G N U R P L E dot N E T

Thanksgiving at the Cottage

2006-10-10T21:28:00.000-04:00

From the photoblog department: I try to go to the cottage for at least a day, if not the whole weekend, on Thanksgiving. I figure if I have anything to be thankful for, it's this special place where I can go to enjoy a life as removed from the city as I can get it. This trip I spent most of my time staining the new deck, built with the help of friends. I also brought my camera along to try and capture some of the beautiful fall colours. On the way up, I stopped by this lake:
Fall Lake I particularly like the deep blue sky, the variety of colour in the trees behind, and the bare trees in front. Then there's this one:
Glory of Fall Which I horked a bunch to exaggerate the fall colours - kind of a painting effect versus photo. I like the extra greenocity of the trees on the left in back, the ripples in the water, the path of the lake (wide on left sweeping through narrow on right) and how the branches in the foreground frame the sides. After staining the deck, I had to jump in the lake - it's not a true Thanksgiving trip unless I take a dip in the lake. It was as chilling as the lake at Thanksgiving always is (I could stay in for maybe 10 seconds before the "get the hell out NOW" instinct kicked in) but the awesome weather meant sunny warmth after getting out. So of course I went back in again. Then I took a picture as proof of the insanity:
Chilly! Three things prove how cold the lake is: the timestamp in the file; my upper body which is a bit nipply; and my lower body with the classic shrinkage, which I appear to be checking - either that or I'm about to trip over my own foot. This photo also proves that the white swim trunks should probably stay at the cottage. I suppose I should be embarrased but hey, if you can't embarrass yourself on your blog, why have one? Besides, I don't think I look that bad for a 28 year old geek. I also like the blue tinge on the water - it gives it an icy feel - and the greens and yellows on the left, plus the four vertical elements in a row - evergreen, birch, bare maple, me. On the way back to the city, I stopped at Ye Olde Wooden Silo for more pictures. I managed to get there right when the sun was setting, too. In the digital darkroom, I punched the colours a bit on both ends of the blue-yellow spectrum to bring out both the sky and the golden light of the sun. Then I flip-flopped between the new and the original and decided the sun's glorious golden cast didn't need any help, so I merely touched the sky to bring it closer to the blue it had in real life.
Ye Olde Silo Again there's the fall beauty in the various tree colours. I also like how clearly the distant background trees come through - the setting sun in the clear sky makes for amazing visibility. Then there's the silo on the left balanced by the shadows cast on the right, and finally the subtle mixture of greens and yellows in the fields mid-picture. Reminds me of crayons a little bit. I heard from someone that this is a popular spot for painters - I believe it!

Silly IM conversations

2006-10-09T12:56:00.000-04:00

From the departments-are-like-points-on-whose-line department: This was such a silly conversation that I had with Wartbag Smith (not his real name) that I had to share it with AZROLB. Names are changed to protect the innocent: (20:20:38) NorMMonkeY: I had a cool idea today at lunch (20:20:43) WartBag: do tell.. (20:20:56) NorMMonkeY: I went to Wendy's and I brought back, like, 4 orders for cow orkers (20:21:04) NorMMonkeY: So my idea is this: (20:21:18) NorMMonkeY: an army of R/C helicopter delivery services (20:21:27) WartBag: ooooh! (20:21:29) WartBag: COOL! (20:22:04) NorMMonkeY: You get a bunch of R/C heli pilots, outfit each heli with an RF videocam and the pilots fly it to the vendor, pick up the merch, and drop it at the buyer (20:22:47) WartBag: Hmmmmm.... You'd probably need to have some sort of system to account for deadbeats who won't pay. (20:22:59) WartBag: Maybe cash first, then retrieve product. (20:23:16) NorMMonkeY: I'm sure something can be arranged (20:23:25) WartBag: Neat idea man. (20:23:38) NorMMonkeY: Maybe you pay the R/C heli delivery guys, and they pay the vendor (20:24:00) WartBag: I had an idea for what I think would be a really cool game last night. (20:24:14) NorMMonkeY: (all this heli stuff 'cause I just got into R/C heli flying) (20:24:23) WartBag: Ahh. ok (20:25:14) WartBag: Imagine a game where you play an angel of death. Your objective is to get people killed. You have to do it by setting up situations that kill them and then be ready to collect and deliver their soul... (20:25:34) NorMMonkeY: Ooh, neat! (20:25:45) WartBag: or maybe you can possess them to get them killed, but have to vacate their body before they die, otherwise you die... (20:26:02) NorMMonkeY: Kind of like pipe dream but instead of connecting pipe bits you're setting up a death, and you have to do it before the goo in the pipe catches up (20:26:13) WartBag: Hehehehe maybe (20:26:24) WartBag: I was thinking more of a 3d environment game (20:26:28) WartBag: a 1st person style. (20:26:48) NorMMonkeY: Real-time? (20:26:55) NorMMonkeY: Or turns-based? (20:27:01) WartBag: I'd say real time./ (20:27:34) WartBag: I could envision it switchin from a 3rd person to 1st person too. Maybe 3rd person when you're controlling the demon/angel/whatever, and it zooms/switches to a first person view when you're possessing/controlling the victim. (20:28:18) NorMMonkeY: I think it'd be fun if you had to set up their death in a race to do it so that the victim walks into it (20:28:24) NorMMonkeY: Sierra style (20:28:35) WartBag: Hehehe, like the pipes (20:28:42) NorMMonkeY: Like Police Quest, only it's DeathQuest (20:28:48) WartBag: Ooooooooh (20:28:53) NorMMonkeY: Ooh, that'd be an awesome metal band name (20:28:59) WartBag: HAHAHA (20:29:03) NorMMonkeY: DEATHQUEST!!!! *throws the goat* (20:29:08) WartBag: ROFL (20:29:16) NorMMonkeY: RAAAH! (20:29:32) WartBag: that'd be their first album title, "Throws the Goat" (20:29:48) NorMMonkeY: Only they'd throw an actual goat for the music video (20:29:49) NorMMonkeY: d:) (20:29:53) WartBag: hehehehe (20:30:10) NorMMonkeY: So you start out in hell, and Satan gives you a mission (20:30:28) NorMMonkeY: Then the intro scene plays out and you start the game on earth (20:30:35) WartBag: hmmmmm (20:30:36) NorMMonkeY: Say, in Las Vegas (sin city baby!) (20:30:39) WartBag: hehe (20:30:47) NorMMonkeY: You have levels (20:30:54) WartBag: or missions (20:31:14) NorMMonkeY: The first one is easy, like the victim is coming out of their room, and you have to break the elevator so they walk through an empty door and fall down the shaft and die (20:31:28) NorMMonkeY: Ooh, text adventure! (20:31:35) WartBag: HAHAHAH (20:31:40) WartBag: walk east (20:31:51) NorMMonkeY: pull elevator shearpin (20:32:22) WartBag: "you are standing in front of the elevator door. there is a stairwell to the east, a hallway to your left. You notice a pair of pliers on the floor" (20:32:25) NorMMonkeY: * The elevator shearpin will not budge * * The victim has left their room and they are locking the door * (20:32:29) WartBag: HAHA (20:32:56) WartBag: Hmmm... I've always thought it would be fun to write a text adventure web page. (20:33:08) NorMMonkeY: Sometimes I do mini-text adventures on my blog (20:33:10) WartBag: user data cold be stored in cookies (20:33:40) WartBag: of course, people could hack their cookies to cheat, but what the hell? let 'em cheat. (20:33:57) NorMMonkeY: Could store it server-side in PHP (20:34:17) WartBag: OoooH!!! Use a server scripting language like PHP and you can actually generate images with it based on the user's settings. (20:34:43) WartBag: If they haven't picked up the pick-axe, draw it. (20:34:45) WartBag: oops phone (20:36:13) NorMMonkeY: * You are in the telco switch room. The victim's phone rings. You have 20 seconds to wire the electrozapper onto their line before they answer * (20:36:29) NorMMonkeY: Open toolkit (20:36:49) NorMMonkeY: < In your toolkit you see a spool of wire, a 9V battery, and the ShockMaster 2000 XP > (20:37:11) NorMMonkeY: Connect wire to phone switch (20:37:24) NorMMonkeY: * You try to bite the wire with your teeth but it is thick and will not break * (20:37:48) NorMMonkeY: check pockets (20:38:04) NorMMonkeY: * You find a trusty MacGyver style swiss army knife in your pocket * (20:38:06) NorMMonkeY: cut wire (20:38:13) WartBag: HAHAHAHA (20:38:22) WartBag: This is awesome! (20:38:28) NorMMonkeY: * You have cut two pieces of 5 foot wire * * The victim is almost in the room with the phone * (20:38:30) WartBag: damn! Now I want to write a text adventure! (20:38:33) NorMMonkeY: shit (20:38:40) NorMMonkeY: * Your pants are warmer * (20:38:45) WartBag: hehehe (20:38:53) NorMMonkeY: Connect wire to telco switch (20:39:16) NorMMonkeY: * The wires are connected * * The victim's hand is reaching for the handset * (20:39:36) NorMMonkeY: Connect battery to ZapMaster 4k (20:39:41) NorMMonkeY: Connect wires to ZapMaster (20:40:02) NorMMonkeY: * The wires and battery are connected * * the victim answers the phone * (20:40:30) NorMMonkeY: * The victim talks to his mother. You forgot to charge the flux capacitor! You have failed in your mission. Back to HELL!! * (20:40:40) WartBag: ROFL (20:40:48) WartBag: ahhhhhhh the flux capacitor. (20:41:03) WartBag: where would modern sci-fi cheese be without the flux capacitor? (20:41:11) NorMMonkeY: Darn tootin' (20:44:18) NorMMonkeY: Hey, can I steal bits of this for pastin' on my blog later? This is silly enough that it must be recorded for lack of prosperity. Names changed to protect the innocent, of course. (20:44:34) WartBag: Please do (20:44:38) WartBag: I'll be famous!!! (20:45:20) WartBag: or rather, "Wartbag Smith (not his real name)" will be famous. (20:45:31) NorMMonkeY: AZROLB himself will mention you in his acceptance speech (20:45:44) WartBag: AZROLB? (20:45:54) NorMMonkeY: All Zero Readers Of this Lame Blog (20:45:58) WartBag: Hahaha (20:46:04) NorMMonkeY: A character that features in some of my blog entries. (20:47:45) NorMMonkeY: "Sent by Lolita Lang on behalf of Sanchez 0nline Co11ege" (20:48:04) WartBag: spam? (20:48:09) NorMMonkeY: I granulated from Sanchez 0nl1ne! (20:48:13) WartBag: ROFL (20:48:17) NorMMonkeY: Yeah. Fake university spam (20:48:28) WartBag: She didn't major in English I take it. (20:48:35) NorMMonkeY: She majored in obfuscation Sanchez 0nline Co11ege sounds like a dirty place. I wonder if Lolita Lang is a graduate of Dirty Sanchez? She probably has a Vivid resume.

a.k.a. How To Remove Blade Scars from Furniture

2006-10-02T22:12:00.000-04:00

Holy crap! Three posts in one day! I guess this means I won't post again for what... three months? From the hella-heli-fun department: A few weeks ago, I gave a cow orker a ride to the local hobby shop where he bought himself a remote-controlled helicopter. The crucial, defining moment was when he brought it out in the office, put it in the middle of the room, and played with it (spinning it up and promptly crashing it in the process). I spent the next week thinking about helicopters. I read about cyclic controls, gyroscopic precession, ground effect, Bell-Hiller mixing, CCPM, and lots of other helicopter- and R/C helicopter-related subjects. I even started up X-Plane and did some simulated heli flying to try and get it out of my system. Well, we all know how this part of the story ends: one week later I went and got an R/C heli of my own.
Furnituripper Smashtaculous the Blademangler What is that thing the heli is sitting on? It's my practice ground, my helipad; a partial sheet of drywall. My lesson plan involves staying within a 1 foot box (marked on the drywall right underneath the heli). I stuck duct tape along the edges of the drywall to protect them and keep them from shedding chalk bits all over the place, but I really want to build a helipad. I want it to have adjustable legs so I can use it as a base on uneven ground. Most of all, I want it to have lights 'cause building shit with LEDs is what hobbies are all about. That and crashing into stuff. More on that some other time. I came up with this design: Plans for helicopter pad Structure * 3' x 3' platform, G1S plywood * 4 legs bolted to corners, 3" height * Feet are plastic w/ nut * Each leg has an optional extension bolt connected with a turnbuckle for adjustment * Center leg? Markings * Edges marked in white * 1' dia. circle concentric w/ platform, white * "H" marked in centre, white Lighting * Edges marked with blue LEDs, 4 per edge at 1' spacing * Circle marked with white LEDs arrayed in clock pattern * Centre marked with "+" in red LEDs, 7 per cross (center one green? removed?), 1" spacing * 3 white LEDs along each edge focused inward for platform light, 1' spacing offset 1/2" from the blue ones, possibly using aluminum cowl for focused beam Design * Protected on both sides by Sikkens Marine-grade Cetol stain * Holes protected by drizzling some stain inside * LEDs secured with hot glue * Wiring across the bottom secured by routed grooves, filled with wood filler, then painted with stain * LED powered by same battery as heli uses (11.1VDC 800mAh Li-Po). Each set of 12 lights (EdgeBlue, Circle, Cross, EdgeWhite) gets a small pot to tune the brightness and keep the LEDs from blowing. Wiring for each set is X series of Y parallel lights where X,Y in ( 2,6 | 3,4 | 4,3 ) depending on the voltage needs of the LEDs. Other * 2 edges each have a level * Edge clip-on windsock?
One Day I'll Be Able to Land In an Area This Small I suspect in the long term the more dangerous thing is having discovered the hobby shop, where all sorts of cool stuff like transceivers, servos, motors and batteries are to be found. Frankenbot, here I come!

Lunch, wireless

2006-10-02T22:05:00.000-04:00

From the inane-ramblings department: Lunch has become my favourite meal of the day. I've always enjoyed reading and eating at the same time. Ever since I was a kid who got yelled at a lot for reading at the table. There's something complementary about the two activities. Maybe eating by itself has nothing to keep my mind busy. Perhaps reading by itself gets monotonous from a physical activity perspective (hold book; wiggle eyes; flip page; repeat). When the two come together it's like taking a step in the direction of perfection: each fills the other's void. (now now, this is a PG discussion here, you gutterminded horny imagineer) Don't get me wrong, there are eating scenerios that are miles better than eating and reading. Two come immediately to mind: great discussions with friends, such as we have during fondue parties where eating is really a slow and secondary activity playing second fiddle to socializing; and dinner dates where again, eating takes a back seat to having an interesting conversation with my date and getting to know her. I guess the thing is that these situations are exceptional; it's not every day we have a fondue party or a dinner date. Most of the time when I'm eating with friends or company it's less of a social activity and more like something that needs to be finished so that the fun stuff can begin, be it getting to work, sitting around the living room chatting, or breaking out the board games, or what have you. (hrm, another great eating scenario just came to mind: sitting out on a deck or a patio in excellent evening weather, taking the time to relax and enjoy the experience completely laid-back and un-rushed... mmmmhmmmmm) And now for something completely different: lunch has become my favourite meal of the day. Why? I think it's because of the routine I've got going: I open up CBC's Ottawa, Canada and World news webpages, skim through the headlines for ones I want to read and open them up in new tabs. Reading through the news usually gets me most of the way through lunch. Then I open up all my favourite comics and finish off with dessert (usually a soft drink that came with lunch, but sometimes a yummy Frosty from Wendy's or an Ice-cap from Timmy's) while browsing the funnies. I suppose this is pretty close to what a lot of people do in the morning with breakfast and newspapers. In fact, if I were one of those people who got to work at 09h30 or so I would probably enjoy nothing more than to cook up an egg, some toast with butter, coffee and orange juice and take that outside on the back deck along with the news and comics. The problem with that plan is that I like to get to work early; my morning routine is: wake up; shower; dress; go to work. No breakfast, since if I can't enjoy it then I'd much rather wait 'til lunch. Also, winter is cold here in Canuckland. I do not like cold eggs and ham, I do not like them, Sam-I-am. So why isn't dinner as fun? I suppose it would be if I were going to be reading or watching TV at dinner. I don't actually have broadcast TV (I collect DVDs instead, don't get me started TV) and while I love reading it's usually something I do in bursts. Most of the time, dinner is something to get through before I go off to work on a project or visit friends or what have you. Hence, lunch. My favourite meal of the day. And now for something completely different: Wireless! As I was driving home earlier this month, I came across this funky van. It had that monster antenna on top so I had to take a picture so I'd remember to look it up the next day. Oddly enough, as I was checking out their website at work the next morning one of my cow orkers walks by and says "Hey, is that pointshotwireless.com? I just saw their truck outside!" So I was all like, "No way, check out this picture I took on my way home last night!"
Not Wireless... Wire FREE! Apparently these guys do wireless on trains and buses and such. It sounds like it's a Wifi ←→ Internet gateway using both cellular WAN (near cities) and satellite. (BTW, apologies for the crappy throug-the-windshield photo... I did my best... you shoulda seen it before I futzed with it!)

Movies

2006-10-02T20:51:00.000-04:00

From the social-studies department: Have you ever noticed what happens after you go see a movie at the theatre with a group of friends? I'm talking about the post-movie discussion. For it oft seems, at least with the people I accompany, that the conversation's usually critical. "Everyone's a critic" goes the old expression. I wonder why, though? I can think of one or two movies which have given me the desire to find the theatre manager, poke them in the eyes and demand my money back. Yet the vast majority of movies I've seen have been a net positive overall experience. I wonder if I'm the only one who really enjoyed it? Somehow I doubt it; if people's critical conversations about movies were a true reflection of their feelings, the theatres would be a lot emptier. So I have to wonder why it is that the post-movie discussions almost never involve the positive? It's always, "I thought [thingy] could've been done better" or "[blah] always gets typecast in that role, (s)he'd be much better doing something else" or "[bazquux] was so much worse than in the book." Never mind the whole realm of "that was technically impossible" or Hollywood/OS arguments. All valid points, mind you. Rarely have I found one of these critical topics worth serious argument; they hold truth. It's not that I disagree with any of these points per se, it's the general air of criticism that I question. Why does the discussion rarely lean towards the movie's merits? There's never talk of "I particularly liked how [wakka] acted in the [norkie] scene" or "the idea of tying [wibble] and [fnord] together to lead to the climax was clever". Why are we as a group so readily enthusiastic to express our opinions on that which disappoints us, and so rarely willing to comment on that which makes us happy? To me this seems backwards! The very nature of the word "enthusiasm" screams of positivism. Again I point out that I believe most people find movies generally entertaining. Is it that the good stuff of a movie is not worthy of discussion? Is it too boring to give praise and make known our feelings on that which made us happy? Or is it that it's so much more fun and interesting to find fault? Maybe it's just easier. I wonder what this says about our attitude towards other things? Is it just movies that draw contemptuous discussion, or does this attitude pervade in all our conversations? When we talk about our friends and what's going on in their lives, do those topics lean towards the negative? Makes me wonder what people say of me when I'm not there? If somebody's as critical about other things as they are about movies, what impressions do their friends and colleagues get about their overall attitude? If you think this describes you, then I challenge you to keep a mental journal of conversations with your friends. How many involve praise or expressions of joy, and how many are critical? Maybe we can all learn something about our attitudes and our outlook on life.

[ FLOODLIGHT DIMS, HOUSELIGHTS COME UP ]

[ AZROLB COMES OUT AND HAULS AWAY THE SOAPBOX ]

The Kingdom of the Canyon

2006-09-18T21:12:00.000-04:00

From the silly-childrens-stories department: THE DUMPTYS Humpty Dumpty was a blacksmith, working in the castle smithy for the King. The smithy, if one went looking for it, would be found between the soldiers' barracks and the stables along the castle's inner wall. Between the outer and inner walls lay the homes of many peasants and the fields that they tended. Within the inner walls lived the King himself and the gentry. Not one of which was poor Humpty! Little more than a peasant himself, he was a short fellow who walked with a limp. The peasant-folk admired and respected him though, for it was he that they came to with their broken pitchforks and their bent hoes. As the King's Blacksmith, Humpty's duties were strictly to the King and in service to His Royal Army. Yet even when he had a full day's work of making horseshoes and nails, mending swords and such, Humpty would always find a little extra time to help the common people. His wife didn't mind that he usually came home late, for she too enjoyed an excellent reputation among the peasants. They oft invited her to dine with them, as did she invite them quite frequently to sup with her family, and their children would play with the young Dumptys. Some days when Humpty was simply overwhelmed by all the work, he would walk atop the inner wall until he came to his special place along the edge, where he would sit in silence and admire the lands around and beyond the castle. Surely even the King's own view was not as scenic! The castle was built along the edge of a canyon with a rushing river at the bottom and beautiful rolling hills of green on the far side. Alone with the sound of the water and surrounded by all this beauty, he would calm quickly, and soon return home. Humpty lived in his hut with his wife, Penelope. As his name suggests, they had quite a few children, the oldest of which were his son George and his daughter Sam. From the way that Sam had kicked and rolled and wiggled around in her mom's womb, the Dumptys were certain that a boy would be born, and so they'd come up with the name early on. Boy, were they surprised when she was a girl! They decided to name her Samantha but always called her Sam. Humpty's old father Grumpty lived in their house as well, and would spend his time watching over the kids while Penelope tended to the house and garden. Young Sam was a lonesome child. She did not get along well with the other little girls, for in their games they pretended to be Maids and Maidens from the Castle Proper. Sam had no time for such games, as she found the most joy in building mud castles, grass fortresses and such. The little peasant boys mostly played pretend soldier, fighting and fencing with swords they'd made of wood, and bamboo rapiers. They weren't yet of an age where they felt girls were fun to play with and in any event Sam did not like fighting, so she divided her free time between building things on her own and watching her father work in the smithy. George, on the other hand, was rambunctious. A short boy like his father, he loved to play pretend-soldier and fight with the other little boys. He noticed that there was one boy who didn't join the games, though he sometimes watched from the sidelines. George met this other boy and soon found that nobody would play with him because he was different than everybody else: he had been born with two anuses! George thought that was weird, but didn't see why this meant nobody would be friends with him. So the two became friends, and soon Anal Two (as the boys called him, for boys will be boys) joined in the fighting games with the rest of the little boys. Anal Two always thought highly of George for becoming his friend and helping him become part of the group. THE KINGDOM GOES to WAR The Kingdom was built on a plateau, below which was a lush, green valley. The castle itself was well-placed along the edge of the canyon, which was easier to defend since attackers couldn't surround it. The inner wall protected the castle itself, the home of the King and the homes of his Royal Advisors, the Knight Commanders and the other gentry. The outer wall protected the homes of the peasants and the crops that they grew. The herders, however, needed lots of land for their animals to graze. Since the early days, they lead their animals out onto the plateau. Eventually the time came when the plateau alone was not enough. The only place they could go was down in to valley, and sadly the valley was the land where the Tunnellers lived. These were people who lived underground, their homes a network of tunnels and underground caverns. When the herders came from the Kingdom, the undergroundsmen soon found that heavy cattle would sometimes cause one of their tunnels to collapse, or worse yet a group of Tunnellers could find their dinner interrupted with a herd of sheep upon their heads! With nowhere else to go, the herders had to use the valley for grazing. The Tunnellers became angry and eventually fought back by building pits and traps. Soon thereafter the herders asked the King to send soldiers who would accompany the herd in the day and keep watch over the grazing fields at night. Clashes between the soldiers and the pit-diggers soon escalated into an all-out war between the Kingdom and the Tunnellers. The Kingdom became a very busy place, and Humpty would spend all of his time, day and night, repairing broken swords, catapults and other battle equipment and making new arrowheads for the war. One day, Humpty had worked non-stop for three long days and three long nights in a row and was very, very weary. In his head the echoes of the hammer against the anvil would not stop pounding over and over again. All he could smell was sweat and hot iron. He had to get away, to take a walk, cool down and calm his nerves. He made his way along the wall, kicking at loose stones here and there, until he got to his usual spot. He sat down with a thump and rested his head in his hands. Lo and behold, he was exhausted and soon fell asleep. As he slumbered there on the wall, he slowly started to lean forward until suddenly he slipped off the edge! Nobody knows if he ever woke up as he fell a great distance to the land below, and though the King's Royal Mounted Search Party found him and his Royal Physicians tended to him as best they could, he never awoke again. GEORGE DUMPTY and the FRENCH MINSTREL It was a dark, dark day in the Dumpty household. Old Grumpty's heart could not bear the loss of his beloved son, and he fell into a coma from which he never returned. Penelope wept with grief and could not stop crying, for she had loved Humpty with all her heart and soul. Many of the peasant-women came to comfort her and they soon became nervous when she would not stop weeping. To make matters worse, George was uncertain and restless and kept running around. He would not stop asking, "What's gone wrong, what has happened to my father?" Finally, unable to bear him any longer, the distressed peasant-women got fed up, turned on him all at once and told him to be quiet and go away! Needless to say he was frightened out of his wits as he ran out of the house, out of the castle walls, across the plateau and finally to a grove of trees where he stopped because he could run no further. There he lay, panting from his mad dash and gasping and gulping for air until finally it hurt to swallow. His throat was parched for he had not had any water before the distressed gathering turned upon him; he had run far under the hot sun and was quite dehydrated. Luckily for George, Anal Two had heard the tragic news and had gone looking for him. It was fortunate that Anal Two found George when he did, for no sooner had he given his greeting than from the bushes behind them they heard rustling, and a dark shape they did see. It was a small bear! The bear roared and growled, for this place was its home. Suddenly it attacked! George, exhausted and dehydrated, could do little but stare as the bear made for his friend. As the bear closed in, Anal Two tripped on a root and fell backwards! Oh, no! With the bear above him and unable to run, Anal Two acted in desperation: he grabbed the bear above its paws and, keeping its sharp claws away from his neck, kicked up hard with his feet, throwing the bear away from him. The bear landed with a thud, rolled backwards and curled into a ball. Anal Two jumped up and grabbed George's arm, leading him out of the grove. Down the path they ran until they reached a cross-roads. Lo and behold, who should they meet but the French Minstrel! This French Minstrel was famous, for he roamed the land in search of stories that he would take back to his own homeland to tell to his people. Still mighty shaken, George told his story: "Those crazy women, they shouted and yelled at me all at once! I ran here from the castle and was so out of breath and parched, and though I tried I could not swallow! I sat down and waited to catch my breath. Then Anal Two here, he came and found me, but we saw a bear! And Anal Two hit the bear so hard it curled into a knot! And then he lead me here." George had just finished his story when suddenly a mad watchman from the castle came running by wearing nothing but his watchman's hat and a sheet wrapped around his waist! He was covered in lice, and as he ran by he swatted at himself in fits using a small book he was carrying. George and Anal Two just stared at each other while the French Minstrel's gaze followed the crazy watchman, jaw dropped in amazement. SAM DUMPTY SAVES the KINGDOM Some years passed since that time, and the war was not going well for the Kingdom. The soldiers had a hard time fighting; their swords were bent and none of their carts and catapults would work anymore. Their horses couldn't handle the hard terrain with broken horseshoes. The King ordered the gates of the Outer Wall to be closed and barred. They were on the defensive. By this time Sam had been thinking hard about some things. She had some ideas, but every time she approached somebody to talk with them about it they would say things like, "What does a young woman know of man's business? Would that your father were here today, then the smithy would be open and we could fight this war!" She soon learned she would get no sympathy nor bend any adult's ear to hear her plans. She sought out her brother George and his friend who nowadays was called by his real name, Tomas. The three of them discussed some of her ideas, and with a few nights' collaboration had come to a plan that might work. The boys were helpful, for they had spent time with the work crews to rebuild much of the castle that was damaged in the war, and had learned new skills. Tomas, it turned out, had quite a knack for proposing unique and creative solutions. Together the three of them spent a week learning to run the old closed-down smithy. They learned how to light the coals, blow the bellows, bend and shape hot iron. For the rest of that month they worked, the boys coming during the evenings and nights when the work crews rested. Sam spent most of her free day-time going over their plan in her head, thinking of refinements and improvements. At night she worked hard with the boys. Soon the shelves of the smithy were filled with the fruits of their labour: they had yards and yards of chain; long stakes; a tough sledgehammer; an odd device that looked like a boat's anchor; a miniature catapult; and two round rings. They had also spent time braiding many lengths of twine together into two long, sturdy ropes. One morning, Sam and the two boys, each carrying some of the things they'd made, climbed and walked along the edge of the castle wall, the very same one that Humpty had walked in days gone by. When they came to the place where Humpty had fallen, Sam stopped. She fell to her knees and cried, her hair falling across her face. Tomas and George looked on in sympathy, their hearts saddened. Then George went to his sister and gave her a great hug. As Tomas looked away, I do believe Sam saw him wipe away a tear. The trio proceeded to the very end of the wall where it met the canyon. There they put down their load and went to work. George pounded in a stake with the sledgehammer. Tomas assembled the mini-catapult. Sam coiled up the two ropes and tied one of them to the stake. The other end of this rope she tied to the anchor. They made ready the catapult with the anchor sitting in its basket. Then they launched it, and the anchor flew across the canyon and landed on the far side. They pulled it back towards them but it did not catch on anything, and they dragged it back all the way to the edge and it fell into the canyon. By the rope tied to the stake they hauled it back up. They made ready the catapult again. Using what they learned from the catapult's first throw, they aimed it carefully so that the anchor would land on the far side of some boulders. They launched the catapult and once more the anchor sailed through the air. It struck a boulder and alas, it fell right on the top! They knew would not hook if they hauled it back. Then Sam had an idea: she grabbed the rope and gave it a mighty flick which travelled in a wave down the rope but did not move the anchor. The boys caught on, however, and soon all three of them were waving the rope up and down causing waves to run down its length. Suddenly the anchor twitched, slid, and then fell on the far side of the rocks! They gave it a long, hard yank and it stayed fast. Next came the most scary task of all: someone would have to crawl along the rope, across the canyon to the other side. Sam volunteered, for although she was frightened of falling, she knew that she was the lightest and so would put the least strain on their rope and anchor. The second rope she tied around her waist, strapping the sledgehammer and a stake to her stomach at the same time, which made her weight the equal of one of the boys. The boys held fast to the other end of the second rope, looping it around the stake but also tying it around George's waist and standing ready to save their friend should the worst happen. Slipping one of the rings over her arm and up to her shoulder, Sam started her journey across by hooking her legs overtop of the rope. Then, upside-down, she reached backwards along the rope with her hands. Hanging under the rope, she would pull her legs close, reach back, and in this way she proceeded across the canyon. Moving along very much like an inchworm, she reached the other side in safety where, for a moment, she lay back to catch her breath. Sam used the sledgehammer to drive her stake into the ground on the far side. She untied the second rope that had been 'round her waist, slipped it through the ring and lashed it to the stake. The boys secured their end to their stake, drawing the rope tight. Now Sam went to the anchor behind the boulders and untied the end of the first rope which she brought back, looped through the metal ring and tied to her stake. Finally, she took up the slack on this rope and made a tight knot on the ring. Everything became easy from here on: they now had enough of the second rope so that they could tug the metal ring back and forth across the first rope. The boys ran back and each grabbed a length of chain from the smithy, bringing two more stakes and the other ring as well. They soon had two lengths of chain running side by side across the chasm, each with its own ring and enough rope on either side to send the ring to and fro. It was not long before others saw what they had done: they now had the makings of a bridge across the canyon! More people came to help build the bridge, bringing rope and planks. Soon it became clear to everyone that the people of the Kingdom had a way to reach a new land full of fertile ground for farming and grazing. Seeing this, the Tunnellers, tired of battling, their lands as torn from war and their people as saddened and weary as the Kingdom's own, raised high the white flag on a staff and sent a messenger of peace unto the Kingdom. The King greeted the leader of the Tunnellers and a truce was made. The Kingdom would send their farmers and their herders to grow their crops and raise their animals on the other side of the bridge, and the land of the Tunnellers would be recognized as a sovereign territory. In a gesture to end any ill will between their peoples, the King gave the Tunnellers gifts of seed and young animals and apologized for their earlier transgressions. And so the story comes to a close. The trio were recognized for their skills and intelligence. At a special banquet in their honour, the King called them forth and bestowed upon them a Royal Commendation. In the years to come they played an important role in helping to build up the far side of the bridge and soon it was famous across the land as the Kingdom of the Canyon. THE FRENCH MINSTREL But what of the French Minstrel that George and Tomas met so long ago? Why, as it turns out he had spent some years wandering the lands. He came to the Kingdom on his journey home and for a fortnight he stayed near the castle. In the old pub, rebuilt after the war, he sang songs and enjoyed a remarkable new drink made of a mix of brandy and ale. The bartender called his new drink Humpty Dumpty in honour of the late blacksmith. By strange coincidence, one of the stones he'd kicked from the wall on that fateful night had accidentally broken a large jug of brandy left sitting near an open keg of ale. Later the bartender found it, experimented, and the rest is history. In his stay at the pub, the French Minstrel learned what had happened to George's father that day he'd met the two boys many years ago. He wrote a short story to honour George and his friend:

Little man borne of little man, waits by himself, cannot swallow
Little man borne of little man, by degree of stammering crazy women
Anal two who knots bears, anal two who leads to the crossroads
Strike from a louse, small book, all watchmen wearing a girdle

Of course, his story sounds a bit different told in French:

Homme petit d'homme petit, s'attend, n'avale
Homme petit d'homme petit, à degrés de bègues folles
Anal deux qui noeuds ours, anal deux qui noeuds s'y mènent
Coup d'un poux tome petit tout guetteur à gaine

[1] The classic Mother Goose rhyme "Humpty Dumpty" (of course!) [2] The Wikipedia article http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humpty_Dumpty, from which we learn of the Ale, and of the bilingual phonetic variation used in software management, no less, "to show the issues involved in crossing over from the oral world typical of implicit knowledge to the written world of explicit knowledge". This inspired much of the story you just read. Not surprisingly, so did some ale. Me like the loco-juice.

The Shell of Politeness

2006-09-16T22:35:00.000-04:00

From the musings department: The Shell of Politeness Politeness: it's the common ground that allows people with different ideas and personalities to get along with each other. It is a filter that lets through only the safe, politically correct and non-offensive. It's what keeps us from saying "You hare-brained dolt" to that guy on the phone who insists that we should help him fix his broken cup-holder because he's paid for support by holding his credit card against the monitor. There are times when we cast politeness aside. Friends are people who know who we really are but like us anyways. In the company of friends we feel free to say the dumb things, silly things, stuff that's taboo in polite company. Have you noticed how much more interesting your conversations with friends are after you've sat around the table and had a drink or two? (this assumes you have a basically good personality. If you're a complete asshole you should probably keep those shields of politeness raised at all times, don't drink anything with alcohol in it, and maybe seek help) The Trade-off By being polite we take an almost universally accepted stance but our interactions with people are limited by the shield; we don't get to know who they really are, and vice versa. More importantly, creativity gets stifled and things are generally less interesting. Think of the most memorable conversations you've had, solutions to problems you've come up with, things you've done with people you really know. All the interesting ones have two things in common: they involved creativity, and they were things you wouldn't have said or done in strictly polite company, weren't they? Politeness has a more strict subset: formality. At work when I'm talking with clients I start the conversation firmly positioned behind both of these two filters. Sometimes an interesting thing happens, especially with longer conversations: the shield of formality falls. This is important because it really helps to get through the problem more quickly and it lets improvisation and creativity flow more easily. Breaking Through the Shell There are times when it's important to let these shields down: working closely with a team, for example, we find we really start to get things done and perform well with each other once everybody really knows one another and doesn't have to worry as much about offending anybody. Silly comments and friendly jibes are welcome and the less people concentrate on being proper, the more ideas flow and we foster an environment fertile for the growth of creativity. Shy people have unusually strong politeness filters. Something in the shy person's upbringing really drills home the "always be polite" ideal (and I'm willing to bet the "never talk to strangers" ideal sets in well, too). This is really important in relationship-land because relationships are all about getting to know somebody else; moving beyond the shell of politeness is a necessary means to this end. Notes I wrote these thoughts down after I came across a passage in a book I was reading: "Fiona sighed. When her father spoke freely, she could sense the man who had told her the stories. When certain subjects were broached, he drew down his veil and became just another ... gentleman. It was irksome." -- Neal Stephenson, "The Diamond Age". That lead me to think of times at the cottage sitting 'round the living room with friends, fire roaring in the fireplace, beer and wine in hands, and conversation flowing freely and uninhibited. I believe this happens more successfully at the cottage than anywhere else because of how long we're there for. There's enough time to let the shields of politeness fully withdraw. I guess that it takes some time for this to happen is a sign that I'm one of those shy guys - as if I didn't already know.

The Saga of White Lake 2006

2006-09-12T19:15:00.000-04:00

From the camping-hiking department: INSTRUCTIONS FOR THE READER: Before you start, know that for a short story, this will be pretty long. Prepare thine eyes and mind, for I allowed mine to wander to a Storyteller's Place as I put thoughts to words. Oh, yeah - it comes with pictures, too! Anyways, read on, and be prepared for the weirdness that awaits. Day 1 - Six hours (five driving) for three days and two nights of one hella fun camping trip Work was busy, so I didn't leave until around 14h00. Considered driving home to restart a basement server shut down by a power failure, but decided that getting to the beer drinking is more important - The Forums will have to wait 'til I get home. The journey starts off fine. Then I drove into Montreal and the Polar Monkeys had poured a finely proportioned mixture of glue and molasses across the highways such that no car could move faster than 10km/h. Outside of Montreal, an hour later, Rte. 10 was nice and quick. I think I prefer driving to Magog and taking the I-91 south versus I-89 . Vermont was awesome to drive through as usual. Entering New Hampshire, I drove through a state park where the interstate narrows down to two lanes. Apparently some old man lost his nose around here. Later I pulled off the highway to find gas and went through a place with a sign: "INDIAN HEAD". I never found any decapitated Native Americans but I did see very cool looking resort-ish hotel made of wood and sporting a well-lit outdoor pool. I should like to visit it some day in the company of friends. Got to the campground where I met my sister, who was not so sauced that she couldn't help me pitch my tent. Then it was to the campfire where I caught up on eating and most importantly, a rather one-sided conversation with my good friend Sam Adams. Met some people I didn't know, caught up with those I did, and so the camping trip really begins, and the evening ends. The campfire crowd thinned out, while those of us who remained got louder as though to make up the difference for our departed comrades. Especially Rob, a happy drunk whose volume of speech matches his volume of drink. Day 2 - Seven people go hiking; one comes back spattered in blood (kudos to Tara who thought that line up) The night is cold. I have two sleeping bags but otherwise no padding, and I am torn between sleeping in one bag atop the other for padding, or sleeping one bag within the other for warmth. The latter wins. We didn't have roosters, so instead babies took on the duty of morning calls. I played the usual weekend game of waking up, turning over and going back to sleep. I wake up when the game gets boring, which is usually after ten turns or so.
A Bag of Home Then I allowed that one of my arms should venture forth from the sacred comfort of the sleeping bag into the dread cold of morning - to turn on the heater. After a minute or two I crawled out of my warm and cozy nocturnal pouch to dress and pack my bags for The Hike. I wandered over to The Breakfast Campsite where that indispensible Columbian Beverage of the Morning was to be found, along with delicious muffins and other yummy breakfast-type stuff. Afterwards, discussion ensued as to who among us will brave the towering and daunting Mount Hedgehog of Modest Effort. Seven of us chose this path, while others chose a shorter and less vertically challenging destination - which was probably the more arduous venture what with carrying the young kiddies along. Our brave troupe piled into Dan's truck for the ride to our starting point. A perfectly innocent mistake by our venerable and benevolent navigator (hey, 113 and 112 are close, OK?) caused us to lose a mere five minutes of looping back - and might I add as a completely neutral and disinterested third party that we would never have had the great conversation and pleasant atmosphere that we had if we'd not taken the extra detour.
The Troupe of Seven Arriving at the mountain, we began our hike to the summit. Comrade John bewitched us into making the climb with all his talk of the sacred Nine Scenic Views. Not far into the journey, my sister, in the lead with Mae at the time, stopped, for she spotted an antlered beast of the forest! A moose was blocking our path. Well, OK, not *our* path but whatever. Photography ensued, and Comrade John wandered off, apparently trying to make conversation with the four-legged masticator of foliage. Perhaps he was trying to extol upon it the Virtues of the Nine Scenic Views.
One of the Scenic Nine Then the trail started to get steep. It was at this point that we discovered that Tara is really a mountain lioness in disguise! Before long she was out of sight, leading the pack up the trail. I could not keep up, though I managed to stay ahead of the main pack because I had found a +3 Trusty Stick of Climbocity. We stopped occasionally for a water break, especailly when we had found one of The Scenic Nine.
The Sacred Circular Symbol of the Summit Before long, we made it to the summit - though not without trials and tribulations, for the convenient yellow marks we'd been following, laid by those who came before, were sometimes not entirely clear. However, we made it to the most sacred yellow mark of all, a cross bound by a circle, a sign that all hikers know means it's time to sit down, have lunch and enjoy the scenery.
Lunch at the Summit Having had our lunch and conquered Mount Hedgehog, we began our descent down the other side. Once again, Tara the Mountain Lioness took off; though I took the initial lead because her knee was bothering her plus I had the Immortal Surefooted Stick of Balance, she soon flew past and made good her return to lower ground. At some point I stopped to take pictures of a large green caterpillar of the sort that Timon and Pumbaa would drool over.
Great Green Grubs Having made it to the bottom I met up with Tara. We chatted for awhile, whereupon we met up with a rather strange fellow who we had seen on our way up. Now that I think about it, it's strange that we should beat him to the bottom when we'd passed him well before we reached the summit, since he'd been descending at the time. Maybe he met up with the moose and played a round of five card stud or something. Tara gave up her grapes to the stranger. It rained a quick shower, which was a welcome cool-off. Just as quickly, it stopped. Tara and I played a game of "See Who Can Get A Pebble To Land On The Boulder On The Other Side Of The Path Such That It Doesn't Bounce Off" - ahh, the classics. By the time our fellow travelers appeared, we tied 1-1. Suddenly I noticed that something was awry. Ed's shirt sported a cool new design, a pattern of splotches in red! It turns out that as Ed was descending the path, he came across an innocent-looking fallen tree. As he climbed over the tree, it viciously caused him to lose his balance, and as he fell he grappled with the tree and it fought back by stabbing him upside the head with one of its fearsome inanimate branches. Comrade John burst forth in laughter at the sight of this. Blood spurted forth, but then the wound was staunched and first aid was rendered. The group made onward with their descent, and eventually caught up to the intrepid leaders. We returned to our campsite, stopping along the way for some chunks of frozen water which we used to make cold the beer. Ed was sent to the hospital by Rob, a trained nurse who examined the wound, where he received 8 stitches and met Lightning Girl. Meanwhile, back at the campsite, just as we'd decided to head to the beach for some swimmin', the skies opened upon us. Lightning flashed, thunder rolled and our heads and shoulders were made to be soaked as we abandoned the beach in search of shelter (and beer). Just as discussions were starting to lean towards going somewhere warm and sheltered for dinner, the skies relented and the weather started clearing up. This was good, because Chef Luke had prepared some meat by soaking it in savory secret sauces. With the help of oil-soaked wood and well-honed fire-building skills we soon had a hot pit of embers that we decided to introduce to the meat. Well-met, the fire and meat made a delicious entree, with a grill along as chaperone to keep things from getting out of hand. This, along with other dishes from Chef Luke and others of our group, made for an excellent dinner. We also prepared some fire-baked potatoes, though by the time they were ready we'd all eaten our fill. All was well, though, because those potatoes made an excellent item on the breakfast menu the next morninng. Once again, dinner was over and the main event, the very heart of camping, began - sitting around the campfire and drinkin' the beers. Apparently some of us who have more advanced skills of comprehension used our +6 Powers of Oddball Conversation to ascend a plane of understanding that left others a little stumped. Imagine a cross between Jedi Mind Powers and the Fremen Weirding Way, and you're close. A dash of Monty Python gets you closer. Day 3 - Breakfast and Breakup This night I used my lessons learned and entered my slumber nestled in the two sleeping bags. Lo and behold, it was almost too warm to fall asleep! (I'm like that, I like it colder when I go to sleep and warmer when I wake). The night was fine, and again I played the weekend morning game of roll-over-and-go-back-to-sleep that I cherish dearly before finally crawling out of my nest. I packed up all my stuff and returned it to my car, leaving only the tent which stayed out so that it could dry as much as possible before I packed it. Then it was off to The Breakfast Campsite again, and this morning there was a feast! Bacon, eggs, fruit, sausages, toast, fried potatoes and more were enjoyed by all, such service as you would not find in the finest hotel in New York. I helped with the frying and eating of various foods, and afterwards enjoyed a cup of hot chocolate as we made with the cleaning up. We all wandered off to our various sites to pack up our tents and such. Finally, the sad time came when we all said our goodbyes and went our separate ways. I hope that we shall meet again, we intrepid campers and hikers, conquerors of Mount Hedgehog and other mountains of modest effort - although hopefully with less medical care requirements next time, yes? The weather was beautiful as I drove back. So excellent and sunny, in fact, that I stopped at a Scenic Overlook for a quick nap. I think it was only 10 minutes or so but damn, it felt great. Then back to the Great White North. It's a beauty way to go. Epilogue On getting home, I pitched my tent on the deck in my back yard so that it might dehydrate and air out. I unfurled my sleeping bags in one of my spare bedrooms for the same purpose.
Epilogue: The Backyard Nest Here is my camping list, while it is fresh in my mind from these recent journeys, and amended with some items I hadn't brought but either wish I did or might need next time:

A big rubbermaid bin to carry the following livingspace-related items: * Tent and tarp * Air mattress or foam pad and pump * Pillow plus case, and perhaps a plastic vacuum-sealable bag to store it in * Polyester chair * Screened dome * Lantern * Fuel * Matches or lighter
Another bin and cooler to carry the following nourishment-related items: * BEER! * Food and drink as necessary (I brought only beer this trip, as the border guards don't take kindly to many foods) * Camp stove (uses same fuel as lantern) * Plastic cutlery, cups, and paper plates * Garbage and recycling bags
A backpack to carry the following personal items and gadgetry: * Clothes * Toiletries kit * Sweater * Rain jacket * Camera * Book (not that I got the chance to read, we had so much fun) * GPS for car * Music for car

2 for 1 in 3 of 3

2006-08-16T11:02:00.000-04:00

From the three of three department: SOCIAL-LAND P and M have bought a new house. We had a party, with pizza and beer, for all the people who would have worked hard at moving boxes and crap had P&M not paid somebody to do all the work. Pizza and beer taste better when you didn't pay for them, and infinitely better when you didn't do any work to earn them either. It was a good party. Lots of chance to catch up with friends I don't see very often. Scoped out the new house. Hopefully nurtured the thought-seed of them getting a hot tub so I don't have to d:) Did I mention their new house is conveniently on my way home from work? RELATIONSHIP-LAND Shortly before heading to Vegas, I met a really great girl with whom I really enjoy spending time. Someone whom I can converse with easily. As it turns out, we both agree that there is no "relationship spark" but we both think that this whole easy-conversing-and-getting-along thing is a good sign of friendship. As it turns out for this particular relationship, I think that is the right way to go, but I have also learned that I really need to explore the land of flirting. This is my big downfall in relationships. I'm a clamshell relationship kinda guy - when I meet someone new, I tend to open up slowly. All of my good relationships have been on a friends-first, relationship later basis. There have been a bunch of bad ones which were relationships right from the start, and I think that all of this past experience is not helping. Well, that's what the future is for. Practice makes perfect, I guess.

Sister-land

2006-08-16T10:59:00.000-04:00

From the two-of-three department: My sister has managed to make a house-buying decision approximately five years earlier than anybody expected (for those of you not playing along at home, my sister never does anything quickly, or on time. This trait comes into play later in this story. Now you have something to look for so you won't fall asleep!) and so she is now in the process of closing the deal. Boy, that was a long run-on sentence. Thank goodness this blog is not about teh good righting and spu-helling and Graham R. Right. So. Anyways, she had some stuff in storage here in Ottawa, so the time came when she needed to move the stuff out. Naturally I got involved in helping out. My mistake was to ask a friend to help me. Here's how the story goes: Prologue I email back and forth between my sister and my friend to arrange times. They are coming from Montreal to pick up their rent-a-truck in Ottawa, load it and drive back to Boston. We are supposed to meet at the storage place at 13h00 on Sunday. She will call me from the truck rental place. Chapter 1 P and I are at his house doing some work. The time approaches when I should think about starting to maybe be ready to head out to the storage place. Then I notice that I don't have my cell phone with me. Suddenly the time is past when I need to be at home getting my cellphone, so we rush back there. Fortunately, my sister is never early in anything and there are no missed calls. We stop for lunch. Then we head out to the storage place. It is a little bit after 13h00, but no calls. Chapter 10 We get to the storage place. We head over to the locker. We unpack everything so that loading it will be nice and quick. We had previously stopped by to scope out the locker, but with everything unpacked, it looks like more than would easily fit in the truck. Mental note: when sister calls from truck rental place, suggest getting a larger size. All the stuff is unpacked now. It's probably 13h45 or so. Conveniently enough, there is a couch here with cushions and footstools nearby. We sit down and chat. Time passes. It is now 14h30 or so. We decide that at 15h00 we will just pack everything back up and leave. Clearly there is something wrong. At this point, we have gotten so bored that P has been reading spam out loud from his blackberry and I have escaped this torture with my DAP and a game of tetrox. We continue to chat about stuff. A suggestion is made that they owe us a case of beer for making us wait. At 14h55, the phone rings. Sister has gotten the truck. I note that I suggested she call *when she arrives* at the rental place, not just as she leaves, and suggest that a larger truck size would be better. We arrange for them to honk at us from the storage place's gate so we know to get off our (their) couch and let 'em in. Chapter 11 Sometime around 15h30, sister shows up with nice big truck. We pack all the stuff inside with room to spare. Better too much room than not enough, eh? They decide to treat us to dinner, which is nice. P tries to call home to see if he needs to get home right away or if the current plan fits, but can't get through, so we go to have dinner. The catch-phrase of the day, which would also be a great band name, is "Oxygen Problems in the Brain". Epilogue I drop P back home. As we walk in the house, the temperature drops rapidly. The family is in the kitchen, where the frosty feeling just gets worse. M has had the kids all day and expected P would be back a lot earlier. Doh. I should not have involved my friends in sister's time-warp-delays.

Gadget-land

2006-08-16T10:58:00.000-04:00

From the one-of-three department: Well, it has been a month so of course I have gotten my hands on some new gadgets. The latest gadget acquisition is a new MP3 player. I got an iRiver H320. You can't buy these in stores anymore, so I had to go to this really large mall in cyberland called eBay. What is this "MP3 player" of which I speak? It is one of a few platforms on which runs Rockbox, the greatest firmware for digital audio players ever. It plays many different digital audio formats (except those stupid DRM'd ones). It has a remote control which will fit nicely in my car. It has a colour screen which is good for viewing pictures. It has lots o' RAM so it can last longer on battery and tell me about what song plays next and stuff. It plays games. It slices. It dices. Finally, it has an FM radio which is really why I got it. I go on binges where I listen to MP3s, and I go on other binges where I listen to radio. So it's nice to have one player that keeps me happy. Until it's time to get another one, of course, I mean hell, this model is ALREADY obsolete. Twenty-two salesmonkeys who walk the floor at Best Buy felt me write that sentence and twitched a little with anticipation.

A trio of posts

2006-08-16T10:56:00.000-04:00

From the not-all-good-things-come-in-threes department: Words. Like flowers, they need to be collected and pressed onto pages of books. And blogs. Then again my lawn needs to be mowed and it's not like I've done that either, so get off my freakin' case AZROLB! *whooosah* OK. So last time I wrote stuff here was after I came back from Vegas and Chicago O'Hare airport made me its bitch. Since then it's been almost a month of update-free, same old blog page not refreshing, day after day. Time for some updatin'. Even better, because I tend to write in much the same way that spam fills your inbox (i.e. lots of meaningless blabbering), I think I will make a trio of posts rather than one big one. This might also confuse people into believing that I have updated more regularly, unless they notice the dates on the posts. Or read this message. Doh.

Final Vegas Update

2006-07-22T11:20:00.000-04:00

From the traveling-sucks department: Last we heard, our tepid hero finished writing the Vegas tale from the concourse of Chicago O'Hare, gate C1. The flight from Vegas was delayed due to some funky lightning stormage, and the last thing written about it goes something like this: "Anyways, the weather delays mean a less lengthy stay courtesy of Chicago Department of Aviation...". I shouldn't 'a' said that. When I got to gate C1, the board said my flight was on time to leave at 08h05. Fine. It's something like half-past six now, so I go get some Starbucks and a danish, sit down to write up the rest of the Vegas tale. Gets close to boarding time, so I finish up the story and some emails, send it all, close up the laptop. Ready to board. Every 15 minutes or so, the gate attendant pushes the boarding time back by 15 minutes. Seems that our plane can't get to the gate 'cause the plane that was there first hasn't left yet. Finally, that plane goes away and our plane pulls up. A load of harried passengers rushes off. Some of them probably have connections they're going to barely make, or not make at all. An announcement from a nearby gate goes something like this: "Travelers to Memphis on flight somethingorother, we apologize for the delay, your flight is still on the runway at the other end." These guys are waiting for a plane that hasn't taken off yet. After an hour or so of being delayed in 15 minute increments, they let us board. The poor folk traveling to Graceland had their flight canceled. I feel better to be getting on the plane. Sure, they could always deplane us and cancel the flight, but somehow it seems less likely when we're on board. The flight is only about 1/3 full. Everybody spreads out. I have the row to myself. Push the chair back, read my book. We are still waiting. It's raining so hard, the ground crew can't get the previous passenger's luggage off. They can't fuel us, either. We wait. The flight crew is awesome. The chief pilot gives us updates periodically. The cabin crew are having fun. One of them grabs a roll of TP from the rear lavatory, runs it right down the aisle. He gets his volunteer passenger to flush, and the TP dashes down the aisle into the back. A girl says, "This is the best flight evar!" Yeah, with the "a" and everything. Eventually, the rain lets up a bit. They unload the luggage and load ours on. Those poor guys from the last flight have been waiting more than an hour for their luggage. They gas us up. Now the only thing left is for the airport to open the ramp for operations, and for our papers to show up. We had to file a new flight plan. Apparently it's on the way from terminal two. It takes a couple of hours to make its way over. We get our papers, the cabin crew closes the doors. All we need is for ramp operations to open up, and the tug will get us on our way. I have been reading book, listening to music, sleeping. Finally, we get pushed away from the gate. This is supposed to be a two hour flight. We take off. The pilots must have filed for a more direct route, and they are not sparing any fuel. They punch it right up to flight level 370 and burn on over to Ottawa. A fast descent followed by a harder than usual deceleration to final approach, and we're down in an hour and twenty minutes. Woohooo!!! Ottawa!!! Home!!!! It's 15h30. This flight should have been in at 10h00 or so. My original itinerary should've had me in at 22h00 or so last night. There's no way I'm going to work now. I've had maybe 8 hours sleep in the last two days. I phone up good friends P&M. I taxi over to their place to chill for the afternoon/evening. I am pretty much a zombie the whole time. Drooling, walking with arms in front, everything. I eat brains. P gives me a ride home around 19h00. It is still a bit early, my body wants to sleep for at least a day straight, but I know that if I go to sleep too early, I'll wake up off-schedule and my body will be messed up for days. I try to finish my book. It seems like I read a paragraph, then my mind wanders to dreamland, my head nods, I start to sleep. I jerk back to wakeyland, just like sitting in the front row of calculus back in university. Repeat more than once for every page in the book through to the end. I'm gonna have to read that book again. I finished it, but I have no idea how it ends.

Vegas, baby!

2006-07-20T01:51:00.000-04:00

From the sin-city department: I'm writing this from McCarran Int'l airport, Vegas, at too-bloody-late at night. So I'm keepin' it brief. Shut up, AZROLB, before you even say anything. I got a whole bag of "shh" right here! *pinky to evil grin* So, SUNDAY * Taxi to airport carrying monster booth along with all my other stuff * Make my way through security and meet up with my colleagues on the other side of US Customs * Hrm, there's a bar right across from our gate. How convenient! * US Airways flight to Philly. Short flight, read book * Philly: there's a bar that serves lunch. How convenient! * 5 1/2 hour flight to Vegas. Ate some snacks I bought at the airport, read some book, watched U-571 on the laptop * Checked in. Colleagues went off for dinner. I decided to chill out. Later, wandered up and down the strip, grabbed some dinner, a milkshake. Surprisingly non-alcoholic. Will make up for that later. MONDAY * Grabbed some breakfast at Carib Cafe, where the food is so fresh they fly up to Canada, kill the pig and ship the Canadian Bacon back. Two hours later, we left the restaurant. * Went to Fry's electronics emporium. J got himself some satellite radio goodness. I picked up a USB key and a DVD: Minority Report * Back to the hotel. Set up the booth. For a short day at the exhibition hall, surprisingly busy WRT visitors * Finished up and headed to Jet club for the cPanel party. Got drunk. At some point during the party, J managed to score us some passes to get back into Jet after the cPanel party closed and they booted everybody. I don't know how he does this shit. He talks his magic talk and people listen. * cPanel ended, they kicked us out. At this point I am fairly drunk, so I remember only a few bits and pieces: * Buddy from the club gives Jason back the money he used to score the passes, as if to say, "Go away, no party for you" * Some guy who may or may not be as drunk as we are is talking with us and flashing an FBI business card * Smooth-talking sales guru J manages to talk us back into the bar. Ahead of some guy in line with half a grand. I remember the words, "Hey, if you want me to stand here, I'll stand here. You want me there, I'm there. I'll go wherever you need me to be." Or something like that. I still don't know how J does this shit, but we're back in the bar. * Hung out with two hot chicks named (get this) Alex and Mallory. Yeah. * I was really quite drunk at this point and all I really remember are knocking over a beer at some point and at some other point, drinking something that really wasn't my drink, but it was good anyways. I'm gonna call that one, "One too many". As a matter of fact, I don't know where all the drinks came from. I owe somebody some money. * I remember getting back to my room and sending J a quick "I apologize for everything stupid I may or may not have done" text message * I drank lots and lots of water. I already knew that this is good for preventing hangovers, but I learned that it is also good for making the puking more tolerable. Ah, praying at the porcelain throne. I have not worshipped there in many moons. *** UPDATE: I'm now writing from Chicago O'Hare waiting for my final 2hr flight to Ottawa. Weather was horrible, our flight was in a holding pattern for some time. I have no idea how long 'cause I was asleep. I do remember waking up for the nice bright flashes of purple lightning. Light show, courtesy of Vegas. Finally the weather went above minimums long enough for us to get on the ground. This was the best rough-weather landing I have ever experienced. More smooth than most normal landings. Probably a combination of good luck and an excellent pilot. Anyways, the weather delays mean a less lengthy stay courtesy of Chicago Department of Aviation, so I will drink my Starbucks, eat my danish and continue the tale: TUESDAY * Buffet for breakfast. I was operating quite slowly at this point * Back to the booth for a full day of show. Not as busy as the previous day * S won an X-Box 360 by kicking ass in Gotham Racing. He also won over half a grand while he was gambling drunk last night, after I'd gone back to my room to pass out. He's hiding a horseshoe somewhere. * After the show, headed to Caesar's Palace and had some crappy Chinese just before going to see Elton John. That's right, Elton John. At Caesar's Palace. In Las Vegas. This concert was awesome. Awesome, I say! The sound system was incredibly good. It was as if they were playing his songs from CD, but yet the band is clearly rockin' it live. The video work, by David Lachapelle, was a little warped in the head, at least from my perspective. This is why I'm a computer techie and not a gay artist, I guess. (I'm not being derogative, here. D.L. is an excellent artist, world reknowned. From the imagery, clearly he is as gay as a flamingo in a rainbow) * Anyways, one concert and two buckets o' beer later ("How much for a bottle of wine?" "Right. One bucket o' Bud, please"), we are done here. Time to go hang out in the casino for a bit of drinking and gambling and talking to two chicks from Leftbridge which I learn is 2hr south of Calgary. They say they're sisters, but it's S's guess that they're a mother-daughter pair. * J scores some passes to Pure, a nearby nightclub. He got 'em from the casino bartender. I was standing right there and I *still* don't know how he does this shit. * We wandered over to Shadow for a bit more drinkin'. * Then we headed over to Pure. J does his magic smooth talkin' again with the bouncers up front, and gets us in right away, ahead of the monster line. I have to head back to the hotel room and change shoes 'cause of the dress code, but I got right back in. J's magic was still in effect. What can I say, I spend a lot more time in my life sittin' in front of computers, bein' outdoors and chilling informally with friends. Dressin' up and all this Vegas shit is not my lifestyle. Still, stick me in a room where there's beers and hot girls all over, and I will have fun. And get drunk. * We met up with those two "sisters" from south of Calgary again * I mostly drank, danced and wandered around the bar. Hitting on girls is also not the norm for this shy techie, but I did get a little practice in. As S says, all it takes is a "So where are you from?" to get things started. * At some point it is around 02h30 or so. J, wandering around the bar, finds me. We wander around the bar but fail to find S. We find out later that some girl yanked him off to the dance floor for awhile. * J and I head back to the Mirage. I am mostly drunk. J apparently doesn't remember going back to the hotel. We stopped by Carib to get some late night food, and met up with S there. At 03h00 we called it a night. WEDNESDAY * I get up at 08h00 to shower and pack and head to the airport * All kinds of crap happens at the airport that you can read about in my earlier post. I end up heading back to Mirage, dump my stuff in J's room, and it's back to the booth. * We pack up the booth and head over to the fashion mall for some shoppin'. I'm not used t all this drinking and no sleepin' so I'm kind of in zombie mode. Still, we managed to find some electronics stores to wander through. Oh, and by the way, this mall is full of teh hot chicks wearing teh not much clothes. Good exercise for teh eyeballs. * We head to some cafe for some burger action. * Then back to the hotel. The guys head for a nap. I have no room, and in any event I need to stay awake now so I can sleep on my red-eye, so I head down to the pool. The pool is awesome. The water seems cold when you get in, but that's just 'cause lying outside in the sun warms you up in this Nevada heat. The water is colder around the edges where it's pumped in, and warmer in the center where the heat has had a chance to work its mojo. This is the only pool I know where the water is *cooled*. Oh, and when you get out, the air is so warm you just lie in the sun and dry off (which is what I normally do in any event, but up in Canuckland it's not nearly so warm to do it). * I come this close to falling asleep out at poolside, but J gives me a call 'cause he wants back in his room and I have his room key. * I head on back to the airport for more waiting. The guys are heading to Old Vegas to see what the acction is like over there. And here the tale ends. My flight boards in 15 minutes, so I'm gonna post, pack up and get ready to head to the office. I managed to sleep some on the last flight, though it was not restful despite the emergency exit row. It's Thursday morning, I'm now running on maybe 7 or 8 hours of sleep since Tuesday, and I'm heading to the office. I will have words with the coffee maker there. I do not want to go home and sleep 'cause then my schedule will be even more messed up. This afternoon will be ... challenging. Vegas, baby!!

United we stand, delayed.

2006-07-20T00:39:00.000-04:00

From the airport-woes department: McCarran airport, in Vegas, doesn't allow its carriers to have their own lounges. This is one of many things I have learned today. Another? According to Tom the United supervisor, a $100 travel voucher is the best he can do for a completely messed up day of travel. Cause? "Flow control", which is ticket-agent-speak for when Air Traffic Control messes up the schedule. I'm not sure how putting a flight the standby pattern can result in a two hour delay. Surely the plane wasn't in the pattern for two hours. But that's why I'm a computer techie and not an Air Traffic Controller. A computer techie I am, and today I am also a red-eye traveler. It wasn't supposed to be this way. Like a good traveler, I showed up over two hours before my flight time. Seeing the horrendous lineup for the United counter, I made my way to the express check-in touchscreen. Swiped my travel card. "Are you traveling to Ottawa, Canada today?" Touch yes. "Sorry, we cannot process your flight from this terminal." I ask the helpful agent supervising the touchscreen area wassup. I show her my itinerary. "Ah, that's why. This flight's late; it leaves at 13h30 now." Holy crap!? My 10h55 flight is delayed by two and a half hours? A brief moment of elation at the realization that this cuts down on my wait in Chicago leads to a much longer moment of despair at the realization that my wait in Chicago is less than two and a half hours. I won't be able to make my connection. The helpful agent tells me to bring this to the attention of the counter agents. The counter agents are at the other end of a lineup. A long lineup. The two people in front of me have enough luggage for a group of five. It occurs to me that this is true of quite a few of the travelers in the queue. The significance of this fact is not apparent to me until twenty minutes later when three-quarters of the counter agents are tied up with travelers who are packing and re-packing their bags in what I'm certain is a futile effort to get their stuff under the weight limit. A turtle would look at this line and laugh. It is after ten by the time I get face to face with an agent. She gets me on a Delta airlines flight going through Atlanta to Ottawa. OK, fine, but that flight leaves at 11h00. I bust tail over to the Delta lineup and politely move my way up the line, briefly explaining my predicament to the kind folk who let me forward. I get to the counter agent, who groans and tsks at what has happened. "You'd better move your tail to the gate real quick." "Oh, your final destination is Canada? I'll need your passport, please." For the time it takes to punch in the passport details, she can no longer check me in. The system won't allow it (which is good, because given the lineups I've seen there's no way I'm getting through security in time for any flight before noon). The Delta agent spends ten minutes searching through all the flights, trying to get me to Ottawa today. She can't do it. She tries all kinds of permutations and combinations, but the best she can do is the same flight tomorrow. OK, I take that and head back to United. I ask to speak to the supervisor of customer service, who turns out to be Susie. Susie does the same thing, trying all kinds of possibilities. The best she can come up with is a red-eye that gets in to town tomorrow. I explain that I can take the flight already arranged for tomorrow, but I'll need them to cover a night's accomodation. Apparently they don't do that. So I take the red-eye. I still have colleagues who are in town. I was supposed to fly back early today 'cause most of the office is away on business and the headquarters is short-staffed. With the late night flight, I'll at least be able to sleep all night on the plane and be in the office for half a day tomorrow. I head back into Vegas to join my colleagues for a third day of manning the booth. More on that in a later post covering the Vegas trip proper. I get back to the airport later this evening. I go over and have a chat with Tom the United supervisor. I was hoping for a pass to the United Lounge. This is where I learned about McCarran's policy regarding carrier lounges. In the end, Tom sets me up with a $100 travel voucher, which is the highest he's authorized to give me. According to Tom. For now, it's not all that bad. I'm in a bar with a Sam Adams and some salsa, guac and chips, answering emails and blogging on the WiFi. Tonight's rest will be had at thirty-thousand feet, in my emergency-exit row window seat. With a pillow 'tween me and the bulkhead. More to come about the Vegas trip itself, in a post which may or may not show up later tonight.

Time flies when you ignore your blog

2006-07-13T12:46:00.000-04:00

From the updates department: Quick updates: 1) Laptop woes 2) Fun week 3) Vegas, baby! LAPTOP WOES So my new laptop is here. In fact I'm bloggin' on it *right now* (shield your eyes!). It has taken me a long time getting this thing set up. Details are at http://grinning-monkey.gnurple.net/index.php/Debian_on_a_Dell_Latitude_D620. Mostly it has been difficult because suspend and resume are evil things to try and get working in Linux. Evil, I say. Like the fruit of the devil. FUN WEEK Weeks start on Sunday, right? Right. So: * Sunday: Watched the FIFA World Cup over at P&M's. Then went to BCB's housewarming. * Monday: I can't remember what specifically made Monday fun, but fun it was. Oh, yes. I just wish I could remember why, exactly. * Tuesday: Helped do drywalling at P&M's. AZROLB: How is drywalling "fun", exactly? Well, AZROLB, some of us *like* combining hanging out with friends and doing physical activities. It's even more fun than having a fake conversation on your blog with the personification of a non-entity. * Wednesday: Had lunch with the Ex-Linuxcare crew at So Good, which is always so good. Especially the peanut-chicken dish which deserves an extra "So" all to itself, that it can cherish and display proudly on the mantle. In the chicken coop. To inspire other chickens to Be One with the peanut. AZROLB: If he keeps going with this, there will soon be a new religion, and it will be fowl indeed ... and if that weren't enough to make Wednesday fun, after work I went downtown to the Honest Lawyer and met an excellent, friendly girl. We had us some brewed BEvERages and a snack. We walked down to the park whose name I *still* can't remember where the BluesFesters are festering. I particularly enjoyed that we had a mostly ongoing conversation throughout, with suprprisingly few silent moments. She must be a good conversationalist 'cause I know that there are not many people with whom I can carry on a good conversation with for a good long time. I hope we will meet again. * Thursday: Why that's today! This morning I got my bike bag packed and I was ready to go to work. I checked my bike's tires. The rear one was a little low. I started to inflate it. It started making a hissing sound. I had to drive to work. I will get a new tube on the way home. No, it was not fun. Not fun at all. In fact it seems like the sort of thing Marvin the Paranoid Android would go on about. So what makes Thursday fun? Well, I had some good luck with my laptop. That's not really fun, but at least there's no air hissing out of my laptop. I will make sure that somehow, somewhere, there is fun to be had on Thursday. The day is not over. There is still time. Ready and forward! <insert enthusiastic motivational statement here> * Friday: Friday hasn't happened yet. But it will, and when it does, it will be fun. After all, is not Friday the best of breed? Worthy of a T-Shirt, I think. * Saturday: I will probably spend some of this day and its predecessor packing clothes and stuff. Packing is not necessarily fun, but the *reason* for it is. Besides, the reason for packing is fun.... VEGAS, BABY! I'm goin' ta Vegas, baby, yeah! (← An unwritten constitutional amendment states that you have to say "baby" after you say "Vegas") The office is sending me down to help promote our new product and stuff. At a trade show. In Vegas. Baby!! WOO! I fly down on Sunday and fly back on Wednesday. Sunday night will be my "wander and take pictures" night. Apparently there's some sort of party on Monday night. Tuesday night is for seeing Elton John at the Red Piano concert. Well, that's all I have for now. I would say something about taking pictures of the old and new laptops to put up here, but we all know what happens to promises I make at the end of a blog about the next blog. Besides, if my laptop wakes me up again like it has the last couple of nights with its broken charging-circuit, there won't be anything left to take pictures of.

My crummy, crummy laptop

2006-06-26T20:40:00.000-04:00

From the laptop-from-hell department: Have you met my laptop? I think it is time for a laptop haiku: Oh laptop Your charging circuit is blown And you weigh too much Now it is time for a story. I do not know where my contractions have gone. Turn on your imagination and hand it over to me for a minute or two. Relax. Breathe slowly. Close your eyes. Oh, shit, wait, nevermind. Uh... let your senses float like a leaf in the wind. Imagine you are tired. It has been a long day and you are thinking about bed. Bed is comfy. Bed is soft, smooth. Cool sheets on a warm night. The cat knows. He paws at you, "Come to bed." [Ever watch Star Trek: TNG? Remember the red alert hoot? Keep that sound in mind for a minute] You lie in bed. Soft, cool sheets cover you. A breeze from the fan soothes you. Your eyelids close as pleasant thou... WOOOOOOP!!!! What the f...? Romulans in my bedroom? Tasha wha...? Dip me in honey and thruhuwha? Waitaminit! That's the fucking LAPTOP making that bloody noise! WTF time is it?!? 02h00. Bloody hell. Fumble out of bed. Stumble downstairs. Bumble over to the couch. You are in a living room. It is bloody dark outside. You have been rudely awakened. The object of your wrath sits before you. > look object of wrath Before you is a monster-sized laptop. Its blue lid is closed. The most awful racket emanates from its surprisingly loud speakers three times a minute. On the size there is one amber LED. On the front there are two green ones lit in a line of three. > look green LEDs There are three LEDs. Left to right you see: (1) a plug icon indicating presence of A/C power. This light is on; (2) a power icon, lit, indicating that the laptop is turned on; (3) a battery icon, indicating the status of the battery. This light is off. > WTF?! In normal laptop operation there is no way for this condition to occur. When on A/C power, the A/C light is green and the battery light is either amber (charging) or green (fully charged). The power light can be either on or off, but the battery light is always on when the A/C adapter is present. WITHOUT the A/C adapter, either all three lights are off (powered down laptop) or the power light is on and the battery light is (1) off, indicating sufficient charge; (2) amber, indicating low charge; (3) flashing amber, indicating imminent death. Speaking of the laptop's imminent death, back to our adventure. > kick laptop You stretch your leg back, wind up and have at the laptop with all your might. Moments later you are forced to recall three important facts: (1) you just crawled out of bed, having experienced slumber interruptus courtesy of your steaming, fetid piece of shit laptop; (2) as such there is nothing covering your feet; (3) your steaming, fetid POS laptop resembles a brick in every way except colour, size (it is larger than a brick) and weight (it is heavier). The toes on your feet do a surprisingly accurate impersonation of your thumb after having just been whacked by a hammer. > inventory You are wearing what you normally wear to bed, offering few storage options. On your wrist is your watch, reminding you of this most inappropriate hour. In your hands is a Romulan battle outfit complete with disruptor which somehow crossed into reality from your dream, where you and Tasha ... were ... in the moments just after that bloody laptop started screaming. Tasha, back in your dream, must be cold and lonely. > set disruptor to max power and fire point-blank into laptop You have the immense satisfaction of seeing parts of your laptop melt a little before it is completely vaporized by the blast from the disruptor. The hole in your floor extends through the basement and into the ground below. A worm pokes its head through and looks at you with arrogance. Yeah, OK we'd better end this adventure here before things get out of hand. AZROLB: Yeah, like *that* hasn't happened already. Wassat? You hear something? The invisible shadow of a sound passes by your ear, barely failing to brush your consciousness. Quickly, here's what's new before I sign off for the evening: (1) Last weekend was a metric happening of fun. An all-day pool party on Saturday ended around midnight. On Sunday I helped good friends P&M do some work around their house, followed by Adventures In House-Scouting™ and then an evening of fire-cooked meat and yummy, yummy salad from the culinarily-talented hands of M. (2) I have finally finished reading the series of books I was working on. As such I am emerging, renewed, into the light of reality, no longer to rush home and absorb pages of literary entertainment. Prepare for an increase in frequency of blog posts. Also, an increase in frequency of cross-offs on the list which literally covers a half-sheet of paper describing a bunch of stuff that I need to do around my house. (3) The housework has started this evening with the elimination of weeds from between the patio stones in my backyard. I used the classic yoink-with-the-Mark-I-hand method (albeit with gloves -- those bastard weeds are prickly) followed by the more modern pressure-washer-between-the-cracks method. Those stones never looked so clean. Remaining on that particular project, to be finished on the next rain-free evening hopefully this week, are (a) pulling out the final (surprisingly large and prickly) weeds from around the last patio stones; (b) pressure-washing all garbage and recycling cans, car mats, kitty-litter trays, boot-mats and anything else that needs a pressure-washing before I tuck what I call the Yellow DeathSquirt 4000™ back into its home in the shed; and (c) attaching the tent-thingy cover after finishing the sewing-together of the corner which got ripped in the last heavy windstorm. (4) I have ordered a new laptop for myself, as this "I think I shall ignore the whole keep-batteries-charged idea" attitude that my laptop has recently taken to is becoming more frequent. Thus far there have been two dead-of-night awakenings, one mid-day death-style failure (and I can tell exactly when 'cause I was trying to use my laptop remotely from work at the time, doh), and a handful of failures that have happened while I actually have the thing on my lap (which I can correct when I notice them). I can't seem to tell what is causing this piece of shit to do this. It's not heat, because most days it stays on all day even during the warmest parts. It does seem to happen more frequently when I use it on my lap, but it has also failed mid-afternoon completely un-attended, and twice at night, also completely un-attended. Perhaps this whole thing is a plot by the cats to make me get a new laptop so they can use this one for their online gambling and kitty porn habits. If so they'll be sorely disappointed 'cause I'm just gonna stick this puppy downstairs near the projector, where it will be off most of the time but shall come in handy every once in awhile for gaming or whatever. Now, before this blog can get any more boring (AZROLB: Yeah, like *that* could happen.) I shall sign off. AZROLB, be warned that I still have Tasha's disruptor over here....

Dip me in honey and throw me to the lesbians!

2006-06-23T10:52:00.000-04:00

From the it-feels-good-to-breathe department: I went up to the cottage on Friday with some friends. We brought a car loaded with the three of us, groceries, their new canoe and some tools. And two bikes. We spent most of Saturday finishing the deck and building new stairs to go on said deck. The only work remaining is to rebuild the railing. The railing for the cottage deck is special. Not only does it keep you from walking off the edge of the deck in a drunken stupor, it also provides you a place to sit and to rest your beer. Actually, many aspects of the cottage share this function. With the weather and humidity the way they were, in conjunction with copious amounts of sawdust all over my body including hair and ears, as soon as the last nail finished the stairs I made for the lake at top speed. A quick swim was followed by my friends taking their canoe out and me following along in a kayak. Then we came back for dinner and later some pie. The evening ended with a sauna, and as always follows a sauna, the Best Sleep Evar for me. I don't know what it is about the sauna and incredibly restful and perfect sleep. It just happens. It is a mystery that I'm happy to leave unexplained as long as it continues to work its miracle. HALF-TIME: I know that reading what I write is incredibly boring. AZROLB becomes zombie-like after only three paragraphs. So I thought I'd stick this picture of a strange-looking crawler that we found walking across the new deck while enjoying pre-breakfast restfulness on Sunday morning. We didn't know what it is. Do you?
What Am I? Sunday morning was a restful wakeup and breakfast followed by a packing of all things returning to the city. With only the fridge contents left to be packed, there was time for one last canoe/kayak adventure and a quick final swim. Then Sunday afternoon officially started. It started with two of us walking our bikes up the cottage driveway hill. We biked to Palmerston before we stopped so I could get a bottle of water. We stopped again in Elphin so I could die of exhaustion a little bit on the stairs of a church. We stopped again in Lanark to eat food. We stopped again at hwy. 7 so I could die of exhaustion on the stairs of another church. Actually, lying in the grass in front of said stairs. We stopped once more in Carleton Place where I got a lime Misty from Dairy Queen (and refilled my water bottle). Here is the progression of pain: (1) My butt starts to hurt; (2) my hands start to lose circulation a little; (3) my feet start to lose circulation a little; (4) my neck becomes sore from looking up at the road; (5) after awhile I cannot inhale to the full capacity of my lungs anymore; (6) my knees start to feel a dull, yet persistent, pain. I try various things like letting my arms droop, standing up a little, sitting up and riding no-hands style a little, removing my feet from my pedals' straps. These little changes seem to relieve the pain in one place by moving it to another, which, if not relieving, at least adds variety. When somebody is punching you, after all, is it not better that they stop punching you in the shoulder and move on to your arm for awhile? Anyways, I have learned some things: (1) I probably won't do that again without company. I need somebody to call 911 when I fall over and die next time. (2) I can actually bike 140km without falling over and dying. (3) The worst part is about 1/3 into the trip, after around 50 or 60km, when all of the above progression of pain has already set in and you know you need to go through it two or three times over. (4) The worst part doesn't end until there's around an hour left and you realize that you are not in fact going to fall over and die, and that you will be in eternal bliss before the minute hand of your watch returns to its position (where eternal bliss is defined as anywhere not pedalling on your bike, but especially involving a shower followed by lying on your bed with a fan nearby). When I woke up this morning, I didn't have too much trouble moving around, but my lungs did not function perfectly until mid-morning at work. UPDATE: It's now next Friday. That's right, I procrastinated the simple act of posting an already-written blog entry for 5 days. Last night on the way home I saw this sticker on a truck:
Not the Dyke Dungeon!

Greetings from South Dakota [UPDATED]

2006-06-08T18:27:00.000-04:00

From the vacation-in-south-dakota department: The Badlands. The Black Hills. Deadwood Gulch. Sounds horrible, doesn't it? Turns out that it's loads of fun, though! I'm sitting here by the pool writing this as the rest of ~~the monkeys~~ my family go swimming. I'll go get my fill of pool in a few minutes, and then some hot tub, too. EDITOR'S NOTE: This post, originally written beside the pool of our campground in The Black Hills, is updated from beside the pool of our hotel in Grand Forks just south of the border. We're on our way home and my family, crazy shoppers that they are, are gonna hit the Grand Forks stores for all they're worth -- just as they've done for all the stores we've passed by or through, it seems. I start to go slightly insane when I've been subjected to more than a couple hours of shopping so I'm gonna blog right here for awhile an' then go swimmin'. DAY 1: GETTING THERE Flew to Winnipeg. Briefly sat beside some guy reading a book about The Simpsons, but grabbed the opportunity to take an emergency exit seat when it cropped up, and ended up beside a Montrealer going to a conference in Fort Garry (part of Winnipeg for those playing along at home). I think it was his first time flying -- he had lots to say about the little things of being a passenger in a commercial airline: the slight nose-up angle at cruise level, how high we were flying, flaps and gear noises, etc. Got into Winnipeg, went for dinner with my mom and aunt, then off to my cousin's place for the evening. And to meet my niece in person for the first time. She's a cutie.
My Niece and Nephew
My Cousin's Place
Our HQ DAY TWO: THE JOURNEY BEGINS Traveling are my mom, aunt, cousin and her hubby, my nephew and neice, and yours truly. We loaded up the camper trailer and got underway. Fifty meters later we pulled over to figure out why the trailer brakes weren't working. Took us forty-five minutes of fuse-pulling and head-scratching to figure out that one of six connectors, a clamp which slides onto a prong, was loose (bent too wide). Worked fine after closing it up. Stopped at Culver's for lunch. Culver's is apparently all over north/central United States but not so much near the East Coast. Then we drove to Dilworth (yeah, Dilworth -- great name, eh?) to do some shopping. I discovered that not all Interstates intersect with highways using the familiar clover-loop, but we were back on track six miles later. Then we scooted on down to P&D's place in Breckenridge, MN for a great BBQ dinner, a trip to the park for my aunt, nephew and myself, and our first night's sleep.
The Simplest Toys Are Best
Me and My Nephew at The Park
At P&D's, our first night's stop DAY THREE: SIOUX FALLS A leisurely wake-up and great breakfast at P&D's, then back on the road again to the first campground, Yogi Bear's Jellystone Park (one of many, apparently) in Sioux Falls. After we got the camper and my tent set up, we took my nephew down to the playground for a bit. Following that we rented a four-wheeled pedalbike which holds two passengers and two ~~mules~~ manly pedallers. Going downhill is a lot more fun than its inevitable opposite. Turns out it's easier to just get out and push. Somebody tell the Flintstones.
Somehow, the passengers seem happier than the pedalers Then dinner, followed by a tractor tour around the campground with Yogi and Boo-boo. Finally, sleep. I slept in my tent on an inflatable mattress which, by the morning, didn't seem particularly good at holding air. The tent passed the rain test with flying colours.
Kids in A Basket
Yogi Bear's Campground at Sioux Falls DAY FOUR: RAFTER J BAR RANCH A long drive across South Dakota was interrupted with a stop at a gas station (in Lyman?) parking lot for lunch (ain't camper trailers fun?!) and another stop in the tourist trap known as Wall Drug (seriously, there were over 100 roadside signs - they started at Sioux Falls and I'm willing to bet they're out as far as New York, or maybe Spain). Verdict: you might as well just go to the shops in Keystone, it's all the same stuff unless you're a veteran and you want your free coffee and donuts (as advertised by at least 10 different signs). Finally we got to our campground. We set up camp, cooked up dinner, went for a walk around the camp to check things out, and settled in for the night. Once again, the tent passed the rain test and the mattress failed the holds-air test.
Our HQ in The Black Hills
The Monkey Plays With Fire
Big Monkey Teaches Little Monkey How To Be Silly DAY FIVE: TOUR DAY ONE Started the morning with a trip to Rapid City where I picked up a sleeping bag and ground mat. Went to Keystone for lunch and a run down the President's Slide. Unbelieveably, my mom went down the slide, too. Made it to Powder Lodge in Keystone for our tour group and waited an hour and a bit due to a communication issue in scheduling. Tour day one: the 1880's train ride, the Gutzon Borglum museum, a chuckwagon dinner & show, and finally the lighting ceremony at Mount Rushmore. Got back to camp and crashed 'cause tour day two starts early the next morning. Sleeping bag performed well, though I could've used more padding between me and the uneven gravel below.
The 1880's Train
Food 'n' A Show, Cowboy Style
Mount Rushmore At Night DAY SIX: TOUR DAY TWO Started the morning with The Reptile Gardens, then Bear Country USA, followed by Mount Rushmore, then Crazy Horse, a trip to Custer Park and then a trip on Iron Mountain road (lots of hairpin turns, elevation and narrow tunnels -- my kinda road, but a little challenging for a tour bus). Back to camp for dinner. I headed down to the pool for a swim and some hot tubbing, then back to the tent for sleep. This time I folded up some comforters under the sleeping bag and all was well.
My Cousin and Nephew at Reptile Gardens
Bear Cubs Like To Be Fed
My Lands Are Where My Dead Lie Buried DAY SEVEN: DEADWOOD GULCH Deadwood is basically a gambling town with tourist-trap style stores. It's where Wild Bill Hickok got shot, and we saw a re-enactment of the shootout in thes street. That was after we lost some money but just before we left. Then we went to Sturgis 'cause my cousin-in-law (cousin once removed? Whatever) likes Harleys. My cousin and her family headed over to Rapid City for more shopping. My aunt, mom and I headed back to camp to make dinner and relax a bit.
Shootout In Deadwood Gulch DAY EIGHT: JEWEL CAVES After breakfast we headed off to Jewel Caves for a bit of spelunking, tourist-style (read: no crawling through seven-and-a-half inch holes, although you can do that tour if you want (and you can fit!). Nonetheless the more active among us did an hour and a half tour through the caves, after an hour's wait due to getting there at just the wrong time. Then back to camp for a late lunch / dinner, and down to the pool where I wrote this blog. I discovered that second-day pizza re-heated on the BBQ is much better than the fresh stuff straight from the box. From now on when I order pizza I'm shoving it straight in the fridge and barbequeing it the next day. This evening the tent barely passed the rain test, letting in one or two drops.
So Many Cool Formations in Jewel Caves DAY NINE: BACK TO SIOUX FALLS Starting early in the morning, we drove straight through to Mitchell, stopping only for gas. Had lunch at Culver's again. Went shopping at Calaberas(sp? -- like Canadian Tire on steroids), then Menard's and also Tractor and Supply Co. Went to quickly visit the Corn Palace. The building has a facade made entirely out of corn -- it's been around for over a century in one form or another. Inside you will find all art forms involving corn. Aw, shucks, it's just stuff they cobbled together, or so I 'ear (the colonel told me so in a husky voice). Anyways, we returned to the same Jellystone Park in Sioux Falls where a windstorm kept us company 'til the morning. Watched some DVD before going to bed. Tent passed the crazy-wind test.
Corn Palace in Mitchell, SD DAY TEN: TO GRAND FORKS Yesterday was go-east day. Today was go-north day. We headed up to Grand Forks, stopping in Fargo for lunch and shopping. Checked into the hotel, and now my family are out shopping again save my mom and I who are sitting out here by the pool.
C'mon Inn Hotel Decor Tomorrow is the last day. We'll be heading back to Winnipeg and I'll catch my flight home if all goes well, and then it's back to good ol' Ottawa. I hope the weather has improved in my absence. One last update to put up pictures of this cool hotel, C'mon Inn (seriously).

ISPCON wrap-up and news

2006-05-31T08:22:00.000-04:00

From the ispcon-2006 department: As usual, many moons have passed and the blog was left on the curb like that poor, sad lamp in the old Ikea commercial. The blog is hungry. It wants to be fed. In today's issue: * Wrap-up for ISPCON * Cottage May 24 weekend * Upcoming vacation WRAP-UP FOR ISPCON I'll try and keep this short 'cause we all know how much drivel I can, unchecked, spew upon these pages of teh intarweb. AZROLB will be pleased. Basically, our time *in* the convention center involved me breaking out of my shy little shell and actively seeking out conversations with lots of people. I hope I get sent to more of these for that reason alone. Apparently it takes a +5 Work Commitment charm to break a Shyness spell. ASIDE: Yeah, I don't know what the hell I'm talking about. The only Role Playing Game I've ever been in on is when I sat in on another group's game to take the place of a no-shower. Uh, a no-show-er, that is. I'm pretty sure everybody there had a shower. I hope they did. Anyways, All the fun was from hanging out with the friends; the game itself didn't do much for me. I guess it doesn't help when you know nothing about the world or the game or anything and you're jumping in with a group that knows all. Meh. Right. Keep it short; AZROLB is becoming fidgety. Basically, our time *out* of the convention center involved drinking, eating, shopping or wandering around the Baltimore harbor area (and a little bit of Little Italy, which we should have walked to so we could've avoided the Worst Cab Ride Ever -- we walked back). Thursday was the last convention day. Very few actual visitors wandered by. Mostly other exhibitors. It was very quiet. I wandered over to the Geotrust booth and stole three of their little globe-schwags so that I could juggle. I also wandered around and found these booth babes to take a picture with me (picture of a polaroid picture, so apologies for the quality): The A.L.I. Cats. Mrowr. I wandered around to find schwag. I got some pens and flashy blinky LEDs. I wanted to get a particular pen with a blue LED in it from a booth down the row, but the guy there was keeping them hidden. I asked him where I could get one. He said, "I think they're around here somewhere. They're pretty popular." As he said this he was holding one in his hand. The name on the pen matched the name on his booth. Assclown. Next time I will remove my "exhibitor" badge in the hopes of scoring better schwag. On Thursday evening after dropping Derek off at the airport for his flight home, Wayne and I headed to Philadelphia for a meeting the next morning. Wayne insisted that I drive d:) Over $10 in tolls on the I-95. Ridiculous. We wandered around downtown Philly to take many pictures of historical stuff. There is much that is interesting there; I need to go back someday to let loose the little shutterbug that lives inside me. Friday morning, our meeting went well, and I drove home. AZROLB sighs. Part one, done. COTTAGE MAY 24 WEEKEND I invited many helpful ~~slaves~~ friends to the cottage for a weekend of beer, fun and deck-building. I didn't bring my camera but Scott did, so here's a link for you: Scott's Cottage May 24 pics As per this earlier post, We had already done some of the demolition for the old deck. As you can see in the picture ("There Is No Deck") we left some of it in place for stability. On Saturday morning we completed the demolition. Dave's ~~Indian~~ Native American name is "Rushes With Hammer". As we took the old deck totally apart, we discovered places where the cottage was rotting because of water seeping between the deck and the cottage. All in all, fixing all the rot required a consultation with Lorne, a family friend and the Buckshot Lake Construction Guru, a trip to the lumberyard, and just over a half a day's work between Saturday and Sunday. By the time all the slaves revolted and ran away on Sunday evening, the frame and joists for the deck were firmly in place, along with perhaps 1/3 of the decking. I spent Monday morning cleaning the cottage, doing many dishes, stripping all the linen and packing up my stuff. I am happy to pay the price of cleaning up after a monkeyfest in exchange for great company and slave labour d:) Monday afternoon I finished 3/4 of the deck-planking, but I had to leave for home before I could totally finish the job. What's left? 1/4 of the deck (the bit that leads to the stairs near the Bedroom By the Fireplace, for those playing along at home) still needs decking. The stairs need to be repaired and then attached to the deck. And finally, the ~~railing~~ cool seating which doubles as a railing needs to be rebuilt and attached. UPCOMING VACATION On Thursday afternoon (tomorrow! woohoo!) I'm flying out to Winnipeg, where I will join my family (minus The Bostonian Branch) for a vacation in the Dakotas. We'll be taking The Fifth Wheel, which attaches to my cousin's truck, plus my Aunt's car. We'll be wandering through North and South Dakota from the 2nd 'til the 11th. There will be seven of us: My cousin and her family (2 adults, two young kids), my aunt, my mom and myself. In an RV. I'm told that we aren't allowed to have a tent. I think I might get one anyways. I love my family to death and they're all wonderful people but I also like sleeping through the night and getting some alone time now and again. I'm bringing my camera and hopefully will be able to update the blog once or twice (although we saw how well that worked in Baltimore, eh?). It's been a long time since I traveled down that way and I look forward to seeing much carved rock, badlands, caverns, etc. Happy happy joy joy!

Baltimore!

2006-05-16T10:17:00.000-04:00

From the ispcon-2006 department: Home of the Orioles My company is making its presence known at ISPCON 2006 in Baltimore. This is gonna be a fun week! Let's jump back in time a little: SATURDAY * Helped BCB move some stuff to his new place in the morning. Cool digs; * Read some book on the couch for part of the afternoon (read: procrastinating from packing and stuff); * Later in the evening (when my conscience couldn't take the slacking off anymore), cleaned up around the house, packed bags and gathered stuff for the trip; SUNDAY * Wayne, a cow orker with whom I'm traveling, shows up at 06h30 as per The Plan. A quick stop for some breakfast for Wayne (some fruit from my fridge was sufficient for me) and we're underway; * 8 hours and one friendly state trooper later ("I'm gonna do you a favour; I'm cutting you loose"), we're in Baltimore. Wayne has now officially used up all his lucky breaks so apparently I get to the driving on the way back d:) * We went down by the harbor to find a place that will give us beer and food (in that order); * In the evening I went into Silver Spring, MD to visit with my relatives. We chatted, went out for dinner, then chatted some more. I had a good time; I gotta run now to get some breakfast and then head over to the convention center. Hopefully I'll find some time to add quick little entries like this (yes, for me this is a quick post d:) along the way, and then maybe a more detailed highlights post later on when I can get my brain worked up. Of course now I've said it it's officially on the list of Things That Norm Says He'll Do on the Blog But Never Does. UPDATE: MONDAY Ok, it's Tuesday night. We just got back from the bar, so this should be an interesting update. Anyways, on with what happened on Monday: * Woke up at 07h00. Turned over and went back to sleep; * Repeat above step 2x for every 1/2 hour; * Wandered around Baltimore Harbor area; saw The Home of the Orioles, though from what we've seen on the TV so far it should be Home of the Place Where Boston Red Sox Cream the Orioles; * Wandered around the Harbor; took some crappy photos in the overcast / drizzly weather; * Drove down to the D.C. area; parked under the International Trade Center after an identity check, bomb material scan ~~and strip search~~ and overall good security; * Wandered down toward The Mall. Walked around the White House oh, say, eight times. Wandered down toward the Monument but couldn't get tickets to the top (all sold out for the day); * Wandered down toward the Lincoln Memorial and then over to the Korean Memorial; * Wandered halfway down the reflecting pool before we discovered that the Vietnam Memorial is on the left/North side near the Lincoln Memorial. By this time the need for beer is strong; * Wandered back up the reflecting pool and Lincoln again, then past the Vietnam Memorial Wall; * Went in search of beer; asked GPS where is the nearest Cafe; it pointed us north 3 blocks; * GPS apparently pointed us to the basement of a hotel near GW University; * Asked a local where we might find some beer; * Roughly wandered in the general direction given us by aforementioned local until I said something to the effect of, "I believe we will find beer over by those tables with umbrellas"; * Found beer and food. My quesadillas were good; Wayne's sandwich was for crap; * Wandered over to Smithsonian Museums; took many pictures; too much stuff to do in D.C.; so little time; * Drove back to Baltimore; * With sore feet from our D.C. journeys, we foolishly decided to seek out the nearest place for food and beers; DSX. Never again; apparently DSX is for Dis SuX. Aside from the crappy laminated particle board tables, the TVs that Wayne describes as "Thermal Imaging", and the mediocre food, the final cap for the DSX experience was this big ol' cockroach we discovered on the way out; MONDAY * Woke up around 07h00; shut off alarm; turned over; * Woke up again at 09h00; commenced leisurely awakening procedures; * Brought our booth over to the convention centre; got our passes and did the setup; * Found lunch at nearby Chef Paolino's pizza place; * Wandered back to hotel to relax until Exhibit Hall opening time / change into RPS clothes; * Met Derek over at the convention centre, finished the booth setup and started accepting visitors; * Chatted with a bunch of people and captured a few leads in the three exhibit hall hours of the opening day; * Wandered to a nearby Kinko's to make copies of material that we were clearly going to run out of; * Wandered down to the harbor area for dinner and beers; * Wandered over to the Wharf Rat pub for more beers; watched the Orioles lose 5-6 against the Red Sox. Highlight: chatting with a cute blonde chick who ordered Sapphire gin & tonics for her and her friend; * Wandered back to the hotel; wrote this updated post and went to bed. I leave you with this picture from my hotel window on Sunday night: The Clock Strikes Ten

The Tale of Foosball Man

2006-05-12T11:37:00.000-04:00

From the dead-soldier department: At work there is a foosball table. By virtue of the "spin to win" strategy used by those of us with no innate foosball talent, it gets heavily used. Some of the players are showing, shall we say, wear and tear. Little cracks are forming. Eventually, one of the players was split in twain. I took pity on the poor player and brought it home for treatment. I found a jar of small nails. I found a small can of PVC cement. I found a dremel. Grin. The 10 step process to repairing a foosball man:

Step 1: Drill 4 holes through bottom half until drillbit exits
Step 2: Insert nails through holes from the bottom exit hole until point of nail just slightly sticks up through cracked side;
Step 3: Firmly press top half against bottom half; nails will mark positions in top half;
Step 4: Drill short holes into top half;
Step 5: Use cut-off wheel to remove tips and tops of 4 nails, creating surgical pins;
Step 6: Insert pins into top half; dry-fit with bottom half;
Step 7: Lament on how well things would have fit together had I used a drill press or something instead of handheld shenanigans; force two halves together as much as possible using pliers-and-cursing method;
Step 8: Separate halves; apply PVC cement to both sides;
Step 9: Remove excess cement with hastily-fetched paper towel;
Step 10: Notice how well PVC cement works as paper towel comes away with some red on it.

This is why they don't let me near hospitals anymore. I brought the newly repaired foosballer back to the office and installed it on the table, switching it for a position that shows the least wear -- or at least, an easily accessible position showing somewhat less wear (if you're going to be a bad surgeon you're also granted laziness at no extra cost!). I drizzled a little bit more PVC cement over the now-installed left-wing foosball defenceman. I then declared my confidence in the soldier newly restored to the battlefield. I believe my words were, "I'll be surprised if it lasts through a game." To my surprise, he lasted more than a week! Alas, while he held up for a few days, he eventually started cracking again and finally busted apart. Here then is an ode to our fallen hero (now including a haiku!). He will be missed -- every time the blue team scores a goal. Foosball man
Your injuries did not heal
Rest in pieces, dude

Cottage Deck Repair Weekend

2006-05-09T08:48:00.000-04:00

From the cottage-weekend department: Ever since I was a wee lad, I've always liked breaking things. I went to the cottage this weekend. Two words: demolition. Fun. THE COTTAGE My cottage is an interesting place. The "front door" is this small door over by the kitchen. It gets used approximately twice per cottage trip: people bring in their stuff, people take their stuff home. The rest of the time everybody uses the back door. The back door is a sliding door. It leads out onto the back deck. The back deck leads down to the water, the dock, the sauna and all the fun stuff. The back door faces the waterfront. THE DECK The back deck was built many, many years ago out of Cedar. But even Cedar cannot withstand the test of time. You know those old, decrepit farmhouses you see, with the siding that's turned all black instead of wood-coloured? That's what this deck looks like. I thought that it would just be a matter of replacing the decking material. I thought that the joists and framework underneath were fine. So I recruited Scott, who likes to help with construction projects, and loaded a bunch of deck wood into the trailer. (I ended up getting pressure-treated SPF instead of cedar, (a) because I didn't know what the current deck was made of and (b) because I thought the joists and framing underneath were OK, that I could get SPF now and get cedar when it comes time to redo everything) THE DEMO SATURDAY Step 1: Run up and down hill carrying 4x 5/4" × 2" × 8' boards, 12 times Step 2: Break for burgers 'n' beer Step 3: Smash deck with sledgehammer Step 4: Imagine reed in wind; switch to hammer and crowbar Step 5: Watch Crazy Man Scott attack railing
Rail Relief Step 6: See pieces of joist come apart along with deck Step 7: Take apart non-deteriorated wood; discover it's cedar Step 8: Regret earlier decision not to buy cedar since whole deck needs replacing and was cedar originally Step 9: Say to self, "It's almost 16h00. The lumber yard probably closes at 17h00 or 18h00. Why would they close at 16h00?" Step 10: Decide to leave trailer attached to car since store will surely be open Step 11: Get to store. Kick self for steps (9) and (10) Step 12: Beer Step 13: Return to demolition Step 14: Start cleaning up mess Step 15: Realize that the only way cleaning can be fun is by using power tools; provision circular saw as cleaning assistant Step 16: Burgers 'n' beer Step 17: Start FIRE
Burnfireburn It's always good when you end the day with a fire. SUNDAY Step 1: Go to lumberyard; buy 24x 2" × 6" × 16' joists Step 2: Watch ~~Lumber Provisioning Technicians~~ ~~Lumberyardsmen~~ two goofballs load 16' boards into 8' trailer with wood sticking out the back Step 3: Notice back of car seems less down to earth than usual Step 4: Drive back to cottage at 40km/h Step 5: Beer Step 6: Repeat Saturday's Step 1 with different boards Step 6: Back to town Here's a picture of what used to be a deck:
There Is No Deck Here's a link to some more pictures from this cottage trip. When in the gallery, you don't get to read my amusing (?) captions unless you click on the photos (hint: use the arrows to flip throug them). Don't worry, you won't get the full monster-megabyte-sized photos, just nice medium-kilobyte-sized ones: Cottage Deck Repairs Gallery NON-COTTAGE STORY I bike to work when I can. Unless it's supposed to be rainy, I usually bring my camera with me. Why? (a) for exercise; (b) for biketographing; (c) because I love my camera (my picture is in the dictionary under Gadget Lover). Most of the time I don't take any pictures, though I hope for stuff like deer, hot naked chicks, plane crashes, riots. The usual roadside attractions. Then there's moments like this (click for larger version):
Go Sens Car I passed by this car in Kanata Hockey Traffic on the way home on Monday. It was slowing down for a red light. I saw that the light was about to turn green. I pulled over, whipped out my camera, and fired off three frames. Considering the camera was on full automatic mode (no locked exposure, no locked whitebalance, etc.) this panorama turned out OK (that is, it isn't the pea soup of random bits I thought it would be). PS: This post shoulda been up this morning as per my habit of writing blogs at night, reviewing and posting them the next morning. Blogger was ~~up and down like a strip club pole dancer~~ having technical issues this morning.

Biking. Fun.

2006-05-02T18:14:00.000-04:00

From the cycling department: Whooooeeee!!!

SPONGMONKEYS (singing):
We love the wind /
Cos it is good to us

AZROLB: WTF?

SPONGMONKEY #1: Hey, did you hear something?

SPONGMONKEY #2: Almost.  Hey, let's go to Quizno's.

I set a record for my journey home at 35'24" (no, that's not 35 feet, 24 inches...). The wind at E 24km/h was a real helper. I coulda done it a little faster, too, but as I was doing the bit of Hunt Club from the 416 overpass to Moodie, a fellow cyclist pulled up and we chatted 'til we got to Moodie where I turn north (the True North, strong and free!). I love biking. Flashback to last Friday. I'm biking home. It's a beautiful, sunny day, winds calm. I'm cycling north on Moodie, about to turn west on Robertson. As I go through the intersection, something feels wrong, and just as I exit the intersection, my back tire becomes wobbly. I pull over to look at the flat tire. Yup, flat. Distance to home? 6km. Time to walk it with a bike to tow along? 1hr, at least. Lean the bike up against a sign beside the sidewalk. I try to pump the tire up; maybe it was a slow leak I hadn't noticed, or a bump that magically deflated the tire? Yeah, right. This tire does not want to hold air. OK, next step: I take the tire off of the bike. I look at it to see if I can find an obvious culprit: a nail, or a staple, or a piece of glass or some little sharp thingie sticking outta my tire. No luck. OK, next step (and this is the part where I learn not to take my handy dandy Park Tools bike kit for granted): I take the tire off the rim. It comes off pretty easy, I didn't have to use the little wheel pry, but I did anyways. Now I look around the inside of the tire for some protruding sharp thing. I see nothing. OK, next step. I inflate the tube and feel around it. Clearly this is not a slow leak, so I should be able to find something. AHA! A tiny hole is allowing my precious air to escape! I dig around in my little kit; I thought there were some emergency patches in there. And so there are! Aside from losing one of them (it got stuck to the little ziplock baggie I carry them in and I couldn't get it free), I field-cleaned the site of the hole (read: lick finger, clean spot, rub with old biking shirt), waited a moment or two for it to really dry, and stuck on the patch. Damn, thos things're good! Wait a few moments for the patch to set well. I know that just up the road there's a Canadian Tire where I can get a new tube if necessary, but this will be a good trial experience. I inflate the tube and sure enough, it holds air. Deflate tube. Manoeuver tire partway onto rim. Stuff tube into tire and partially inflate so it stays there. Begin hooking the tire into its proper place. Those tire pry thingies really come in handy. Done! Deflate tube. Partially re-inflate. Bounce tire around on the ground for a moment or two to allow the partially inflated tube to wiggle around and find a good position within the tire. Mostly inflate tire. Woohoo! It seems to be holding air. My 70psi toroidal atmospheric prison is secure! All that's left is to figure out how to mangle the wheel around the chain and back onto the bike again, and secure it. Replace pannier, and away I go! I finally notice that there's something on my back, and I remember the camera bag strapped on there. That's how comfy this thing is: I forgot it was there while I was repairing my bike. The rest of the trip home was short and uneventful. The whole thing reminds me of when I came back from my sister's wedding. This whole 'have all the things you need to fix your flat tires with you' thing is really working out for me so far. Knock on wood. Knock on head. It's all the same, really. Part II: The Bike Shop (a.k.a. When Things Go Right) So on Saturday morning, before heading over to P&M's place to help with some construction (and then watch the Sens send Tampa Bay home), I call up my favourite bike shop, Rebec & Kroes. Yes, I had to search teh intarweb to get the spelling right. Why call the shop, you say? Why not just go to the local hardware store, get a tube and install it? Well, my bike, she needs tuning anyways, plus there's some stuff I want to get (like more patches and a nice baggie to put 'em in). The chain is a little rusty because my shed, where the bike lived for the winter, is crap. It's a cubular moisture prison, shall we say. (it's OK 'cause I hope to build a new shed this year) Also, the gear shifting is a little off -- it's a new bike, the new cables are breaking in.

ME: Hi, I need to bring my bike in for a tuneup.  And I blew a tire, so I need
a new tube, too.

RK: Ah, er, well, sure, there's a two week wait for tuneups, though.

ME: Holy carp!  That's crazy!

RK: Yeah, it's that time of year around here.

ME: Well, I should probably make an appointment.

RK: Unfortunately, it's first come first serve.  We don't do appointments
'cause too many assholes ditch and then our techs stand around playing poker
'stead of fixing bikes.

ME: OK, well, I guess I should bring my bike in, then.  When are you open 'til?

RK: We're open today and tomorrow, but the techies are only in on weekdays.

(OK, conversation not entirely verbatim, here d:) Decision time. If I want a tune-up, I have to lose my bike for two weeks. Otherwise, I can ride on the patched tube or go buy a Crappy Tire tube, but still keep riding an out-of-tune bike. Neither of these is really very good.

ME (stalling for time while I make up my mind): Hey, I seem to remember when I
bought my bike there last year that you guys would do a free tuneup for me,
right?

RK: Oh, when did you buy your bike?

ME: Last year, in the fall.

RK: Oh, well, I have good news for you!  Not only is your tune-up free, but
we'll get your bike done by the next business day!

ME, trying to imagine how I was in a dark tunnel with a tiny light at the far,
far end one minute, and now I'm out in the bright, bright sun: Well, hot damn!
Er, uh, I guess I should go find my receipt, eh?

RK: Well, you should be OK, we remember our bikes, we can find you in our
records.

ME: Awesome!  Well, I'm about to head out.  How 'bout I bring my bike 'round
and drop it off, and you can call me when it's ready.

RK: Sounds good, see you soon.

Talk about turning your frown upside-down. I ran upstairs to see if I could find my receipt anyways. I didn't find it (a bunch of papers have gone AWOL since Christmas cleaning) but I did find the bag full of owner's manuals and stuff the bike came with. And guess what? There's four 3M patches in there (you can count on anything that Minesota Mining and Manufacturing makes that has to do with being sticky)! So I dropped off the bike. Guess what: new tube? $5.50. New chain? $30. New little baggie for patches? $0. Woohoo! Now I just have to fold 'em up in some wax paper when I get the chance. That's the best flat tire experience I've done yet, although last year's story comes pretty close.

Take twice a day

2006-04-17T21:09:00.000-04:00

From the stories department:
Trail of Power

Awaken. The sun shines. Stretch. Pet a cat. Today, it starts. Go outside. Uncover the bike. Strap on the panniers, the camera gear. Reset the cycling computer. And so it begins. A quick jaunt through the park, then onto Glamorgan, a quiet street. It seems slightly uphill, and what little wind there is tries to slow you down. No matter. Glamorgan leads to Rothesay, which ends at Eagleson. Stop. Wait. Wait some more. Is the sensor working? Finally the light changes. Down the street, at the bend is a path into Shetland park, and onto the Trans-Canada trail. Another three kilometers, some level, some a bit uphill. The wind is not enough to wiggle the trees, but it tries, it tries to slow you down. No matter. The path at the bridge merges with Robertson. At 6 kilometers, a third of the way there. Crappy shoulder, but the lane is wide enough for both cars and bikes. Right at Moodie. The shoulder is even crappier now, but it's a short jaunt to W. Hunt Club. Wait for the light, turn left. The shoulder is beautiful and wide. The bumps are few and far between. Slightly uphill, and the wind, trying to slow you down, is not enough to pay any attention to. Up over the overpass, to Greenbank, then to Woodroffe, Hunt Club goes by like a blur. What a sweet, sweet road. Right at Woodroffe, and 2 or 3 kilometers to go. Left at Vaan. Vaan is nice and quiet. The peoples' houses among gentle hills. A kid ties her shoes and waits for the school bus. Left at Slack, and the journey is over. It feels good. Awakened, refreshed, energized. It's like a drug. Take twice a day. AZROLB blinks.
The Path Less Taken

You may have noticed that the graph at the top has changed. I wondered if, as I get into the habit of biking to work, the time it takes will go down. I decided to graph the distance, too, as if it's going to change somehow. Mainly I'm just curious to see what difference, if any, there is in distance to and from work. After awhile I'll stop tracking distance and change the time axis to range from 30 to 60 minutes, the better to illustrate differences. Speaking of time, the journey to work seemed slow and laborious. It seemed to be more uphill, it seemed to be more windy, it seemed to be less fast. The trip home seemed more lighthearted, as though the wind was helping me along. Every time I looked down at my speedometer, I saw upper 20's, low 30's. I was *sure* I'd see a better time by around 5 minutes. Surprise! Almost the same exact time. And 0.8km less distance, courtesy of Moodie (which, from now on, I'll sneak onto going south. Bicycles excepted, or at least they should be d:) So overall, lower average speed! Just goes to show the powers of attitude and perception. May all your bike journeys be swift and lighthearted. Screw the numbers. Well, I had some fun with the camera on the weekend, and results are over at the gallery. Specifically, http://www.gnurple.net/gallery/cpy-20060414. I interspersed my favourites throughout this post, ending with this one:
Paddington Leaps

It occurs to me that whenever I say I'm going to do something here on The Blog, it jumps off the bandwagon, falls by the wayside, and through the cracks. So, to end the blog, here's what NOT to expect next time: * Car pics * Bike pics * A creative story of some kind

Camera gear

2006-04-14T22:59:00.000-04:00

From the photography department: A young man rides his bicycle across the land, capturing moments in time. Wait, that doesn't sound very accurate. A not-quite middle-aged man in poor shape wheezes along on his bike, stopping once in awhile to catch his breath and maybe snap a photo or two of some random stuff. There, that's it! To press! Spring has sprung, and the time for cyclophotography has begun! Or something like that. NEW LENS I bought a new lens for my camera last week. Well, OK, new to me. I found it in the buy/sell/trade forum on a photography site I hang out on. I took it out with me yesterday on a cyclophotography trip. I love this lens. In my arsenal of lenses are:

14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 (Oly): Came with camera.
18-50mm f/3.5-5.6 (Sigma): Cheap but good. Close focusing makes this a good macro lens. True manual focus as well, which is handy for macro work. The Oly lenses can be focused manually, but it's done via an electronic ring which steps the focus motor. It's a little slower and more awkward to use.
55-200mm f/4-5.6 (Sigma): Cheap but good telephoto zoom lens. Also true MF.
400mm f/5.6 (Sigma OM): Manual everything super-telephoto lens. I found it on the web, a German second-hand store. Had to use Babelfish to help me fill in the online order forms. Also had to beg for free OM->fourthirds adapter ring, which Oly only gave out free on the second Thursday after a full moon on a cloudy night. I don't think it's free at all anymore.
25mm extension tube (Oly): Turns many lenses into macro lenses. Found used on the same b/s/t forum as my new lens...
11-22mm f/2.8-3.5 (Oly): High quality wide zoom lens. Where my kit lens or the normal Sigma would show barrel distortion at wider zoom, this lens shows none. This lens lives on the camera.

NEW BAG ... and speaking of new gear, the new lens means that all my gear no longer fits in my already crammed kit bag. Time for a new bag. Check this baby out: Have a look at the manufacturer's webpage for all the nifty features and stuff: [lowepro.com] Slingshot camera bag. The major feature with this baby is its two positions: backpack mode and access mode. I took this with me on the bike ride yesterday and it turns out to be perfect for cyclophotography. Now that I think about it, I don't really need to carry the kit lens around. With new lens and the two Sigmas, I'm covered for all the zoom range I need (equivalent to an 18x zoom, 22-400mm EFL). So I could probably go back to cramming all the crap in my old bag. On the other hand, now that I know how convenient and awesome this new bag is, I'm never going back. CAMERA GEAR Now for the fun part: here's all the stuff I've got jammed in there. What is all this crap? Outer row -- clockwise, starting with the first lens in the upper-left corner:

Sigma 55-200mm f/4-5.6 telephoto zoom lens: Lives in one of the two inner lens pockets.
Olympus 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 normal zoom lens: For now, lives in the other inner lens pocket.
Olympus EX-25 tube for macro shots: Lives in the add-on lens pouch.
Sigma 18-50mm f/3.5-5.6 normal/macro zoom lens: Also lives in the add-on lens pouch.
Crappy Canon mini-tripod: It's nice to have a small tripod handy. I have a big proper one at home, but sometimes you just wanna do a group shot, your big tripod's at home and you need a place to stand and aim your camera. I found this tripod in a bin of used $5 camera stuff. It was built so that it had "stops" of elevation, so I hacked it by putting a plastic washer between the little teeth. Now it can be locked at ANY angle. Lives in the inner pocket with the Sigma telephoto zoom lens.
Olympus FL-36 Flash, plus case: Not as fancy or expensive as the FL-50, not as crappy or as cheap as the FL-20. Pretty popular, too. I had to wait 3 months for it to ship; by the time it finally did I'd left SiteBrand to work at Roaring Penguin and the thing was delivered to the wrong place! I keep it in its case so it doesn't get scratched from the other stuff it lives with in the topmost pocket.
Extra 512MB CF: This is the card I'd started out with. When I went to my sister's wedding I discovered how quickly it gets full, I bought a 1GB card. Lives in a set of pockets on the inner flap of the main chamber.
Empty case for 1GB CF: I dunno why I keep this in the case. Just 'cause, I guess. Lives beside the above.
Video out cable: You know, just in case I wanna do a slideshow from the camera on somebody's TV. Lives in a set of pockets on the outer flap of the main chamber.
USB cable: This comes in handy a lot and not just for the camera, lemme tell you. Lives with the above.
Lens pen: In addition to the brush, there's a cap covering a little thing that rubs gunk on your lens. Also lives in the outer flap pocket.
55-58mm adapter ring: So I can put the circular polarizer (or haze filter) on the Sigma 55-200mm lens. Lives in the pocket with the Sigma telephoto zoom, underneath the tripod.
Extra lens cap: You know, for when you misplace your normal one. Lives with above.
Body cap / rear lens cap: The Oly 11-22mm f/2.8-3.5 lens is on the camera now, hence these two. Lives with above.

OK, now for the inner bunch of stuff. We'll do these in rows, left to right, starting again at upper-left:

Oly battery charger plus cable: It's surprising how often I *don't* charge my battery at home. Both live with the flash in the topmost pocket.
Two silica gel packs: I stick these in various places within the camera bag 'cause moisture sucks (and they suck moisture, ha ha)
58mm haze filter plus case: 'cause the circular polarizer's on the Oly 14-45mm right now. Lives in outer flap pocket.
Lens paper and business cards: Lens paper comes in handy all the time. The (out-of-date) business cards are for handing to people whose photographs I've taken. "Thanks for letting me take your photo. Send me an email and I'll send you a copy of your picture!" Shows people you're friendly and not a crazy stalker creep at the same time (what crazy stalker would hand you his contact info?) Biz cards live in outer flap pocket, lens paper is jammed in with the all-weather cover which has its own special pocket on the back.
Oly remote control: Stick your camera on a tripod, gather your friends together, smile, and click. Also good for controlling the camera in slideshow mode. Lives in inner flap pocket with the memory cards.
Extra battery: Another "it would be nice to have..." I discovered at my sister's wedding. Yet another b/s/t purchase from the forum. Lives in outer flap pocket.
Viewfinder cover: If your eye isn't blocking the viewfinder, light can get in there and mess with your picture a little, so if your camera's on a tripod and you and your friends are lined up with the sun shining on you, you'd better have this little gizmo blocking the viewfinder or the sun's gonna creep in and mess up your shot a little. Outer flap pocket.

Other stuff not pictured:

Olympus E300 dSLR camera: I love this camera ever since I got it a year or so ago. I usually carry it to work and back every day. It actually makes a pretty good scanner-substitute, too. I take pictures of documents and email instead of scanning or faxing.
11-22mm f/2.8-3.5 lens: The new wider, faster, better lens I just acquired lives on the camera.
White card: In the extra lens pouch, there's a little hidden pocket with a plastic card in it. Maybe the card is there to make the pouch more sturdy, but (a) it's pretty sturdy without it, and (b) it just happens to be a neutral white/gray shade
Air bulb (a.k.a. the one thing that doesn't fit in the bag): Usually a couple of shots of air is enough to clean a lens, and then you don't have to waste time and lens paper. Also good for getting junk out of the camera body if some happens to get in there. Unfortunately, there's no room left in the bag for it.
Laptop and other gear: On an extended visit or a distance journey I'll bring along my laptop bag, which is pretty packed with stuff, too, like a paperback book, MP3 player and headphones, network and phone cables, maybe extra batteries and charger, etc.

NEXT POST Stay tuned for lots of pictures. Tomorrow I want to clean my car and do more cyclophotography, so pictures will ensue, along with yesterday's cyclophotography pictures. Boy, 'cyclophotography' is a mouthful. Or a handful, when you're typing incredibly slowly on an AlphaGrip. It'd be way more fun to use a TLA. How 'bout CPY? Or an ETLA, CPGY? Chicken, pasta, garlic, yummy?

Mutant zombie onions

2006-04-07T20:13:00.000-04:00

From the something-completely-different department: I'm finally starting to get into the habit of typing with the AlphaGrip. God, this is so slow! On the other hand, I'm lying on my back on the couch. End result, this'll be a short blog, and I may fall asleep. (AZROLB breathes a sigh of relief) Speaking of being lazy and such, have you looked at the graph lately? Yowza! Just to be clear on some things: * I ate waaay too much last weekend and got no exercise. I blame The West Wing. * 90% of my exercise comes from cycling, which has been for crap lately. Bloody weather, eh? * The fun, graph-wise, oughta start when cycling to work starts. Stay tuned. Frustrating. I normally type at ~100 words per minute or so. It's not the (lack of) speed that's annoying so much as constantly flipping between consciously thinking about (remembering) where letters are -- I'm purposefully trying not to look at the 'grip as much as possible -- and what I'm trying to type. And the typos! Auugh! On a normal keyboard, I do greater than 99% accuracy. With the 'grip, right now, it's something like 70%. Auugh! At least I know where the backspace key is. That said, I'm surprised at how quickly I'm getting the hang of it. I feel confident that just a few hours of this will make a huge difference. It's the unpleasant pain of those hours. As Calvin's dad would say, "it builds character[s]". Har. Har. Har. And now for something completely different. I am a bachelor. I have undeniable proof. I was just in my kitchen getting a snack and I saw a green tentacle poking out from under a cupboard. Turns out there were some onions hiding in there and instead of rotting and stinking to get my attention they were growing instead! The nerve (heh). They look like green onions growing out the top of the cooking onions that came before. Onions must be pretty remarkable to be able to grow so well in complete darkness and low room temperature. I thought chlorophyll needed sunlight? Maybe I have mutant zombie onions. And there's the title for tonight's post. Tomorrow I hope to be back with some pictures and the stuff I said I'd do from the last post. In the meantime, I do believe this is my first fully-'griptyped blog. And given there aren't too many 'grips out there, maybe the first ever? First ever about onions, certainly. Not much in the groundbreaking department, but I'll take it.

Stick it in your ear

2006-03-27T21:08:00.000-05:00

From the new-gadgets department: In today's issue: * New gadget * New wheels * Two wheels * Two ×15 pounds, to go (this is gonna be a LOONG blog entry, but if you get fast the pirst one, it goes by quicker. And if you get to the end, I'll explain why the moon at the top of the page got replaced by a graph) NEW GADGET I'm playing with my new toy *RIGHT NOW*. I was playing with it at work, too. I stuck it in my ear. AZROLB SAY: WTF? Now, before you get all "Dude, I don't wanna know", answer me this: what's in *your* ear? (OK, now say it) I read a story that some random person posted on a forum out there on the internet about hearing. It said that if you stick things in your ear, it's good for you. No, wait, that's not it. Oh, right. Signal to noise ratio. That's important. You've driven in a car, right? Not your grandma's '75 K-car (a nice, reliant automobile, btw) but a cool car with, you know, a stereo. A stereo with more than two speakers. One that you can turn up to eleven. Now, you're driving around in this car. You get on the Queensway. What do you do? You turn it up, right? 'Cause the road noise is loud. The next thing you know, you're getting off at your exit and you've gone from 110km/h to the red light at the end of the exit ramp. What do you do? You turn it down (fool, you keep it cranked! Always turn up, never turn down!). Awhile ago I bought an MP3 player. A tiny MP3 player with a blue LED. It's so small I can look like the incredible geek I am by wearing it around my neck. I really like listening to it as I walk from place to place. Car to work. Work to lunch. Work to car. I used to work at SiteBrand. I parked across the intersection of two four-lane highways from my office ~~because my old boss wouldn't give me a good parking spot despite two years of work and yet the new guy gets the good parking spot~~ because parking is hard to find in the downtown Hull area. One thing I noticed every time I walked to the car on the way home from work is that while I normally had the volume around 20, when I crossed the intersection I had to crank it to 25. Then when I crossed and went down the hill to the quiet side street where my car was, I turned it down to around 18 or so. Signal to noise. You see what I mean? The problem, of course, is that the brain is adaptive. You can be sitting in your hammock and hear the call of the loon across the lake, or you can be in a bar with live music and a hundred raving partiers and your brain automatically adjusts for the huge differences in volume. You can be in a sauna chatting with friends one minute, and be in a cold lake the next, and your brain tunes your senses accordingly. Sitting inside your fridge might seem cold in the middle of summer, but when you've spent the winter in -20°C, you walk around in +5°C in jeans and a T-shirt (I go biking in shorts, myself). Unfortunately, the equipment isn't as versatile as the processor. You and your boss go to Le Audio Shoppe and buy a pair of speakers each. You put yours in your party room where you crank them all day and all night long. Your boss puts his in the elevator and plays quiet muzak all the time. The muzak sucks, sure, but those speakers will last many times longer than yours. Hearing damage is cumulative. It's just equipment wear. And that's really the meat of the matter, isn't it? Do you want to listen to crappy muzak all your life and still be able to listen to it when you're 80, or do you wanna be rockin' out for 50 years and then be "Whazzat sonny? Speak up, boy!" and everybody in your family rolls their eyes at you for the rest of your life. I say, go for the middle ground. Moderation. But I also say, if a smart option wanders by, grab it by the neck and stuff it in your pocket. In this case, I'm talking about noise-blocking earphones. Basically, they're earplugs with earphones built-in. Except they're well-designed in terms of both comfort and audio quality. I was going to write a review, but knowing this blog is gonna be loooong, I'll save that for another post. NEW WHEELS I bought a new car a month or two ago. In addition to a small discount off of the list price, and in addition to having the dealer pay a 3rd party audio company to swap the stereo from my Saturn (which turned out to be a big job, with special mounts cut for the speakers), I also negotiated for a set of summer tires. The annoying thing about summer and winter tires is that not only do you have to pay for the tires, you also have to pay somebody to put the tires on the rims, balance them and install them on your car. Less the latter, this is not something you can do without the right equipment, either, so you're pretty dependent on tire places for this service. (the good thing about winter tires, of course, is that they'll save you from accidents) So, car with winter tires on it, and a set of summer tires. Two options: 1) twice a year, pay a tire place to swap them -- by the way, did I mention tire places want you to buy their tires, and so they charge you lots when you don't want to buy anything, just to swap tires with rims? 2) Buy an extra set of rims and put the summer tires on 'em. So I did that. And, silly me, I found a set of used Corolla aluminium rims which are still more than twice the price of the steel ones I should've gotten. But they're shiny. And now, at the end of this year, I can just jack up my car and put on the winter tires myself. TWO WHEELS Speaking of wheels, the snow is (mostly) gone, and it's time to bring out the bike! So I did. Last year, towards the end of the year, I bought myself a new bike. My old bike (which I still have, much like I bought a new car and still have my old one) is a mountain bike. The new one is a hybrid, but it leans to the road-bike side of the spectrum. There's more about it over here in a post from last year. So anyways, the bike is out, locked to the front of my house and covered by a bike cover in case it rains -- a bike cover which fits the new bike better than the old one, BTW, for those of you playing along at home. So right now, I ride the bike around the neighbourhood for a couple of clicks every evening when I get home from work. The plan, once it starts being a little warmer (read: warmer than my fridge) in the morning is to bike to work. That's 40km of biking a day, which leads directly into the next (and finally, the last!) topic du jour: TWO ×15 POUNDS, TO GO Last year, at my best, I weighed about 170 lbs. I've gone under that a couple of times, once as low as 160 lbs., but usually hovering around 170 lbs. I biked to work everyday, which back then was only 7km each way. Then I bought a house, and so I was driving to work because I needed my after-work time to pack boxes and move boxes. Then I lived at my new house and so I drove because I needed all my after-work time to unpack and besides it was 33km to work. I biked to the nearby store for dinner when things got settled as regards the packing and stuff. And then winter came, and the biking stopped. And work at SiteBrand was a little stressful, and blah blah blah whatever other excuses I could've thought of would go here. Result: I'm over 200 lbs. So, now the bike is out and the exercise begins. Interesting thing about losing weight: positive feedback cycle. You start doing one thing that you find is making a consistent difference. So you say, "This is going well, what if..." and then you try something else, too. And that makes a difference, too. And the compound difference is pretty good. And so on goes the loop. So now, not only am I getting a little bit of exercise every day with the little neighbourhood trips, I'm also starting a bit of a diet. The problem with willpower and positive feedback cycles is that a turnaround in the cycle can break the willpower. So follow along with that friendly graph I've stuck at the top of the page. I've written some software that makes it trivial for me to update the graph with new measurements, so I'll be posting new data every day for awhile. You can click the graph and get a larger version. You can click that and get a PDF, which will have the graph plus the actual data from the textfile. I'm taking pictures along the way, too. I'm not posting them because they're embarrasing. Maybe I'll do a before/after if there's a good outcome to this thing. Anyways, some things to look forward to next time: * Review of new earphones, including pictures * Pictures of the Saturn and the Corolla * Pictures of the old bike and the new bike

Introducing TruxII

2006-03-20T13:42:00.000-05:00

From the carputer department: Forgive me AZROLB for I have slacked. It's been twenty-two days since my last update. Where have I been for the last 22 days? Working on TruxII! What is TruxII? When my team and I did the DARPA Grand Challenge our vehicle had these computers. They're ideal for cars since the CPU and mainboard are designed to be low-power and the power supply is designed to work well with your average car's power system. I bought one of the computers from the team after the event. Now I'm working on building something that I think will be cool, or at least will be fun and incredibly frustrating to work on. I'm going to build a system that lets me make modules. The thing is that there are a bunch of cool things for a vehicle computer to do. Play MP3s. Collect GPS data. Plot GPS position. Monitor OBDII for things like speed, efficiency, etc. Connect via wireless to a home base and grab your updated grocery list, then remind you what you need to get at the store (maybe even print a hardcopy). Turn the volume on the music up or down depending on the car speed. Etcetera ad nauseam. All these cool ideas and more, running on the one computer. How to manage it? Modules! What I envision so far, which is as far away from "set in stone" as you can get while still having an idea, is a low-level system that collects all sorts of data from the peripherals, and an infrastructure in which a bunch of modules interact. Some will run in the background and make themselves known when needed (like the shopping one, which can use GPS to detect when you're near a store, check if you need any items from that store, and alert you if you do). Does it make sense to you? It doesn't make sense to me, at least not anywhere lower than the ten thousand foot level. I'm working on that. In the meantime, I'm using my Wiki to keep track of cool ideas, what I've done so far on actually making the computer work, etc. It's all here: http://grinning-monkey.gnurple.net/index.php/Carputer In other news, I'm now addicted to West Wing. I dream West Wing when I sleep. My computer's background is the President's Seal. My boss laughs at me when I say "I serve at the pleasure of the President" every morning. When I get home I go to the TV and put West Wing on, and when an episode finishes, instead of going to eat food or do work I start the next episode (OK, maybe only that last one is true...). ... and what's up with the West Wing DVDs? The first season is in 1.33:1 (4:3) aspect ratio (just like a normal TV). The second season is 1.85:1. The rest are 1.78:1 (16/9). Weird. Oh, and speaking of weird, I'll leave you with this picture of somebody who's really trying their hardest to communicate with God:

The inbox on the wall

2006-03-01T20:08:00.000-05:00

From the junk-mail department: It's been a good winter. In the winter, the child slave labour that the junk-mail mafia use to make the deliveries are too lazy to go out in the cold. In the summer, it's a whole different ballgame. You turn your back for one second, ONE SECOND, and the next thing you know your mailbox is bulging more than your cousin from Tenessee after she met her uncle's brother's son.

(BEAT)

But this summer, things will be different. This summer, I'm gonna get me a lawn chair. I'm gonna put on my sunglasses and sit on my front porch in my lawn chair with my Louisville slugger and a six-pack o' brew. We'll see how much junk mail those little turds can deliver THEN. I sit on my porch with a shotgun and some beers. I keep the shotgun loaded, and the beers keep me loaded. I'm a junk mail vigilante! Some kid put a flyer in my mailbox, it was selling dairy products. I got out my shotgun and now the kid looks like swiss cheese. Some kid delivered a flyer for a hardware store. I took the flyer and used a coupon to buy a chainsaw. Now the kid's friends call him 'shorty'. One of the little bastards dropped off a copy of the local newspaper. I took my Louisville slugger and put some spikes in the end. Now he's on the front page.

The preceding post is intended as humourous. All characters, including that of the first person, are fictional only. No resemblance is intended with any real-life person, the author included.

The Hot Tub dream

2006-02-28T21:53:00.000-05:00

From the setting-sun department: Turn on your imagination. Is it on? Is it working? Imagine a meadow. Green grass, yellow flowers, a clear blue sky with fluffy white clouds and a bright, radiant sun. Birds are chirping, the calm wind ruffles the flowers and soothes your body. Right. That was a test. Just seeing if you're playing along, here. Imagination's all warmed up now, eh? Righto. OK, now, imagine this. You're in a house. It's not a big house, but neither is it tiny. It's a midsummer day, around eight o'clock. It is Friday. You got home from work at six o'clock. The sun is setting outide. You have finished a light dinner and you are all lounging around the living room, chatting and enjoying a nice drink. Somebody says, "Man, what an awesome day it is. Friday. Look at the sunset." Everybody turns to look at the sunset. Everybody turns to look at each other. Everybody gets up and goes to the back door. Everybody goes out on the deck. Everybody brings their drink. The grass in the back yard smells freshly cut. The setting sun casts an amazing orange glow on the wall. The wooden deck is warm underfoot. It's a big, square deck. On one side there is a deck table. In the middle is an umbrella, and around the table are a number of chairs. On the other side of the deck there is a hot tub. It is set into the deck, in the corner farthest from the house. A long one edge of the hot tub runs a hedge. Somebody has lifted the hot tub cover and folded it so it rests against the hedge. Along the far edge of the hot tub there is a railing. Running along the remaining two edges are a pair of steps that lead up to the edge of the hot tub. Everybody wanders over to the table. Everybody seems to have a towel over their shoulder, which they take off and put on the back of the chair behind which they stand and in front of which, on the table, they have set their drinks. The group of friends remove their overclothes, underneath which everybody is wearing a bathing suit. People wander into the hot tub. While the sun sets, the group of friends relaxes, enjoying their drinks and chatting as the waters of the hot tub ease the stress of the week away. The sun continues to set as the water flows out from the jets. It is now quite dark. The sun has set. The group of friends have been alternating between chatting in the hot tub and sitting around the table playing silly games. But no more, for it is now time for The Movie. Just off the back of the deck there is a wooden post. At the top of this post there's a shelf, upon which somebody has placed a projector. Midway up the post there's another shelf where a DVD player and amplifier can be found. You turn to look at the wall of the house. There's something about this wall which is not normal. Across a large part of the wall, somebody has hung a large neutral white piece of canvas. The kind of canvas your office might hang in your cubicle farm with an optimistic message like, "IS IT GOOD FOR THE COMPANY?" The large piece of canvas seems to be almost twice as wide as it is tall. Somewhere between one and a half to twice as wide. Some of your friends are staying in the hot tub while others have lined up their chairs to face the wall. Some people have a chair upon which to rest their feet as well. Everybody seems to have a drink at hand. Upon the wall, to a trumpet fanfare, the Twentieth Century Fox logo appears...

Cowboy J gits crackin'

2006-02-27T21:57:00.000-05:00

From the something-something department: Back to the old job today.


AZROLB: Hunh?

OTH: That's right, I was back at the ol' monkey farm today.  Yessir, AZROLB, the old digs fer sure.

AZROLB: What 'n' carnation 're you doin' thar?

Well, it's like this. I done got this new job, see, an' I kinda had tuh, y'know, leave the ol' monkey farm tuh git workin' at'n new 'un. So I says teh muh bawss-man, "Hey naw, y'all, I gots me sem new office digs, y'know?" An' he says,


BAWSS-MAN: Well, damn, y'all!  W'ain't expictin' thet!

OTH: Well, I dun tol' ya deh truth.  Tew weeks fem nah I be gawna ain't be here no mo', ya hear?

BAWSS-MAN: Well shee-it.  How we s'pos ta git some new varmint teh do yer jawb now's yer done up gawn 'n' quit awn us, m'kay?

OTH: I say, look heer, bawss-man.  I gots ta be lookin' out fer nummer wun here, y'see?  I done hayts teh put y'all in a fix, m'kay, but theht's the way the hawss trips over d'armadiller.

BAWSS-MAN: Y'mean lahk the cookie crummles?

OTH: Naw yer singin' titha tune!

BAWSS-MAN: Now look heah, y'hear?  We done gawna be up them thar crik wizzout 'm paddle, m'kay?  W'ain't got n'un t'spare fer teh take awn teh shovelin' yer pile uh meadow muffins once'n yer dun split'n outta heah!  Ye gawts ta be helpin' us out some, jessa li'l bit heah, now, y'heah?

Well, I done reckon I gotta take pity on 'em, y'see. Now I don't cotton tuh playin' two fiddles at the fair if'n yeh know what I mean. Tryin' tuh sing two tunes at'n t'same time ain't never done a cowboy right, y'see? Y'cain't be out wrasslin' them dawgies same time'z yer balin' t'hay, if'n gits mah drift. But lookin' on t'other side'r them thar fence, I done spent a big ol' time 'n' effert inteh runnin' t'ol' grin'stone, an' a true cowboy dun never turns's back on a broth'rin' need. So's teh cut a short story fer it gets reel bad, m'kay, I done 'greed tuh give 'm couple'a days've lendin' a han' down'tuh farm tuh straighten' out teh hay in muh pasture 'fore I up 'n take off. Right. So what I'm saying here is I talked to muh new bawss 'n' tol' him 'bout the predicament my ol' buddies was in 'n' we agreed I could spen' a few days teh git things straight. Y'see, I was kind've a one-man show over there, t'ain't nobody else at t'farm doin' the same thing I'm doin', so I gotta lotta stuff up 'n' my head. So I 'greed tuh spen' some time 'n' terms 'a settin' up fer bringin' in a new cowboy teh rassle things up 's far's handlin' muh ol' turf. I done given' 'em fer 'couple'uh days this week'n'teh nex', too. Meantime I'm settin' up tuh learnin' the ropes over't teh new digs if'n yeh know whut I mean, m'kay? So don't nobody ever say thet Cowboy J don't step right up to the plate and give'r hundred'n'ten p'cint, now, y'heah!

One week later...

2006-02-21T21:40:00.000-05:00

From the clean-your-clock department: When we last heard from our tepid hero he was whining about a sucky weekend. Meh. Shit happens. But now, the moment you've all been waiting for! La piece de resistance! El postado muy grande! The story... ... of what I had for lunch!

FLASH BACK TO YESTERDAY EVENING.  OUR TEPID HERO, SITTING ON HIS COUCH, LOOKS
AT HIS WATCH AND NOTICES THAT ONE OF THE TWO PLACES WHERE THE BAND JOINS THE
WATCH IS QUITE LOOSE.  HE REACHES FOR THE TOOLKIT AND MUCKS AROUND DOING
NOTHING PRODUCTIVE BEFORE FINALLY NOTICING THAT A PIN IS ACTUALLY BENT.
                                                                                                                                                     
TH: This job will require...
                                                                                                                                                     
ALL: An *horologist*!
                                                                                                                                                     
MAD GLUE-SNIFFING SCIENTIST: An horolographer is *sniff* somebody who draws
pictures of watches, while an horoloogey is what happens when you *sniff*
sneeze while checking the ti --
                                                                                                                                                     
MGSS GETS CLUBBED ON THE HEAD WITH A RUBBER CHICKEN BY A WOUND-UP YOUNG, FEMALE
HOROLOGIST WEARING A THIN-BANDED TWO-PIECE NUMBER WITH SWISS MOVEMENT AND 21
JEWELS AS THE SCENE FADES TO BLACK.

So today at lunch I set out to find somebody who would repair my ailing timepiece. I first went to People's Jewellers at Merivale Mall because that's the closest jeweller I know. I showed them my thing and explained about my bent pin. They directed me to a part of town that could help me with my problem. So I ended up going to this place called Bijoutique (I think?) in the mall at the corner of Meadowlands and Merivale. This is a mom-and-pop-shop -- a plus in my books. The guy's English is not great -- clearly not his first language -- but his horologer's skills are top-notch. Granted, replacing a bent pin is not a task that taxes the skills of any student of the horological professions, but this guy has been working in watch repair for well over two decades. He apprenticed in Europe, worked for Rolex and has certificates of achievement from Rado. A far cry indeed from your average chain-store jeweller who learns on the job / teaches themself by playing with old/dead watches (not that there's anything wrong with that... just making a comparison here). Anyways, so how did buddy from Bijoutique do? Not only did he replace the pin, he also properly tightened up the connection on both sides of the band. My watch is now in proppa shape. ... on the way back to work I stopped in and grabbed some Quizno's. Which is interesting, come to think about it, because when I get home today there are Quizno's coupons in my ~~junk-mail deposit area~~mailbox. And now for something completely different! La piece de resistance! The penultimate paragraph! The world's worst wordsmith's witty writings, wryly written wherever we want! The story... ... of the new gadgets!

MAD GLUE-SNIFFING SCIENTIST: A whorologist is somebody who can *sniff* repair 
your bent pin, you know, *sniff* wind up your mechanism, nudge nudge wink wink 
know what I --
                                                                                                                                                     
ALL: We did that bit already!  This is the gadget story!

MR. T: Enough of this jibba jabba.  I pity da foo' who don't know what the 
story is!

EVERYBODY PULLS A VIAL OF GLUE FROM THEIR POCKETS AND SIMULTANEOUSLY SNIFFS.
MR. T SPILLS AND ACCIDENTALLY GLUES ALL HIS GOLD TOGETHER.

So, on the list of newly acquired gadgets:

2002 Toyota Corolla CE (stands for Cheap Edition)
Aftermarket tachometer for said Corolla
OBD-II ←→ serial interface
Roomba, the robotic floor vacuum
The long-awaited Alphagrip

I also picked up a pile of DVDs recently. Among them are such beauties as: Magnum PI, Airwolf, A-Team, Night Court, and one few movies. Oh, and while I'm on the "making lists" run, here's another random list. The list of major projects this summer:

Rebuild the deck at the cottage
Build a carport for the side of my house
Replace the carpet in the basement (and maybe on the upstairs, too, if the wood underneath is ugly)
Rebuild my lawn
Stain/treat my back deck
Install more insulation in my attic
Maybe building a new shed
Pick up some of those nice adirondack chairs which are so comfy to relax in on a summer evening with a tall glass filled with ice cubes between which some lemonade sits, barely frozen, waiting to get drunk (yeah, OK, not a major project but what the hey)

Ooh, and another list. The list of stuff to write about in the next blog:

The dream of the hot tub
The end of the old job and the start of a new one

This episode of bloggage was brought to you by our good friends at *sniff* LePage.

Still alive

2006-02-14T08:39:00.000-05:00

From the AZROLB-is-mad department: Holy cow. It's been a dog's age since I wrote here last. Seriously. My neighbours have dogs, and in between the last post and this one the dogs have gone from running around and playing in the snow to sitting in lawn chairs, smoking stogies and drinking Labatt Blue. You'll also note that immediately after this post is another new post, GhettoMixer v1. I wrote that awhile ago but only posted it this morning. When I wrote it I thought it was crap, so instead of posting I saved it to fix up later. I read it this morning and thought that it was still crap, but posted it anyways 'cause I just realized everything here is total crap that nobody reads and blah blah blah so why not? I think I just offended AZROLB, but, like a tree in a forest.... Anyways, so what's new? Just about everything. Seriously. New car, new job, new toys. But you don't want to hear about that stuff. You came here to read about what a crappy weekend I had. It started on Friday. WHAT?! Fridays are supposed to ROCK! And normally they do. Normally Friday is the best day of the week for me. Normally Friday is the day I crank the stereo up to eleven on the drive home and scare other drivers with my horrible singing. But this Friday sucked. At work I spent most of my day working on some database stuff for a client and I didn't get where I wanted it to go. It wasn't a total waste of time, I did learn a couple of things and moved forward a bit with my task, but nowhere near the success I was aiming for. In my job, if I spend most of my day on one single thing, a number of other things pile up behind. So I was really hoping for a good return on my time, and I didn't get it. Instead of driving straight home I sort of skipped my exit on the Queensway and drove around the city to unwind a bit. That always helps. But the weekend still mostly sucked, partly because of Friday, and partly because of new stuff. For example, my car is making a noise that I don't like. My *new* car (well, new to me). Nothing gets you pissed off quite so much as laying down over ten grand on a car and having it start to make noises right after you get it. Anyways, more about new job, new car, new toys, sucky weekend in the next post. It's 09h00 and I gots ta get workin'.

GhettoMixer v1

2006-02-14T08:29:00.000-05:00

From the electronics department: If you haven't read Office Love, then you don't know that once upon a time I had an office and now I'm in a cubicle pit. Let me tell you a little bit about my job. I do technical support, which means I talk on the phone a lot. If you've ever spent any time talking on a regular handset while trying to use a computer, you know it sucks (if this is you, listen (read?) closely: there's a better way. Stop punishing yourself). Marketroids and executives will use speakerphone for this because they don't mind offending people by putting them on speakerphone, where all those other noises (like typing on a keyboard and scrolling the mouse) are just as annoying to the listener as the talker is. They also have offices, so there's no yahoos around them also talking on the phone or yelling at each other to mess things up. I have a phone headset instead. Handsfree operation yet not annoying like speakerphone. It's a one-earpad (left ear) headset with a boom mic sticking out. It plugs into a little base unit that has volume control and mute buttons and stuff. These things are great for offices or even quiet cubicles. However, I work in the cubicle pit. I'm surrounded by sales guys who talk on the phone all day. If that isn't enough, they're walking back and forth behind and around me, having conversations off to the side, and all the other guys who have offices are yelling across at each other because they can't be bothered to get up and walk over to actually see each other. In this sort of environment, the single-earpad headset is no good. One ear is completely un-blocked, and the small earpad on the left ear don't do much, either. So, when the Powers That Be threw me in the pit, I had to come up with a solution. For awhile, I brought in my good music headphones. These are the sort of headphones that actually sit right over your ear and surround it, blocking external noise. I would wear these overtop of my single-earpad headset. I adjusted the balance on my MP3 player to 10%-Left to offset the imbalance from the earpad. This worked, but it was uncomfortable for any length of time. A better solution was required. Meet the Ghetto Mixer, v1. GhettoMixer is designed to mix stereo music from a source like an MP3 player or a radio, plus telephone audio, into one headset. I ordered some parts from Digikey, and ordered a computer headset from TigerDirect. The computer headset has big ear-covering external-noise-blocking pads, and a boom mic. Then I got out the soldering iron and built that thing you see above. GhettoMixer v1 works great for me. Much better than I expected, really (I expected total failure plus sparks and fire). Now I can talk on the phone, listen to music, and drown out all external noises. GhettoMixer v1 is not ideal, though. The audio from the telephone is only in one ear, not both. I can't enclose it in a metal box because some grounds are not shared. There's also a "bug" where when you take the phone off-hook to begin a call, the MP3 audio in the left ear dims. I think this is a feature, though, since you'd want the music to be softer so you can hear the telephone better. Anyways, I've got plans to make GhettoMixer v2. This version will have full isolation and op-amps with volume controls to tweak everything proppa. Telephone audio will be in both ears while still maintaining the stereoness of the MP3 stereo signal.

Weekend Update

2006-01-29T19:42:00.000-05:00

From the wazzap department: Kids. Kids? Kids! Hanging out with friends, playing with kids and buying a car. That pretty much sums up most of my weekend. Let's talk car for a bit. Ever since my ol' Saturn went in for $1500 of work, shortly after passing 200k late last year, I've been thinking about getting another car. The secret is to get the next car *just before* the old one starts to really cost money in maintenance. Also the dropping fuel efficiency is a sign that now is the time. When I was making noises about this over the Christmas holiday, my initial car on the "seriously considering" list was a VW Jetta TDI. I happen to really like diesel. They're more efficient, they pollute less, and it's a better kind of pollution (more heavy particles that end up on the street than in the air). So last week I started in on some research. I checked out the numbers on a number of cars. It came down to the Honda Civic, Toyota Corolla, my friend's Saturn and the VW Jetta. The Jetta has the best efficiency by far (it does better in the city than other cars do on the highway) but it seems they can't be counted on for great reliability -- and they're expensive. The Corolla, Civic and Saturn are all in roughly the same class for fuel economy, although the Civic and Corolla are ahead for reliability. The Corolla seems to have a bit more power than the Civic. At this point it was down to these three cars and only test driving and prices would determine the right car for me. Jump forward to mid-week. Wednesday Middle of the week. Ho hum. But after work, I went to Tony Graham's dealership at Hunt Club and Merivale to check out a Toyota Corolla. Decent drive. Scared the salesperson. Afterwards, went over to friend M's place to test drive the Saturn they're thinking of selling. Also a decent drive. ABS sounds like two rocks rattling in an empty soup can, but apparently all GM ABSs sound like that and it's not a bad sign of impending failure. Thursday Friday's coming soon. Anticipating anticipation. Went to Orleans Mitsubishi to test drive a Honda Civic. Also a decent drive. Less power than the other two, and most of it is in the higher revs (probably has more power than the Saturn, but you don't notice it until you're in the upper end of the power curve). Each car has its own "feel" in terms of clutch tension and clutch points, and shifter tension and stuff, but nothing particularly good or bad either way. All cars seem comparable steering-wise, responding well and translating the road "feel" to my driving hands. BTW what is it with manual transmission vehicles not having tachometers? After trying the Civic I went right back to the Toyota dealership to try the Corolla again, a) because the Civic experience was fresh in my mind, and b) because I never really got to do my suspension test^[1] (salesperson was uncomfortable so didn't push it). The Corolla definitely has more power, and this time I was able to do the test, which passed. After finishing up at Tony Graham's, I went to friends B and T's place to hang out and party. Hung out with some good peoples I don't normally hang with, so that was fun. Chats, played games, etc. Good times. In the meantime thoughts of cars are stewing in the back of my mind. Friday It has come down to the Corolla and the Saturn. Both are pretty good deals. The Saturn has 143k usage, so will not last as long, but the price reflects this. The Corolla has 52k, is well-known for its reliability, has a little more power, but is more expensive. Sent some email and made some phone calls with my sales rep. to discuss particulars. Went to friend M's place after work to hang out and spend lots of time playing with their kids. I am slowly discovering that I can make up silly kid stories and generally have enough imagination to make playtime fun, at least with these kids. Thoughts of cars stew in the back of my head. Saturday Decision is made. It was a tough call, but in the end I want something that will last and be relatively trouble-free for a long time. A lot of it comes down to gut feeling, and the Corolla "feels" right. Went to dealership in the morning to finalize the deal and sign some papers. Left with loaner car -- Toyota Echo -- 'cause the dealer will (pay an audiocentric company to) swap the stereo from my Saturn to the Corolla. In the afternoon, went over to P and M's place to help M take their kids to Cosmic Adventures. This place is crazy. Imagine a McDonald's playplace, but quadruple the wow factor and explode the size seven times over. This is the sort of place where they make you take your shoes off and you have to keep your receipt so that they know you're leaving with the right number of kids. The sort of place that, if they opened it at night for adults only and served alcohol, would be dangerously fun for grownups. Afterwards, went back to P & M's for dinner, play with the kids a bit more and then watch some hockey after the kids go to bed. Friend S called up while we were watching the game so we convinced him to come and hang out, too. Haven't seen S in ages so there was chats and lots of good times. Sunday Spent the morning relaxing (doing laundry, etc.). In the afternoon went to P & M's place to help friend P run some errands involving heavy lifting. Stuck around to play more with kids. Went for dinner at the Lone Star with P and M and their kids, meeting up with T and D and their kid. Kids all around, good food, good chats, good times. Spent some time in the evening writing a blog entry. I've discovered that I don't like the lender car, Toyota Echo, at all. It sits high up off the ground. I prefer to be lower where I can feel the ride. I'm more in tune with the car's speed and handling. It's also an automatic, and I cannot feel the engine through the pedals and the shifter the way I can with a standard. This makes it harder to detect the breakpoint between static and kinetic friction in acceleration and, to some extent, in braking. The instrument panel is in the middle of the dashboard, which is just odd. The Echo failed my suspension test miserably. I would not want to be involved in any sort of sudden manoeuvering at high speeds in this car. The non-winter tires, the poor feeling of control that comes from the automatic and the high ride make controlling this car in poor winter conditions less than ideal. In my Saturn, I can feel the road through the pedals and the shifter and the wheel and my seat. I can feel when the brakes lock, I can feel when the wheels are spinning, I can feel the wind pushing my car on the highway. I am in tune. With the Echo, it's like I'm trying to unlock a door with mittens on. Still doable, but less intuitive. Still I was able to control the car through a couple of slippery situations. I suspect that, as with any car, you get used to it, just like you get used to unlocking your door with mittens on. Still, I'm glad my Saturn and my Corolla give me the kind of feeling and control I want to have in a car. One thing the Echo does have for it is a cool blue LED that tells you the engine is cold. Anyways, here is a crappy un-white-balanced picture of my new car: I will be taking some better pictures of the car alone and side-by-side with my Saturn, which I'm keeping. Keeping? Keeping. Why? Well, both Tony Graham and the Orleans Mitsubishi dealers offered me $500 for the trade-in. My initial thought was that at this price, it would be more valuable to me as a car that will (hopefully) last two winters. I did a bunch of car math which you can find here, but my generic number is that a car should cost around $1k/yr. By inverse the Saturn should be worth just over $1k to me if it lasts two winters (winters are harder on cars than summer, so lasting a winter means more value). During the week, I have started to notice a new noise in my Saturn. It started as a noise that I noticed when turning right -- kind of a high-pitched wub-wub-wub noise -- which now seems to be detectable even when turning left and basically any time any pressure is being applied to the steering wheel. So I called the dealer back to take them up on the $500 trade-in, but apparently I've gotten enough of a deal^[2] from them already that they don't even want to take the trade anymore. So I'm back to my original plan of keeping the Saturn and using it for winter driving until *just before* it is totally dead, at which point I'll either see what kind of money I can get for it or call a service which tows it away for donation to charity. The tow is free and you get a $50 tax receipt, which is a great way to get rid of a car.

^[1] The suspension test: Find yourself some dry road conditions and a warmed up, ready to go car. Get going on a high-speed highway like the Queensway here in Ottawa. Once you're cruising comfortably, wiggle your steering back and forth just a little. See how your suspension reacts. Does your car respond to your every move? Does it feel tight or does it feel like your car is a compass needle pivoting back and forth at its center? Does it feel like, if you had to make a sudden left-right dodge to avoid something, it would perform well or does it feel like it would rock dangerously and maybe even roll? ^[2] The deal: $220 off the list price, plus they're paying to have my Saturn's stereo swapped to the Corolla, plus a free set of normal tires (it has winter ones on it now).

The content has changed

2006-01-24T20:07:00.000-05:00

From the you-guessed-it-long-time-no-updatum department:

THE LIGHTS OPEN ONTO A QUIET TABLE WHERE TWO NORMMONKEYS SIT, 
DISCUSSING THE INS AND OUTS OF LIFE

NM: "Holy cow, NormMonkey, it's been a ..."

NM: "Shut UP!  I *know* it's been a long time since I
     updated my blog!  For the sake of little green apples in
     a rotted bag in the dumpster behind the grocer's fetid
     compost heap!  Just L E A V E   M E   A L O N E!

NM: "Hey, how did you manage to speak all those spaces?"

NM: "Shut up!"

NM: "And you forgot your closing quote, too..."

A DARK, BARELY DISCERNABLE FIGURE UTTERS INAUDIBLE WORDS FROM 
WHAT SEEMS TO BE A NETHER REGION UNDER THE TABLE

AZROLB: "Hey, what about me?"

BOTH NMs: "Shut up!" 

NM: "Hey, did you hear something just now?"

NM: "Zero."

NM: "Then what did you just yell 'shut up' for?"

NM: "What did *you* just yell for?"

NM: "How did you manage to speak those asterisks?"

ABRUPT SCENE CHANGE: NM, WEARING A DARK SUIT, SITS BEHIND
A LARGE BUT PLAIN DESK.  ON THE CENTER OF THE DESK SITS A 
OLD-TIMEY MICROPHONE.  IN THE BACKGROUND, A NAKED NM PLAYS
AN ORGAN (no, no, you sick minded monkey, like, an organ 
with a manual keyboard... you know, music?)

NM: "And now for something completely different."

So, when I got home from work yesterday, I rounded up the recycling, put out the trash, and went to school. In gym, I talked to a cute girl for couple of minutes, but she was eating so I left her alone to go stand in a line. Waitaminit. Has my life just been crossed with a young teenager's? Oh, no, wait. I got it. It was election day! So, after I cast my vote I went home to gather food and tune in the hockey game. Flipped between the game and the funnay over on CBC -- you know, Air Farce, Mercer Report, 22 Minutes (sorta funny...semi-demi-hemi-funny). The game was great! Unlike Saturday's 7-0 win, this game had loads of action and excitement, with Toronto being denied a comeback by the horn in the final period. I like it when TO pulls the goalie to try and get the tie point in the last minute... and fails d:) Other interesting stuff: * Coliacovo (sp?) tried to check Varada into the boards but missed and severely injured himself, receiving about 10 minutes of on-ice attention before being taken off on a stretcher (concussion); * Hasek's totally amazing kick-ass triple-save. Blocked a shot, then flails across the ice to block the rebound, and finally uses his magic sixth puck-radar sense to glovesnag a final rebound right outta the air; * Spezza (I think it was Spezza, not sure) got a delay-of-game penalty for flipping the puck over the glass, but then Murray successfully argued the ref out of it (!!) and Spezza was pulled out of the box and back on the ice (Murray was right, but I've never seen a ref. get argued out of a decision). I'd say Quinn was not a happy camper but that's nothing new; * Chris Neil put 'em up against Tai Domi and had him on the ground before the refs broke it up. Our bruiser beats their bruiser *grin* ... and then after the game I spent a couple of hours watching our country elect its next government. Now it's Tuesday and the country's gone Conservative. I was talking to my sister who wasn't too keen on the Tories -- she says it's a little too much like Bush. I guess I can't blame her, living down there in Merka, but I think that even if it's a Conservative government, we're still Canadian. I think (I hope!!!) we're still a fair cry away from *that* (shudder). At least it's a minority government. I suspect that this maybe even gives the Tories a chance to stay in power for awhile. Had it been a majority they certainly woulda done something stupid sooner or later and gotten booted for it. Not that this isn't a big possibility... Anyways, no more politics spouting from me. I came up with an idea for a diet. This is totally new, nobody's ever heard of it before. It works for everybody. You can eat as much as you want. You can be lazy if you want. The idea is, you can eat all you want, as long as you exercise proportionally. So, if you're going to spend the day reading or watching TV, then that's fine, but you gotta eat carrot sticks and drink tea. What if you're hungry? Well, you can have your normal-sized meal, but you gotta work for it. Shovel the driveway. Go for a bike ride. Take a walk in the rain or the snow. You looking forward to a really nice meal that the company's gonna pay for? No problem. Just pay for it with lots of exercise before and after. The only rule is you have to pay for your food in exercise, and you can't run up a tab. You can pay after the meal, or before the meal. You can't pay more than one meal in advance; it doesn't count. By the same token, you can't lag behind payment by more than a meal. If you do, you just fell off the bandwagon. Don't fall off the bandwagon. That's where all diets end. It's the Broken Window theory. Anyways, that's enough outta me for now. I know it was a long time since I last came and spewed thoughts atcha, but STAY TUNED!!! In tomorrow's edition, we'll discuss the Ghetto Mixer. Also, coming soon, some sort of short story, like my weird-ass coffee story from long ago or the more recent Fun in the Rain story. Did I tell ya I wrote a ...er, uh, more different (nudge-nudge-wink-wink-know-what-I-mean) version of this story? There's no way it's going up here -- we try and keep things clean for the chillun heah -- but if you ask nicely, and you're horny, you can read it. Anyways, if I don't write for awhile, this creativity starts to build up inside me. Creativity is very nebulous. We can create instantiations from it in an infinite number of ways. I guess it's like a fire. A kind of big donut-shaped bonfire where you're inside the donut. I was going somewhere with that, but I totally lost the path.

NM AND AZROB TOGETHER: "No kiddin'!"

FADE TO BLACK

Coffee, tea and me

2006-01-09T17:59:00.000-05:00

From the hows-your-heartrate-today department: I'm pretty sure that that fourth cup of coffee this afternoon was not a good idea. A long time ago I used to drink coffee at work. I discovered two things: one, that the effects of caffeine on your system become dulled as your body gets used to you drinking coffee every morning; two, that coffee comes with other things than the pure caffeine effect, such as a mildly irritated tummy and sometimes headaches. So, I made the switch to tea. Tea doesn't have the same boost-kick jitteriness effect that coffee does, but it has enough caffeine to wake me up and keep me going. Besides, it comes without the headaches and stuff I could really do without. I can make, and drink, a full coffee-press-thingy (one of the 4-cuppers) full of tea and the only effect it has is a trip to the head. Coffee is something that is in practically infinite supply. Work pays for it and keeps the office stocked with it. Tea, on the other hand, is something I have to keep myself stocked with. Normally I get my tea from The Tea Store. Recently I discovered that a shop online has a better price, so I ordered some from there to try it out. It hasn't shown up as of this morning, so what do I do? I grab some coffee, instead. Now, I was up late last night having fun. I only got about five hours of sleep last night. Therefore, this morning I decided that more than one cup was in order. I get into work fairly early. By lunchtime I've had three cups. As time goes by I start to discover that my fingers are typing things faster than my mind is generating them. Words are appearing on my screen and I don't know where they're coming from, but while my mind is not fast enough to come up with them before my fingers type them out, it is sufficiently fast to read them and note that they are the words I would've wanted (this is the sort of thing that only makes sense after numerous cups of coffee). The last time I felt this way was years ago, when, working at my first real job, I drank a Jolt Cola. And ate a Kit Kat bar (the full-size one with four Kit-Kat units inside). And then ate a bag of chocolate-covered coffee beans (this last move was probably the most unwise one). All within half an hour (hrm, OK maybe *that* part was the dumbest). So, in retrospect, let's just say that that fourth cup this afternoon was not the smartest thing I've done in awhile. Now I'm going to go drink lots and lots of water and really, really hope that this wears off before I (try and) go to bed tonight. That is all.

Girls, dating, shyness, charm

2006-01-09T08:00:00.000-05:00

From the dating department: I'm a guy, and as such it is written into the fundamental rules of the universe that I will never truly understand girls. I believe there's even a clause in there that ensures the rules I think I do understand will be almost immediately changed thereafter. However, with all rules there are exceptions. In this case, there is a fundamental rule of girls that is pretty much constant, and this is that they make up their minds pretty quick about whether you're boyfriend material or just a regular friend type friend. This is the way girls are, in the same way that people have hands at the end of their arms. It just is. So it naturally follows that a guy who finds a girl to be potential girlfriend material should immediately make this clear vis a vis allowing his charm and flirtatiousness to shine through. By contrast, what he should not do under any circumstances is allow his natural instinct to be polite, courteous and shyly standoffish to new people to in any way show its face, because that is a path to lets-just-be-friends land which could not be more clear if it were perfectly straight, flat, well-paved, and marked with fluorescent signs as such. Therefore, inasmuch as this blog is my diary, a place to put my thoughts that I might come back and read them in the future, let me just say this: WHEN you meet a girl, a girl whose mind makes your own shift into mental gears you didn't know you had, a girl who is both cute and hot and sweet in a combination that you find irresistably attractive for some reason, and you are arranging to go on a date with her, AND you know that because you haven't had any human contact since you visited your friends last night, and you're experiencing that odd sadness/emptiness that comes with finishing a book you really like, plus you just watched episodes of M*A*S*H sad enough to actually jerk a tear from your eye, BECAUSE of these things you are not your usual upbeat and charming self, you SHOULD NOT, ever, under any circumstances, arrange to go on a date with her that very evening, especially if she offers you an out on a silver platter such as "We can do it tomorrow if that is easier." And while you're at it, you should learn not to write horrific run-on sentences.

Fun in the rain

2006-01-06T21:18:00.000-05:00

From the memories department: Here's a little snippet dredged out of my memory, inspired by a message from somebody who expressed their enjoyment of being outdoors in all weather, day or night, rain or shine.

When was the last time you had fun in the rain? I think back to a couple of summers ago. I'd biked over to a friend's house for dinner, which turned into drinks, hanging out, etc. and ended up being a fun but late night. But it was also a warm night, and a beautiful night with drizzly weather, so I decided to bike back home despite an offer of a ride back. I got about two or three blocks out and then the drizzle turned into big, fat, sloppy raindrops. The kind of living rain that almost looks like sheets waving in the streetlamps. But at this point, I'm already into my journey. Bike rides are like that for me. Once I start, I don't want to stop 'til I'm done. Gotta keep on keepin' on. Along the way I decide my shirt is not doing me any good at all. It's not keeping me dry, it's not keeping me warm, so I take it off -- at this point, biking around in a downpour, I'm already the weirdest person out there, so I have no dignity to lose. It feels good, a little like taking a shower in an infinitely huge (and oddly-decorated) shower stall. At some point a guy and a couple of girls walking on the sidewalk -- obviously drunk -- make catcalls and yell "woo!" and "hey baby!" at me. I laugh and wave, and keep on truckin'. That felt good, too. Eventually I turn onto the last street, the final stretch for home. I feel a strange sense of relief, contentment and disappointment all rolled up in one. Normally on this stretch I would speed up on the downhill part so that I'd have some momentum to slowly shed on the final uphill part, but this time I slow down instead of speeding up. I don't want this to end so soon. I look around at the rain moving through the light of streetlamps. I watch little streamlets of water being thrown off of windshields by wiper blades. This is a different world, and I feel sort of awed and privileged to have been in it.

The only other time I can think of where I really enjoyed the rain was years ago when my girlfriend at the time managed to convince me to go for a walk with her in the rain. I thought she was mad (well, OK I knew she must've been somewhat crazy, she's going out with me, after all, right?) but thought it might be fun, or at least shared misery, so I went along. It really was loads of fun. There's nothing quite like the carefreeness of being out in the rain. All pretenses of being a dignified human adult are dropped. Your clothes are soaked, your hair is sticking to your head and you resemble a forlorn wet dog. You have nothing to lose. You jump in puddles like a five year old. Why not, right? You worried about getting wet? *grin* You know your clothes are going in the laundry machine just as soon as you get home. Come to think of it, there was one other time, when a bunch of us were at the cottage and it was raining out and we spontaneously decided that it would be fun to go and dance in the rain out on the deck. But that's another story for another time.

Happy New Year 2006

2006-01-04T11:44:00.000-05:00

From the family-rules department: I spent the last week or so hosting family and friends (everybody who stayed was family, but they are all friends, too, because that's the kind of people my family are) at my house for the holidays. This was absolutely teh RoxX0rz. I think "It's not what you do, it's who you do it with" is one way to describe what made this holiday special. What did we do? We sat around, chatting and drinking. We decorated a tree. We cooked lots of food. We visited with friends. We went out shopping and out to dinner and out to a movie. Ho hum, right? Wrong. It's not what you do, it's who you do it with, that makes things special. For example, whenever I get together with my mom and my sister, something always happens that makes us crack up and become giggling fools for awhile. Silly things that have no meaning in other circumstances, but with the three of us cause spontaneous snickering that crescendo in a positive feedback loop. This does not happen with anybody else. It's a magic thing that only happens with us. It happened more times than I can count this past couple of weeks. Mom, Sis: thank you. I feel honoured that everybody came to stay at my house and hang out with me for the holidays. Playing host is a privilege, a responsibility and a pleasure all wrapped up in one. I hope everybody enjoyed it as much as I did.

Merry Christmas!!!

2005-12-25T21:58:00.000-05:00

From the holiday-festivities department: Well, it is truly Christmas at The Gnurple Residence. I just happened to be wandering around the airport on Friday evening, and who should show up but my mom! Well, imagine my surprise and delight! So we headed back home. When we get there, who do we find waiting in my house but my sister and bro-in-law! Let the Christmas festivities begin! We had a drink and chatted for awhile but as it was after midnight and everybody'd been traveling all day, plus we knew that we'd be busy running around the next day shopping and such, so we went all to bed. Saturday comes and we start the day with muchas shopping for food and tree and such. Then back home where we put up the tree and prepared for the arrival of John's parents, who showed up mid-afternoon. That's when things really got going. We cooked up some salmon fillets for dinner. My sister won the Dec24 Official Marketing Award of the Day for her description of salmon patties -- "You know how they make particle board? They're like that!" We started ~~flinging shiny tree fleas at~~ carefully placing festive decorations on the tree. This was especially entertaining because the strings of light (which were leftover from my sister's wedding, for those playing along at home) were only half-working. As in, each string only had half its bulbs on. And of course my sister discovered this *after* she'd finished putting the lights on -- naturally you start at the top and run the lights 'round the tree, plugging them in at the bottom last, right? So after unwrapping all the lights, I put on my techie hat (and my fake ~~Italian~~ Spanish (?) accent) and solved all the light issues. Oh, and I zapped myself, too d:) One of the bulbs was physically broken and as I was wrangling the string my wrist happened upon the exposed leads of the broken bulb. Zowch. I think it was at this point that we broke out the eggnog. And then my sister got to string the lights for a third time. And there was much silliness to be had, and at some point we went to bed. I think it was around midnight, maybe. AND THEN IT WAS CHRISTMAS DAY, AND THERE WAS REJOICING ACROSS THE LAND (or at least the living room, and maybe more like "blinking and eye rubbing" than "rejoicing") AND THE PEOPLE WERE HAPPY FOR EVER AFTER (or at least we all had breakfast and then sat down to open presents). Then Team Turkey got to work on the Traditional Christmas Dinner. My sister and I, in an impressive display of lack of bickering and good teamwork, took care of triptophanic avian preparations, with help from other quarters where appropriate (how do you flip a 15lb. turkey with nothing but a pair of tongs and two potato mashers?). At some point I won the Dec25 Official Marketing Award of the Day for my description of spruce beer -- "You basically take a spruce tree, put it in a blender and add sugar." After that we retired to the living room (except one of us who did a bunch of dishes, and another one of us who packed the fridge Memere style -- see fridge packedness level in photo above). And then I went to write a blog. Merry Christmas everybody!

The Order of the Grinning Monkey

2005-12-23T08:12:00.000-05:00

From the secret-society department: Somebody asked if there were any happy, passionate people left in this civil servant city of ours. This was my response: [BEGIN] Yes, there are happy and passionate people left here. We've all banded together, though, to defend ourselves and fight back against those whose sourpuss attitudes would bring us down. In the streets we wear frowns and dour disguises so nobody can tell who we are. If you're very observant you'll spot our secret signs and handshakes (I can't tell you what they are yet 'cause I don't know where you stand on this important issue). We also have a few telltales that give us away: * We'll put coins in somebody else's parking meter if nobody's looking; * We dance in the streets, but if somebody spots us we pretend as if we'd just tripped and then keep walking; * We sing out loud in our cars (if somebody catches us we hastily pick up a cellphone and pretend as if we're yelling angrily on it). We call ourselves the Order of the Grinning Monkey. Meetings are spontaneous (we get text messages on our phones and if we're near a meeting we'll stop in) and our meeting clubs are cleverly disguised as dull government office buildings, like the passport office and the health card office downtown. If you look closely at the elevator buttons you'll see our stylized secret grinning monkey logo (it's disguised as an 8 but if you rub it the right way, the ears, eyes and huge grin become visible for a second). [END] You too can join the Order of the Grinning Monkey. Our online world is at our Grinning Monkey wiki, www.grinning-monkey.gnurple.net.

Office love

2005-12-22T09:15:00.000-05:00

From the merry-christmas department: I don't know if anybody got a chance to check out my ~~hole in the wall~~ office (and here, for more wordy version). Well, it was the worst office in the place, with no natural light, very cage-like, etc. But that's no longer. We're taking down the walls of my shithole office to make room for more employees. So what do I get? Of course! The worst cubicle in the place. See, when people come into the office from the outside, they enter the kitchen. On the other side of the kitchen is a door that leads to the office. Everybody goes through this door and heads off to wherever their seat is. Well, my new cube is on the wall directly across from this door. So everybody is going in and out of the office behind my back, constantly creeping me out and staring over my shoulder at my computer. It's also the smallest desk size available here, and I've got two crappy, portable (and quite wobbly) cubicle walls haphazardly thrown in place on either side. Of the ten people working here, only three have been here longer than I have. So it's a case of "Thanks for working here for two years, let us show you how much we love you. Merry Christmas." I'm just waiting to see if my boss will actually fling physical shit at me as he walks by, or if it stops here. Oh, and on top of that, I'd just cleaned my office thoroughly two weeks ago. I sure am glad I put all that effort in.

Christmas update #1

2005-12-20T08:05:00.000-05:00

From the its-raining-deer department: CHRISTMAS LIGHTS The Christmas Light Project is 100% completed, deployed and operating. Pictures coming soon. I learned some cool stuff that'll help me build the dimmable version next year. I spent too much money and now own more extension cords than I'll ever need. Seriously. I have enough extension cords that I can fly an electric jet from here to Vancouver and back. I've invested a fair bit of money, probably around $150, on this project (more if you count stuff I bought that I ended up not using). Fortunately, the last time I gave money to charity I gave enough to cover the silly pen-gadget thing I bought awhile ago, plus enough to cover what I ended up not using, plus a little extra^[1]. So I'm a little bit ahead on the gadgets vs. charity game. Which, if you know me and gadgets, you'll know is a good thing. (how's that for a tangent?) Anyways, I figure I've spent too much on this for it to be just a one-time thing. $150 for something I use once for ten days of Christmas and that's it?! So instead I'm considering it an investment. For next year, I'll improve upon the design with dimmability. After that I'll expand a bit more, maybe replace the blue LED strings with tri-colour LED lighting... ten years from now I'll be able to one-up that crazy guy whose house lights up to the music ... you know the one, you saw the email that went 'round teh intarweb. CHRISTMAS IS COMING There's a tree-stand in my freezer, eggnog on my back porch, and a turkey in my living room. Uhh, hey, waitaminit. Anyways, you know what this means. That's right, Christmas time has come once again. A time for being woefully behind on your Christmas shopping! A time for keeping your neighbours awake with Christmas lights! A time for arguing with your family! ... or something. Anyways, there it is, I'll let y'all know how holiday celebrations at Team Norm HQ goes this Christmas... with pictures to follow. Oh, yeah, and here's the stuff on my holiday ToDo list: * Upgrade laptop * Do DARPA photos * Work on RouteStudy * Work on panoramas

^[1] I decided awhile ago that if I buy a gadget and I don't get good use out of it, I have to donate the cost of the gadget to charity.

Christmas lights - 90% ready!

2005-12-13T22:27:00.000-05:00

From the geekatroid department: It works! Finally! Happy happy joy joy! All that time and money and effort I've put into this thing is not for naught! Here's the Christmas light controller I've been working on for about a week. Wassit do? In case you haven't been playing along (naughty!) it turns my Christmas floodlights on and off. No, not just the four dangling from the outlets in the picture. There will be nine: three groups of three, where each group has a red, green and blue floodlight. All pointed at the front of my house -- although if we build a snowman when my family shows up for Christmas, we'll probably reposition one of the sets of three to do funky lighting for the snowman. Howzit work? It's got four relays (two inside each of the grey enclosures in the center) that switch power to each of four outlets. 120VAC comes into the enclosure through the big fat blue cable entering the center-left enclosure, plugged into my outdoor outlet, and leaves through the four switched outlets, two in each of the left and right outlet enclosures. The control signal for the four relays comes from a PC parallel port. The PC is in my basement, and it's connected to the enclosure via a CAT5 cable -- the thin blue cable entering the center-right enclosure. One of the cool things about this is that the CAT5 cable sneaks nicely into an already existing hole in my basement wall (where the phone cable comes in). In the picture, four floodlights of varying colour are plugged into each 120VAC output socket. The green one, second in from the right, is turned on. UPDATES So, earlier today in my "aw, crap, it's not going well" blog, I reported that in step six of my project I learned lesson number two, which was that the parallel port couldn't drive the relays across 20' of CAT5. That was total crap; a misdiagnosis on the part of Team Norm. This morning I spent about an hour soldering the leads from the LEDs and the CAT5 twisted pairs to washers on the relays' input terminals. After I finished, it was just about time for the work day to start, so I did a quick test, hoping that I'd wired everything the right way 'round and that everything would just work. Nope. So I did a quick test, measuring the voltage at the relay (1.15VDC) and then from the parallel port with the wiring disconnected (3.33VDC). This lead me to the conclusion that the 20' of CAT5 was too much for the parallel port to drive the relays across, hence my earlier blog report. It's helpful to note at this point that the code I'd written was only driving one relay, not all four. TROUBLESHOOTING When I got home, I had time to put my troubleshooting hat on (you'd like it, it has the troubleshooter's emblem of a hammer, pickaxe, crowbar and a cup of coffee). * I test the resistance of the CAT5 wires. 1 ohm; pretty small. * I no longer think the CAT5 is the problem. I try using the same signal to drive one of the other relays. Voila! The blue LED lights up nicely! * I rewrite the code to drive all four relays, connect everything up, and note that three of the four LEDs glows. The only one not working is the one I tested with earlier. * I curse Murphy 'til I turned blue in the face. I have to look up some of the more creative Croatian curses (see previous post). * Assuming a faulty wire, I try running the faulty relay using the signal from one of the working ones (jumped with a handy piece of wire). I expect to see the faulty relay's LED light up, but instead I see that both LEDs don't light up. What had happened was the blue LED must've been zorched. I guess when LEDs die of zorching they actually short (which explains why when you have a string of LEDs, such as are found on Christmas decorations nowadays, when an LED dies the others stay on). The short was preventing the relay from operating properly. So I disconnected the LED on that relay, and now they all work. I was hoping to drill little holes in the control box covers to put the blue LEDs through. The idea was that they'd look cool and show the status for each of the outlets. Oh, well. MOVING FORWARD So, what's the final 10 percent? What do I gotta do to get this over and done with so I can get back to shopping like mad for Christmas and cleaning my house for guests and stuff? Step 1 (Step 8?) is to replace the outdoor outlet with a GFCI outlet. I think it's required by code in any event, but in this case its extra important with the possibility of snow getting into the lights and shorting stuff out. Step 2 is to install the floodlights in front of the house, connect up all their extension cords and run 'em back to the outlets at the control enclosure. Step 3: Change the string of blue LEDs, currently drawing power from my front door light, to draw power from the enclosure. I'm not looking forward to changing to the GFCI outlet in the -20°C weather. Also, once that's done and everything's wired up, I want to make sure I run it for the first time for a couple of hours while I'm around so that I can ensure that nothing starts a fire or explodes or electrocutes innocent passersby. Tonight's office-Christmas-party night, so while I might be able to change the outlet late tonight, I won't be able to actually run the lights 'til tomorrow night. Once Christmas is over, I plan to leave this up and running for the winter. I'm going to use one of the outlets to power my car's block heater (turning on at, say, 05h00 to be warmed up in time for me to leave for work, usually 06h50), and maybe another to light up my driveway for when I get home -- I can even make it so that, just before I leave the office, I can connect to my server at home and tell it, "I'm leaving now, turn on the lights in half an hour, in time for my arrival". Once it gets warm out, I'll figure out what to do with this on a more permanent basis. There's a lot of ideas floating around in my head: timed lighting for my backyard deck; low lights for the driveway; etc.

Where's the blogging, round 2!!

2005-12-13T13:51:00.000-05:00

From the no-updates department: Craptastique! Me no bloggum long time! What's up lately? Christmas light project There's an unwritten rule where if you own a house you have to put up Christmas lights. There's an unwritten rider on that rule where if you own a house and you're a geek you have to spend lots of money and time on some really strange lighting project. So this year's plan is to have some Christmas lights controlled by computer. Picture the front of my house (OK, just play along, any house will do). Now imagine there's floodlights on the ground, in front of the house, facing upwards towards the house. There's three floodlights -- one red, one green, one blue -- in each of three groups. Nine floodlights total. Still with me, here? Now, all the red lights -- there's one red light in each of the three groups -- are connected together and plug into one socket. All the green lights are on a separate socket. Same for blue. Still playing along? Good. That's it. Next year, there'll be dimming, too. Or I'll go with something completely different. Stick around for an entire year of crazy, silly blogs and find out. So how's this light thing going? Let's just say it's been a learning experience. I started out on step one by putting together a pair of floodlights and relays, and connected the relays to the computer's parallel port. That worked fine. The computer was able to turn the floodlights on and off. In step two, I was hoping to use the relays to make the lights dim, too, but alas, that's not to be. My relays are zero-cross relays. Learning how my relays work was lesson number one. OK, so with success in the turning-lights-on-and-off department, but failures in the dimming-lights department, I decide to go ahead with just lights on and off for now. Step three was the shopping-for-floodlights step. I walked away from the store with nine floodlights, nine little outdoor floodlight stands, and nine outdoor extension cords of various lengths to connect everything together. Step four was to figure out how to enclose the relays and the wiring for outdoorsness. This involved buying lots of PVC enclosures and a couple of outlets. Step five was to wire the enclosure up. This involved a couple of hours of cutting, stripping, drilling, screwing and glueing everything together. I even managed to stab myself in the hand with a screwdriver. If you sat around stripping and screwing for hours (and I don't mean the fun kind!), you would too. Step six was to wire the parallel port into the enclosure. I did that this morning. Here's where lesson number two comes in. In my test setup, I used a little piece of phone wire to connect the relays to a parallel port. The final version uses about twenty feet of CAT5 cable. It turns out that a twenty foot length of CAT5 cable is not as good at power transmission as a small piece of phone wire is. There's not enough juice in a parallel port to drive the relays at the other end of a 20 foot length of CAT5. I'll have to wait 'til tonight to try other options. Stay tuned.

50th post! W00t!

2005-11-28T21:20:00.000-05:00

From the gadgets-R-us department: Awright! 50^th post!!!1! I've been writing this crap for months now! And to the best of my knowledge, no human reader has keeled over and died, nor experienced their stomach hurling violently, nor had their eyes roll back into their heads nor jump right out of their sockets in a spectocular attempt to avoid my random blabberings. But then again, if they had, they wouldn't be pointing it out to me, would they? At least, not very politely. They're probably plotting my demise via orbiting brain lasers right now. The timing of my 50^th post coincides neatly with the arrival of my latest gadget: . It's a wireless keyboard and mouse! "What's so cool about that?" Well, er, if you're a geek like me, these things are kinda cool. "Dork. Keyboards and mice have been around forever. What's special about these? Are they Bluetooth?" If one more person asks me if they're Bluetooth I'm gonna show them a closeup of my wireless Bluefist! No, they're not Bluetooth. Yes, it'd be cooler if they were, because then a lot of people in the same room could use them, and that would be teh RoxX0r. But on the other hand my craptop doesn't have Bluetooth, so pbbt. What's so special about them? Well, the keyboard is very compact. It fits nicely in my laptop bag, and it fits a lot more nicely in my lap than my monstrous laptop does. Aside from the cool form factor, it's just your average wireless keyboard -- although it does have a special poweroff function so you can shove it in your laptop bag and not worry about a bunch of keypresses draining your battery. The mouse is what's frikkin' cool. It's an optical mouse. "What?! Optical mice have been around forever! You suck, nerd! Stop wasting my time!" That's not all, let me finish. As you can see in the picture, the mouse has a funny form factor. It's not the greatest, most ergonomic mouse when you're working with it on the table. Then again, it wasn't designed for use on a table. "Huhn?! Now you're just talkin' crazy talk." It was designed for use in the air. It's a gyroscopic mouse! In the picture with my hand up there, you can see my thumb over the left mouse button. My index finger controls the trigger, which, when pressed, means my wrist movements control the cursor position. I can use the mouse AND look like a complete dork AT THE SAME TIME! It's pretty cool. There's a bit of a learning curve. It's intuitive enough to be easy, but different enough to be challenging. I'm at about 75% of my normal mousing speed with this thing. I did some gimpwork to come up with that picture you see up there, and finessing the position of the photos took a bit of work. Finesse work is one of the reasons why having the optical mouse part is really handy, although I suspect most normal people who buy this kit use the mouse on the desk most of the time, and only do the gyro thing when sitting on a couch or doing a presentation. What things suck? Well, the keyboard uses AAA, not AA cells. That makes the form factor good, but it means I need to go get some rechargeable AAA batteries, plus a charger that has AAA capabilities. The mouse has a rechargeable battery pack. When it dies, I'll either have to get a new battery pack or see how hard it is to open it up and replace the batteries inside -- I'm 99% convinced they're just AAA NiMH cells wrapped in a plastic cocoon with leads wired into position. What things rule? The mouse appears to last at least 24hr, so I can throw it on the charger overnight and use it all day at work and at home. Like a true geek. I'm not really sure how long the keyboard lasts, but being that I have a few gadgets now that work on AAA batteries, I'm gonna get a bunch of NiMH cells and a charger for 'em. Also, the USB fob is recognized as a standard USB keyboard and mouse, so I can plug into anybody's (modern) computer instead of trying to get used to their weird keyboard layout. It's also a cool way to share a screen, say during an overhead presentation. What situations make this thing really stand out? * Being in the boardroom or sitting on the couch at home working on the projector screen; * Sitting in the car working on the car computer (which I don't have yet, but should have before the year is up, if I'm lucky); * Sitting back in my chair at work -- I hate sitting in the same position, so I change positions a lot. This set up offers more freedom, more choices; Today's blog was written on my laptop computer. Not once -- aside from opening the lid when I got home -- did I touch the laptop. ... and that's enough geeky gadget talk for today. I gotta do some chores and go to bed now. Cheerio!

Weekend update with Kevin Nealon NormMonkey

2005-11-28T08:09:00.000-05:00

From the teh-w33K3nd department: PHOTOGRAPHY STUFF I pretty much blew the whole weekend being obsessed with, and failing to properly finish, a 360° panoramic photo of my living room. *** WARNING WARNING WARNING *** Extreme photo-geekspeak ahead. Don't say I didn't warn you. Control points / stitching / nodal point / tripod / exposure / white balance / focal length / focus lock / blah blah / yada yada / shutter up already! In the beginning, there was nothing. Then I did that panorama of my office, and *THEN* I discovered PTViewer, and *NOW* I'm obsessed with doing panoramas. This weekend, I started by spending a lot of time reading about panorama tutorials and learning cool ways to use PTViewer (the cool Java thing I used in the interactive office, see previous blogpost). After that, I got into, and became frustrated with, trying to find the right software for finding control points. Control points are how you tell your panorama stitching program to connect photo A with its neighbour, photo B. You can choose them yourself, but when you have 18 photos that make up 360° you don't want to spend a lot of time finding 200 control points or you'll get carpal tunnel syndrome or something. You want software to do it for you. After I found some decent software, things still weren't working so I experimented with finding the right way to take the photos. Everybody knows that you want to lock zoom, focus, exposure and whitebalance before you take a set of panoramic photos so that nothing changes between each shot. The part I was working on was how much overlap to take between shots. I took a set of 12 photos (30° between, landscape orientation, just under 50% overlap), a set of 18 (20°), and a set of 36 (10° in portrait orientation). Photo stitching and image manipulation requires lots of memory and disk space and CPU cycles and power, in general. I set some records this weekend. For the first time, I ran an application that used up all my memory (1 GB) and then crashed. I also crashed a program (on the 35th file of 36, BTW, which is frikkin' annoying) by running out of disk space. I maxxed my processor (2.8GHz) at 100% CPU usage for over 20 minutes, causing not only my CPU fan to go max speed and stay there the whole time, but also to get my *power supply's* fan to turn on, which has never happened before. I was all like, "WTF is that noise?" I probably took two years off of my computer's life. Stitching 360° panoramas is like "The Machine" in The Princess Bride for your computer. I'm still goofing around with it. I'm pretty sure there's nothing wrong with the photos themselves, it's the stitching software that's kicking my ass. I've got a few ideas, though. *** END PHOTOGEEKSPEAK *** Enough talk about panoramas and photography. Just let me say that I got so into it that when I went out driving, everywhere I looked I imagined control points. Now I'll put down the camera and tripod and get back to my regular geekiness. OTHER WEEKEND NEWS I had to wake up frikkin' early on Saturday morning to go and get my winter tires. Out in frikkin' Orleans. And my alarm didn't go off (I adjusted it for the right *time* the night before, but forgot to change the "weekdays only" switch). And my gas tank was too low to make it to Orleans. So in the end, I rushed through my wakeup routine, rushed through getting gas, and pulled into the OKTire store one minute after my appointed time. Boy, what a difference with the winter tires compared to my old half-bald set of all-seasons. What with the long drive to work and the incredibly crappy conditions I saw on the Queensway after a recent snowfall, I'm willing to bet that I just spent $360 to save my life. But we'll never know. (and that's the point, isn't it?) On the way back I stopped at Canadian tire to pick up a box of wiper juice and some new wiper blades. I think my car is good to go for the winter now. Yeehaw! I think I'm gonna take a bucket and fill the bottom of it with wiper juice, and leave it in my driveway with a squeegee in it and a lid on it. Winter is the only season where I have to squeegeeclean all my windows *every time* I stop for gas. Oh, and then, on Saturday while I'm geeking out with my photo panorama stuff, one of my clients from work calls me on the weekend for help. Now, technically, I'm *always* on call, and I don't get paid for any of it, but normally hardly anybody ever calls up (this week is special 'cause we just launched the latest version of our product) so it's all good. I just wanna know why they always call at *lunch* on the weekends?! It's like they know exactly when I'll have three different pots and pans cooking on the stove and that's when they call. I went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire on Sunday evening. You don't need me to tell you to go see it. There's a reason Joanne Rowling, who had barely two shillings to scrape together, living on welfare while writing in a cafe, is now the wealthies woman in the U.K. (including the Queen, although nobody can say for sure) and also first person ever to become a USD$ billionaire by writing books. Here's the fun part: after the show, I went to get the ~~free~~ no-extra-cost refill on my drink and popcorn. Then I went out to the parking lot. Covered in ice! Did I slip? Yeah, a few times. Did I look like a fool doing the icy-sidewalk-waddle? You bet. Did I ever fall on my ass? No. Did I spill my drink? No. I make it to my car, and I put my drink and popcorn on the icy roof while I go inside the car to start it and get out the scraper. Does the drink fall? No. After spending 5 minutes joining the ice-scraper's orchestra (like the ice-waddle, a uniquely Canadian experience, I'm sure) in the parking lot, I got in my car, secured the popcorn and drink in the driver's seat, and headed for home. As usual, I tested the road conditions (icy as all hell) in the parking lot by attempting a sudden stop. What happens? a) my new winter tires kick ass, find grip where none is to be found, and b) my drink goes flying forward, my hand arrives on the scene about one quarter of a second too late to stop the plastic lid from coming off in spectacular spring-loaded explosive fashion and dousing my passenger seat with cola. So I drove across the street to the gas station, tossed the drink, got a big sheet of cloth out of the trunk (why do I have three big sheets of cloth in the trunk of my car?), and put it on the seat with some weight on it (I used the big jug of laundry degergent I bought at Loblaws before the movie) to try and absorb some of the nasty juice from the seat I had steam cleaned less than 3 months ago. Oh, well. At least I have ~~chicken~~ popcorn.^[1]

^[1] This one's for you, AnyFlower.

Office revisited

2005-11-25T12:35:00.000-05:00

From the interactive-office department: This is too cool for words. Normally you have to pay for stuff like this, but I found a free version, made by the same guy who made PanoTools (the also kick-ass panorama stitching software I use). If you haven't seen it before, go have a look at my last post, where I showed you my office. Note the crappy photo. Today, I present to you, the same crappy photo, wrapped in an ultracool viewer!!1! Here's how to use it: 1) Click your mouse in the center of the image, and hold the mouse button down. Now move the mouse around slowly. The farther away you drag your mouse from where you first clicked, the faster the image scrolls in that direction. 2) Now do the same thing, but hold down CTRL before you click. As you hold the click, the image zooms out! To zoom in, hold down SHIFT and click. 3) Keyboard: "A" to zoom in, "Z" to zoom out, arrow keys to move around. Easy as 1,2,3!

Funny, in a NSFW way

2005-11-23T21:29:00.000-05:00

From the mom-dont-read-this department: *** WARNING WARNING WARNING *** This is *so* not safe for work. As in, you open this URL at work and ten big red siren lights all go off in your admin's office. http://www.insultmonger.com/swearing/croatian.htm But DAMN, we are so lame at swearing compared to these guys! They're so ~~good~~ ~~bad~~ funny I have to give out some awards: This one wins the "WTF does that mean?" award: "May everything in your garden go dry - except from laundry." The "Most Chinese Zodiac Animals" award: "Sh*tty horse, I'll f**k you like a little monkey." The "Most creative" award: "The postman f**ked your dead mother in basement in which your grandma burned while trying to set your sister on fire." The "Beats 'When Hell Freezes Over' Hands Down" award: When a fingernail grows on a d*ck (said when something isn't going to happen) (for an added laugh or two, when you read these, imagine them in the voice that Samir from Office Space used in the scene where he and Michael Bolton, drunk, stumble away from Peter's house, and he's singing the lyrics to a rap song, "Back up in your ass with the resurrection.")

My camera is back!!11!1!

2005-11-22T16:54:00.000-05:00

From the shutter-up department: My camera came back to me today. I was so excited I took some pics of my office and (very poorly) stitched them together. Note that this is a +90° panoramic, so things are highly warped. You'll have to put your imagination to use to envision my office as the square hole in the wall that it really is: So, now that I've got you looking at my boring office, why don't I bore you even further by pointing out some of the mundane stuff that we see here. BTW this is what my office looks like about one week before I get fed up with how messy it is and clean it. I plan to have my camera with me when that day comes. I'll take proper photos using the tripod (instead of today's handheld) and proper white-balancing (instead of today's random setting) and proper exposure and focus-lock (instead of today's mis-matched focusing). The result will be a more proper panorama and then when I put it side by side with this one it'll make my cleaning efforts look even more stunning. So, on with the mundane details! * Those three "windows" on the wall above the tiger lead to the kitchen. I have no source of natural light in my hole in the wall. * On the right side, just underneath the whiteboard markers, you can see a cube in the wall, and another in the very bottom-right corner. There's three little holes with distorted glass cubes inside them that lead to the hallway. * On the desk is my laptop, with my G n u r p l e dot N e t homepage. Look closely and you'll see there's something wrong with the keyboard, like it had a run-in with an axe murderer and then got glued together by a drunk model airplane builder. That's what happens when you do a bad panorama, boys and girls. * On the door handle there's an IGA bag that's full of IGA bags. Some of the IGA bags inside the IGA bag even have IGA bags inside them. As you can see, recursion's my bag ("This sorta thing is my bag, baby!" "Oh Austin!") * Under the IGA bag is a towel. It's supposed to be blue but it's not. This is what happens when you don't set your white-balance properly, boys and girls. I used the towel for showers back when I biked to work. Even though I stopped biking to work long ago, it's still there -- hey, now, stop that "eww"ing, I took it home and swapped it for a clean one every Tuesday and then took the swapped one home on Fridays and cleaned them both on the weekend, back in the bike-to-work days. Never let it be said that I'm no frood who doesn't know where his towel is at. * Tucked in the corner, under the lamp on the left, is a bottle of shampoo that, like the towel, is still around. * Just a tad closer to the camera than the shampoo bottle is my binary clock. Why? Because it has blue lights, and 'cause I'm the only one in the office geeky enough to figure out the time from it. Can you tell what time I took this picture? * The big green ball under the desk is my "office chair". * The little green chameleon on top of the monitor ~~eats part of my lunch everyday~~ is confused about how to be a proper chameleon. I use that computer for one thing: scheduling -- I use my laptop for the rest, but it doesn't have an exchange-friendly calendar thing on it. In fact, the scheduling computer is running on my old laptop, which is buried under some papers just to the left of the monitor. * On the little speaker to the right of the monitor sits a puffin. I wanted to put a penguin in the office but I felt kinda dirty about it; since we're forced to use MS Exchange, I didn't think it'd be quite right. * Just in front of the speaker is a small plastic box. Inside the box is some blue goo. That's "thinking putty". (silly putty with cool blue colouring added and with a funny marketing name) * Look at the lamp on the left. Now look at the little switch just to the left of the lamp and down a tad. That switch controls lights on the other side of that wall. So how do you control the lights in my office? Well, the lamp on the hutch there has its own switch. The pot light which is shining onto the door is controlled by a switch on the other side of the wall from the lamp on the hutch. And the fluorescents, which I keep turned off, are controlled by a switch on the other side of the wall from the whiteboard. * The thing in the calendar picture is a white cat, with black ears and a black nose, sitting on some yarn. Admit it, you'd never have known without my telling you d:) * Tucked behind those blue files in a stand on the black filing cabinet under the tiger picture is a silver toolcase. I'm the office handyman; a couple of weeks ago I installed the curtains, projector and screen in the boardroom. I bring my drill to the office at least twice a month. I love working for a small company. * To the right of the lamp on the hutch, in the middle of the wall, there's a white box. These white boxes appear on a smattering of walls throughout the office. Each white box has a little pushbutton switch on it. ~~When somebody pushes one of the little buttons, another LCD panel about to come off an assembly line in Taiwan gets a defect~~ We have no earthly idea what those buttons do. I tried looking up the name brand printed on the box -- nothing. And that's the end of my office tour. If you haven't gone mad yet, read on and I'll tell you all about the shenanigans to end my camera's recent journeys. So, to end the camera cleaning saga: I opened the box, and what do I find? The camera and lens are wrapped separately from each other, in bubble wrapping. What does that mean? That the camera body is separate from the lens. Which means that it has a big gaping hole for dust to get inside. They should've either shipped it back to me with the lens attached, like I shipped it to them, or asked what I wanted to do, like pay them for a body cap or something. Oh, and speaking of caps, I shipped it to them with the lens cap on, and it came back to me with the lens cap missing. So I phoned them and asked WTF. They offered to pay to have it shipped back to them, re-cleaned, and shipped back to me again, but I decided enough's enough. There's only a couple of specs of dust in the viewfinder optics, and none on the CCD, and if there's any on the lens I can clean it myself. Luckily I have a spare lens cap on hand for now - the only thing I'm really missing is the cool Olympus one I started with. And just for fun, I'll end this posting with the email I sent to the camera servicing place:


Hi,
                                                                                                                                                     
I got my camera back today.  Inside the box I found that the camera was
separated from the lens.  I phoned to ask why you did this, and the answer
I got was that it's for safe shipping.
                                                                                                                                                     
That's all well and good, but what does that mean?  Without the lens
attached to the camera body, there's a big gaping hole in the body where
dust can get into the optics.  I sent the camera to you to get it cleaned,
not to get it dirty again!  I'll admit it's better than it was when I sent
it, but because the body was unprotected, there are some specks of dust in
the viewfinder optics again.
                                                                                                                                                     
Thankfully there's none on the sensor, but I suspect that's more because
the E-300 has the SSWF dust-buster feature than because of your carelessness
in returning my camera to me.
                                                                                                                                                     
If you were unwilling to ship it back to me with the lens attached, you
should have called me and asked what I would like to do.  I would gladly
have bought abody cap and shipped it to you to prevent this.
                                                                                                                                                     
Oh, and speaking of caps, when I shipped the camera to you, with the lens
attached, the lens had a lens cap on it.  When it came back to me, the lens
cap is missing.  When I phoned I asked about this as well, and was told that
it's not on the inventory list of items received, and that the people who
make the list are meticulous.
                                                                                                                                                     
Be that as it may, when I sent the camera to you the lens had a cap on it
and when I got it back there was none.
                                                                                                                                                     
I would really appreciate it if you would look around for my lens cap and
send it back to me.  It says "OLYMPUS" on it and it's a 58mm dia. cap.
                                                                                                                                                     
Regards,
Josh Audette (see invoice 00197776 for details)

I never forget a pussy...cat

2005-11-21T21:00:00.000-05:00

From the catz-R-us department: I wrote some stuff about my cats today that I thought I'd share with you: My cats: I have a brother (Paddington) and sister (Fluffernutter). They're Persians of the "I ran into a wall and now my face looks like this" variety (although I think they're incredibly cute). I adopted them from the Humane Society a few years ago, but that's another story -- and knowing the way I write, I'd better not go off on too many tangents^[1] or you'll fall asleep. As rulers of the house my cats have many duties: * They exist to cover every surface with fur. These cats make other long-haired cats think they have full-body crew cuts. I swear I could take the fur these cats shed and knit myself a new cat every two weeks. Every floor of my house has its own cat-hair remover brush. * Paddington's job is to know when I'm about to fall asleep and jump up on the bed, lie down beside my head and purr with his nose as close to my ear as possible. Either that or he'll lie down facing the other way and stick his big fluffy tail under my nose. The only way to get him to relent is to pet him. * As official alarm clock, it's also Paddy's job to wake me up by jumping on the bed and sticking his nose in my eye until I pet him. * Fluffernutter is the official scaredy cat. Whenever there's other people over she takes off and finds a safe spot while Paddy runs interference. When it's just me around, Fluffo is the "I'll start purring as soon as you look in my direction" cat. * Fluffo is also the Cat In Charge Of Making Sure the Human Knows It's Feeding Time. She doesn't do it by meowing. She'll find me, and then when I go to pet her she'll tease me by walking a few steps toward the food dishes and then look back over her shoulder and purr. http://www.gnurple.net/gallery/dacatz ... and while we're on the subject, a short "ships in the night" story about a kitten I met a couple of weeks ago: I was walking to work the other day and a kitten jumped out of the bushes right behind me on the sidewalk. I stopped, turned around slowly and hunkered down. That little kitty came over, sniffed my hand, then walked around me a couple of times. She let me pet her for some time while she rubbed against my legs. Then she started purring and she even let me pick her up and hold her for awhile. When I put her down and walked away, she followed me to the corner, where she let me go. I felt a little sad to leave her but at the same time I felt like an honour had been bestowed upon me. For the rest of the walk to work that day everything seemed a little brighter and there was a bounce in my step. I never saw that kitten again.

^[1] On the other hand, tangents are what footnotes are for! (well, that's what they're for here in NormLand, anyways).
So, coming from a cat-friendly family, a few years ago I was thinking about becoming a cat owner. This was back when I had fish (BTW, if you're thinking of getting fish, think twice). I visited the local PetSmart to get some fish stuff, and it happened to have a Humane Society "outlet", and while I saw that most cats had their own cages all to themselves, two particular cats were sharing a cage.
Those two cats stuck in my mind, and I wandered back to that PetSmart a couple of weeks later. Those two bundles of fur were still there in their little cage. I went in to visit with the other cats. Some were shy, some came over and let me pet 'em. When I got to Paddy and Fluffo, Paddy came to the front of the cage and did this cute little "play with the edge of the newspaper" thing while Fluffo hung out in the back of the cage, looking forlorn^[2].
I asked about them, and learned that they were paired together because they don't get along well if they're separated. I noted how I saw them awhile ago and asked why they were still around, why nobody had adopted them. The going theory was that people wouldn't want the burden of two cats, and also that people want kittens, not older cats.
I felt kinda sad for them, nobody wanting to take them home and give them love. So I did. And all those fools who didn't want "older cats", didn't want the burden of two cats? They have no idea what they passed up with these two. These are the best cats in the world. ^[2] To this day, Paddy protects his sister, distracting evil visitors while Fluffo makes her getaway to one of her hidey holes. And who says footnotes can't have footnotes?!

Geeky GPS project reaches a milestone

2005-11-21T09:22:00.000-05:00

From the geeky-GPS-project department: ... but first, what else is new? Winter is coming, and Team Norm has been putting off a few things: * Get winter tires, now that I drive ~70km to work and back everyday, on the Queensway which is full of crazy drivers; * Get wiper blades; * Get new winter boots; * Fill some holes in the wall where there used to be phone wires with expanding foam stuff; Christmas is coming, and Team Norm is hosting family this Christmas, so there's a bunch of other things I need to do: * Finish putting up the shelves in the kitchen/dining room; * Move all the boxes out of the kitchen/dining room to somewhere else; * Clean, de-fur, and straighten up around the house; * Buy more bedsheets and pillows and stuff so that everybody gets a nice comfy place to sleep; * Buy some Christmas lights and start decorating; * Buy a Christmastree stand; * Do some gift-shopping; ... and what about the weekend? Well, on Friday night I took my trailer over to Alex's place and helped him get 18 sheets of drywall moved to his house. On Saturday, I spent the morning working on my geeky GPS project, and then most of the day over at Alex & Anouk's place helping with the installation of drywall. We worked on that 'til just after 19h00 and then we stopped to watch the game. They were kind enough to feed me some yummy Thai food, too. I spent Sunday being lazy and working on my geeky GPS project. ... and, news with my camera, which for the last two weeks has been at the shop getting cleaned (I got some dust in the viewfinder optics while onsite in California). When I sent it in, I sent it with the lens attached so that a) no junk would get into the body during shipping, and b) so that they'd have the lens to look through to confirm dust-free-ness. I made it explicitly clear in a note that I tucked in with the camera that the lens was not to be cleaned, just the body. So when I got the estimate / approval, I was a bit disappointed to see that the estimate included cleaning the lens. I sent a reply email. Then I followed up with a phone call. The person on the phone said she got my email, adjusted the repair order instructions, and re-did the estimate. I confirmed over the phone that I approved the new estimated price for cleaning just the body. Then I waited two weeks for the camera to get cleaned. Today I get an email with the invoice. Surprise, they cleaned the body and the lens, and charged me for both. The interesting part is that, right in the invoice, it says, "************CUSTOMER ONLY WISHES FOR HIS BODY TO BE CLEANED. PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH THE LENS.******************". And then on another line is the actual work done: "CLEAN MIRROR MECHANISM, CLEAN LENS, REMOVAL OF DUST THROUGHOUT, CLEAN AND TEST." So I phoned up to express my disappointment. They were nice about it and agreed to charge me for just the body cleaning. Now I just have to wait for my stuff to get back and then finally the GnurpleBlog will get back into having some photos. ... which brings me to the topic du jour: Geeky GPS project reaches a milestone! The project code is now at the point where it gives me the information I want!!11!1! It can process all the datafiles, figure out which legs I drove, and calculates the elapsed time and distance for each leg. Things left to do for a quick and dirty version 1: * Put waypoint markers on the map, and include leg info on the map, too; * Put the analysis results into a per-datafile textfile; * Build some code that takes the textfile and builds the HTML results page; * Enhance the per-leg results to include more information: bearing (although it's useless d:), and avg. speed; * Build some code that reads the textfiles to build another HTML results page that groups the legs together so they can be easily compared against each other; ... and then there are tons of other post-v1 things to be done, like making it more efficient and using better methods to automatically determine which routes were taken, etc. Right now it max'es my CPU out for 4 minutes to generate the data for the 14 routes I've got, and it uses a hack to figure out which trip I took (if the bearing is around 213°, it was a home-work trip d:).

Make this week be over

2005-11-16T21:02:00.000-05:00

From the is-it-Friday-yet department: It seems that the 'office weather' has been following along with the true atmospheric weather. So far this week it's been rainy and snowy and windy outside, and the job has been similarly dismal. A new release coming soon, a bunch of new stuff I need to learn, and a pile of problems I need to solve. When Friday@5 comes I may do backflips all the way to my car. The new bike is roXx0ring. My Brooks saddle showed up in the mail today, so naturally I had to install it and then go for a bike ride in the great weather this evening. Already I'm finding this saddle is better than the one my bike came with, and it hasn't even started to break in yet! For those of you playing along, Brooks of England has been making bike saddles since 1866. They make them the old fashion way - leather wrapped over a metal frame. People who have Brooks saddles either swear by them, or swear at them before returning them. There's no middle ground, either you love it or hate it. If you love it, it lasts a lifetime. For the first n kilometers it's not the most comfortable, but over time the leather breaks in to your body. In other news, I picked up a wireless router today. My old one was a 802.11b which had a really funky fluctuating signal strength problem, the result of which was that when I sit on my living room couch, teh intarweb was intermittent. No longer. New router is in, I'm on my couch, and signal strength is good at full 54Mb/s 802.11g action, baby! Woo! The GPS project is progressing slowly. I'm still collecting data twice a day, and slowly updating the code. The most exciting part is coming up, where I write the code that actually determines which waypoints you've passed and then figures out the elapsed times for the different legs. I'm really looking forward to getting this done, because that'll be a rough v1.0 milestone -- it will be doing what I want it to be doing. And the final item for today comes straight from my heart. A friend of mine mentioned that she's now in a relationship, and that hit me in a way I wasn't really expecting. I was hesitant about writing about this on the blog, but nobody reads this, and it *is* a diary, after all. Besides, the cool thing about it is that I used a technique that I read about to write a letter. The idea behind this is to write a letter expressing your feelings, even if the recipient will never read it. It's supposed to be good for your emotional well-being, and I thought I'd try it out -- I had to do *something* with those feelings, and I'll at least be able to look back at it years from now and remember. The cool part is it worked! Most of the letter is too private to put here, but I thought these parts would be okay:

...

Your news earlier today that you've met someone kinda hit me in a place I
didn't quite realize I had.  If there was ever a way to know that you love
somebody, even a little, this is probably a good indicator.
                                                                                                                                                     
...

So why write this letter? ...

...

I guess the point is that I normally just brutally suppress these sort of
emotions within myself, but recently -- with the advent of The GnurpleBlog --
I've been learning to be more honest with myself.  *Not* writing this down
would be a step in the wrong direction for my personal development.  Couple
that with something I read ... about writing letters to people even though 
they'll never read them (supposed to be good for you) and you end up with 
this.

...

Anyways, in the spirit of honesty in which this letter is written -- and also
with the knowledge that you'll never read this, or at least you won't get a
chance to until the time comes when it doesn't matter -- here's a little bit of
what I felt when you gave me the news ...

...

So here's hoping that writing this letter will a) somehow be good for me and b)
help me realize that I've got a lot of personal development to do that I really
need to get around to doing.

And that's that. I'll end with the wish that the office weather continues to stay true to the physical atmospheric weather, and that both are sunny and calm for the next two days. Here's to Thursday and Friday! [chug drink here]

Biketastic

2005-11-14T10:31:00.000-05:00

From the pedal-power department: Blogging is still as infrequent as ever, but my excuse for the time being is my geeky GPS route study project, which is proceeding well on the website front (lots of diagrams and thinking about waypoints and decision flowcharts and stuff), and on the taking up all my free time front, but not so well on the code front. In other news, I got myself a new bike this weekend^[1]! This is much more of a road bike than my current mountain bike is. It's also a bit more expensive, but I got $150 off by buying an on-sale 2005 model. Next year's model will have slightly better shifters, stronger forks, one or two other changes, but the frame is the same (apparently Cannondale has found a near-perfect design and they've been sticking with it). I test-rode a bike with the better shifters on it, and didn't find the difference was worth it, and as for the other stuff I doubt I'll be riding the bike hard enough to make a difference. Things I learned: * My body is right on the border between a medium and large bike frame * 10mm makes a helluva difference in stem length * Gonna be a bit of a learning curve for the different shifter style Motivation for getting a new bike: * Road bike for road biking - the mountain bike just ain't the optimal bike when all I do is bike on roads; * Comfort - I really enjoyed the variation in hand positions that the dropdown handlebars give. I also found that this bike is a lot easier to balance. Riding in a straight-up position, no hands-style, is something I like to do once in awhile for a change of position; * Speed - I haven't empirically confirmed this yet, but just from the test-riding I feel I should be able to get about 5km/h avg. speed increase from this bike; * Colour - d00d! It's blue!

^[1] Please excuse the crappy photo. I had to steal it from a white background. Click the image to go to the actual bike stats page.

The Route Study Project

2005-11-10T09:10:00.000-05:00

From the geeky-GPS-project department: I haven't been 'round to blog lately, because all my spare time is being taken up by a new project. Here's it's tagline: "Have you ever wondered which way home is the fastest? So have I." You can read more about the project from my last blog posting, or you can just go to The Route Study Project Page. Everything I'm doing on this project shows up in one form or another on that page. It's getting updated frequently, so check back often if this kind of thing interests you. Who should go look? If you: * are a computer geek; * like Google Maps; * are interested in GPS; * live in Kanata and work in downtown ~~Hull~~ ~~Gatineau~~ the formerly Hull district of what is now known as Gatineau; * have a GPS and want to use it to find out which way is the best way to go from A to B (note: mild geekiness required); ... then you should check this project out.

The geeky GPS project

2005-11-07T08:13:00.000-05:00

From the acronyms-within-acronyms department: Well, I tried the whole voice recording drive home from work thing last Friday with the red MP3 player. I even came up with an idea for a really geeky project I'm gonna do along with a bunch of other crap. Then I noticed as I listened to the data, there were chunks missing! Sacre bleu! The problem is that this red MP3 player doesn't act like a UMS^[1] device when it's plugged in, so I have to use some special software to transfer the files off of it. I think this special software es bustado grande (i.e. "is totally busted" for those who don't natively understand Normian speech) and so it FUBAR'd^[2] my data. "Special" software, indeed. I also discovered that it's more of an incredible pain to sit through my own blabberings, parsing the voice data using the process that I outlined last post, than I thought it would be. My enthusiasm for finding an error-free way to get my voice data compares well to a California surfer's enthusiasm for going surfing in underground sewer pipes. Don't expect to be hearing things here anytime soon^[3]. THE IDEA So while I'm not going to share my crappy broken voice recording with you (this is the part where you sigh with relief) I will share the geeky idea for a project I came up with (sigh of anticipated unpleasantness goes here. Imagine you're a sewer worker, and think of the kind of sigh you'd give out just before going underground to start your day's work). Intro There are many ways for me to drive home from work. I can think of about eight combinations. This is also true about the trip from work to home (although there are only three options I can think of for the home->work trip). I want to know which of these different routes is most efficient. Definitions A route is a full one-way trip, from start to finish. A leg is ~~one of the many parts of girls that guys find attractive~~ a part of a route which is different from other routes but shares a startpoint and an endpoint with at least one leg of a different route. It could also be a part of a route that is identical to parts of other routes but that shows variation, e.g. traffic variances or traffic light time variances. A waypoint is the point at which a particular leg starts or stops, or other interesting points along a route. A waypoint found on one route should show up on at least one other route. Headache: What you get when you read too much of the mindless drivel you can only find on Gnurple dot Net. Self-deprecating humour: See headache. Original Plan The original plan (the one I came up with about 10 minutes into my drive home on Friday) was to use the voice recorder. As I drove a route, I would call out when I reached certain waypoints. Later I would use the time index of the recording to figure out how long it takes to drive each leg. New Plan Given the recorder / data transfer glitches, the original plan would be inaccurate. A much better plan would be to use my GPS. It outputs one data point per second over the serial port, which I can collect using my laptop. Data points include time, position, speed and some other stuff I may or may not want. I figure I'll take this data and plot it on a graph, using colours to indicate speed^[4] and with little markers denoting things like position every 5 minutes and time indexes at waypoints. In terms of running the routes, I think a good plan will be set up a schedule of varying routes and run through it in order, say, 5 times. The idea here is twofold: 1) run each route at least 5 times to catch variances. For example, sometimes traffic might rule, and sometimes, like on Corel Center hockey nights, it might suck. 2) Each different route should be run as soon as possible to minimize long-term variations. For example, as the weather gets colder, more and more people put their bikes away and start driving cars to work, adding more traffic. Or there could be a bus strike that takes a long time. After converting lat/long to UTM I'll be able to overlay the data onto an actual map to make things clearer (and to help identify waypoints such as intersections, etc.). The speed colouring will help me identify which areas are more prone to variance (traffic lights, traffic patterns, etc.). This post is going on way too long (pretend to be surprised here. Or rather, use surprise to mask your relief at coming to the end.). I'll put up a webpage specifically for this project a little later on. I'll try and do some trials this week to see how much work this thing is gonna take. OTHER NEWS It wouldn't be a Gnurple dot Net post without some boring personal life details to dull your mind and make you scream for escape or redemption or something, so here goes: 1) The bike cover I ordered has arrived. It turns out that it's a little too small for my bike. It comes up short in covering both wheels, and it's too narrow at the top for the handlebars. i think it might work, though, if I angle the front wheel to 45° or so. I also need to put some grommets on the bottom where I can tie bits of rope with carabiners on the end, so I can secure the bottom to keep the wind from blowing the thing away (and also to secure it to something when I'm actually out riding). 2) I got an email from Nortown, the place where I sent my camera for cleaning. Despite my clear written instructions, in the approval request they seem to think that I wanted both the camera body and the lens cleaned. I sent back an email clarifying that I want only the body cleaned. Then I called them this morning to be sure everything is clear and to give approval for the job. Now I just need to wait three weeks. *sigh*

^[1] An acronym within an acronym. Full points. ^[2] Not an acronym within an acronym, but half-points for verbing an acronym. ^[3] Unless it turns out that reading my lame weblog causes you to go mentally mad and you start hearing things of your own accord. Gnurple Services will not be held responsible for damages to your brain due to reading my horrifically dull material. ^[4] Something like Red=slowest, fades to Green=midspeed, fades to Blue=fastest

'Twas the day before Friday

2005-11-03T18:07:00.000-05:00

From the whats-up department: Well, I phoned Nortown Photo which is where I sent my camera to get cleaned. Wait time? Three weeks. Three WEEKS?! *sigh* No photos for the ol' blog for awhile. At least for the next three entries. <-- poor joke about my blogging frequency. Laugh here. Hrm, what else? In my search for a bike cover, I turned up nothing in local stores, so I ended up ordering one from far, far away (Toronto). $27, including shipping. It should show up in a few days, and then I will feel comfortable taking my bike out of the shed and locking it up outside in my driveway. And if *that* happens, the process of taking the bike to the store for shopping will be easy enough that I'll make the effort to do it: unlock and uncover bike, attach pannier¹, bike to store, get groceries, pack groceries in pannier, bike back, unload groceries from pannier, cover and lock bike, done. So last night I was on my way home, and dreading the Corel Centre traffic because I had a training call that went late and left the office at about twenty past five. A friend had called my cellphone while I was doing training, so while I was smack in the middle of not going anywhere in traffic I returned the call and got invited for dinner. That rules 'cause a) dinner is good, b) friends are great, and c) Hockey night traffic is teh sUxX0r when you live near the Terry Fox exit. So I stopped in for visits, which was fun. I got to see D&T's new baby boy, who has taken on the arduous task of eating as much as possible and growing like all get out. Spent the first half hour or so camped out in the living room on my laptop 'cause T was upstairs sleeping with the baby and D wasn't home yet. Good thing I had their WiFi key, eh? We cooked up some fajitas and had us a yummy meal. I headed home to catch the tail end of the Sens hand the Lightning a bolt of you-go-home-now. So if you're one of the zero people who read the last blogpost, you may have clicked on the audio and screamed out loud as your brain tried to do an emergency separation from your ears to save your sanity. The audio quality was crap-o-riffic and the content was even worse. Last night on the drive home I tried a different recorder with better voice quality and better positioning of the microphone (strapped to the visor, if you're playing along at home). I think I've solved the quality problem. Now I just need to work on content, a much more difficult thing. I think the approach will be a weekly drive-home recording, every Friday 'cause that gives the best odds of actually having something funny or even remotely interesting to blabber on about. We'll try one tonight and see how painful it is to listen to. I tried to listen to last night's test recordings to get an idea of how involved it will be to condense it² and the content was (OK from an audio quality standpoint but) so hard to listen to that I gave up. We'll see what happens tonight.

¹ I haven't decided if I'm gonna leave a pannier on the bike while it's under its cover. I'll wait and see how the cover looks, etc. ² Recording goes like this: 20% blabbering and 80% thinking quietly / listening to radio³. Processing the audio file goes like this: 1) open in Audacity -- my favourite audio editor -- 2) listen to the crap, marking spots where 2a) I start speaking as well as 2b) the spots where I count 8 seconds of me not speaking. Then 3) I take the spaces of non-verbal-diarrhea which occur from roughly 3 seconds after I finished speaking until roughly 3 seconds before I started speaking again, and silence them. Now I have an audio file with about 80% silence and 20% intermittent bits where I was blathering on. I 5) take each of those bits and put them in separate tracks, with each track overlapping by 3 seconds with the previous track. Finally I 6) crossfade track n to track n+1, so that the end result is that all the speech bits flow into each other in a non-abrupt manner and all the non-speech bits are eliminated, resulting in about 5 or 6 minutes of blabbering from a 30 minute trip. ³ Keep in mind that this is still with full concentration on the road. It's analogous to talking to a passenger, only without having to think about responses to what the other person says.

Driving home

2005-11-02T19:40:00.000-05:00

From the something-new department: OK, so I was driving home today, and traffic just sucked! First of all, I totally went the wrong way, 'cause yesterday I went shopping in downtown Ottawa so I took a different route home, and today I took yesterday's route instead of my normal way home 'cause my brain was in yesterdaymode, and the traffic was horrible. It was horrible on the 50, it was horrible on the stretch between the new war museum and Island Park, it was horrible where the parkway merges with Carling, it was horrible on the Queensway. Anyways, instead of me telling you all about it, I thought I'd try something new: I'll tell you all about it instead. What? See, on work days I usually walk around wearing my little MP3 player around my neck. I like to listen to tunes when I'm walking from my car to work in the morning -- especially if there's a song on the radio I don't want to interrupt -- and I like to listen to the tunes when I head over to the IGA for lunch, and when heading back to the car at the end of the day. So, yeah, tunes are good, at the expense of looking like a geek with an MP3 player around his neck. So, on my drive home today, I was really frikkin' annoyed at the traffic. Well, part of it was that I was annoyed at myself for taking the wrong route. Had I gone my usual way, I would have missed the traffic jam at the 50 and at the parkway stretch before Island Park... and maybe, by missing all that crap, I would have gotten to Carling before it got ugly there. And by going down Carling, I would have bypassed most of the nasty Queensway traffic, especially the westbound clusterfuck between the 416 split and Moodie. Anyways, I was really annoyed, so while I was in the middle of not going anywhere at all and staring at Moodie which was slowly not getting any closer, I called a friend of mine on the ol' cellphone just before I went insane. The worst part is that the traffic is as bad as it tends to be when there's a game at the Corel Centre... but there was no game. Maybe they opened the Corel Centre so people can go see the Buffalo game on the jumbo screen for free, and that's where the traffic came from? So after my call, I figured if I'm gonna go insane I might as well make a record of it. So I took my little MP3 player and hit the voice record button. Then I just started rambling like an idiot, in my fake Strongbad voice. It's actually really bad, and so stupid it's embarrasing, but you might get a laugh out of it... or waste 3 minutes of your life. Here it is: The first instalment of the "Driving Home" series (and maybe the last). The audio is bad because a) the recorder is hanging from my neck, with the microphone probably facing my body, b) while I ramble on speaking towards the windshield, and c) in a cheap car (that I still love, though) driving on the road with the radio playing. Next time I try this -- if there ever IS a next time -- I'll hang the recorder from the sunvisor, so it's a little bit more in line with where I'm projecting my voice, and a little bit less muffled by my clothes and body. But let's face it, this crap is so bad that you won't listen to the next one, and if you do, you'll WISH that it were bad and muffled and crappy so you wouldn't have to suffer through it.

Diet time

2005-11-01T10:31:00.000-05:00

From the too-much-food-is-bad-for-your-health department: OK, so, well, diet time really should've been, uh, early this year or so, but hey, better late than never, right? When I started working at my office, I weighed in at 175lb. This is a good weight for someone like me. It puts my BMI at just under 25, which is the threshold between "normal" and "overweight"¹. I felt good and I felt good about myself². I was able to keep this weight until the beginning of this year, when house hunting and additional stress at work and the DARPA Grand Challenge and moving and no longer biking to work and any other excuse I can think of all added up to a slow weight gain. Now I'm hovering around 200lb, which is well in the "overweight" range. I look like your average middle-aged guy, and I don't want to be that guy. I want to be my old self, who felt good and felt good about himself. So, I'm on the NormMonkey Diet^TM. Here's the deal. For lunch, I get soup and a sandwich. At 14h00, I get a smoothie, which is a cup of fruit, and some OJ, and some ice blended together (no added sugar, just natural goodness). For dinner, I get a salad and some cut fruit, and for a late night snack I get another smoothie. On weekends, I can make anything I want but it has to be un-processed non-junkfood type stuff. TV dinners or chips or popcorn or other crap like that are right out. Pasta is OK if I use a tomato-based sauce, and only if it's less than a full meal's worth (there has to be something else there, too, like fish or veggies). Potatos are OK, but again only as a side dish, and definitely not fries. Baked or mashed. Weekend snacks can be carrots or cucumbers (or pretty much any veggies), cut fruit and/or smoothies. No processed junk. Cheese is allowed in smallish amounts (yes on the parmesan, no on the half-block of grated cheddar or mozzarella in the pasta). Oh, yeah, and all food gets bought on a just-in-time, per-meal basis. No buying extra food for later (alright, *maybe* buying one day's worth rather than a separate lunch and dinner trip is OK). Here's my problem with the whole food thing, and why I think this diet ought to work for me: 1) If it's there, I'll eat it. I have little willpower, so having lots of food accessible is bad. On the other hand, I know I'm lazy enough that unless I'm really hungry, if there's no food handy then I won't go out and get some on a whim. 2) I like eating food that takes a lot of time to eat. This is why carrots and cucumbers, cut vegetables and fruit, etc. are good for me and also why I cannot allow chips or any junkfood snacks into my house. Eating food that I can pick at, like the above, and watching movies or reading books is my paradise. Fortunately, drinking a drink is also counts, and that's why smoothies are especially good. They take time to drink 'cause they're thick and cold and give you brain freeze when you drink them too fast. The whole plan really dovetails together for me because a) there's a grocery store across the street from my work, which happens to have ready-made soup and sandwiches for lunch, as well as cups of cut fruit, and b) there's a grocery store right on my way home where I can stop and buy a ready-made salad and a container of cut fruit. My fridge with its ice-maker makes metric boatloads of ice for me, so the only extra work I have to do is make a tupperware full of crushed ice every evening to take to work the next day. That takes about 5 minutes to prepare. Oh, yeah, and c) the grocery store I mentioned in b) is one kilometer away from my house, so it's nice and close when I need it for Just-In-Time shopping on the weekend. I can even bike to the grocery store, although I need a way to make this more efficient. Right now, biking to the store also involves a) going to the shed in the back, unlocking it, shuffling things around to get my bike out, walking it across the yard and out the fence, and over my trailer before I can even start riding it. This maddeningly inefficient for me. I think I will go looking for a bike cover. Then I can lock my bike up at the end of my driveway and the cover will protect it from rain and snow, and it will be easy to unlock it and go to the store. The exercise will be great. Of course, it doesn't help my whole diet plan when cow orkers bring in their Hallowe'en boxes of leftover candy and leave 'em out on the desk where they tempt you every single freaking time you walk by them.

¹ I'm actually a pretty fit guy with a fair bit of extra muscle, which the BMI system doesn't take into account. Even at 25 or 25.5 on the BMI scale I don't think I'd be overweight. ² The difference: "feeling good" means sleeping without any back pains, sitting comfortably in a chair and being able to lean forward and still be comfortable, etc. "Feeling good about yourself" means looking at yourself in the mirror and feeling proud, walking down the street with confidence in your appearance instead of feeling a little like a slob.

Boo!

2005-10-31T20:46:00.000-05:00

From the yeah-yeah-I-know-long-time-no-blog-again department: I *will* get the hang of this blog-more-than-once-a-week thing. I know. I'll blame it on the clocks-roll-back thing. Yeah. I didn't blog all this week 'cause... uh, 'cause I *lost* an hour! Yeah. Yeah, that's it. OK, so when we last heard from our intrepid hero who doesn't know how to sit down and blog once in awhile, it was last weekend. Lessee, so what's happened since then: 1) Computer stuff A friend of mine who was in China picked up a 120GB hard disk for me, for cheap. This will become a new home for my photo gallery. I have 1.6GB of photos from DARPA on my laptop that I can't upload 'cause I'm out of room right now. Since wiring my basement for sound from the computer, I have discovered a 60Hz hum. The hum doesn't come from the wire, or from anything the wire runs past. When I take an MP3 player and exchange the plug from the computer to the MP3 player, without moving anything else, the hum goes away. I don't know about you, but any sort of noise that shouldn't be there drives me mad. My car's alternator adds a hum to my car stereo that varies with the engine speed. Now my basement stereo has a 60Hz hum when I listen to music from the computer. It's no wonder I'm crazy. At least I have an excuse. What's *yours*? So, when I add the new hard disk to the computer, I'll replace the power supply and hope that solves the noise problem. As for the car, my mom gave me some money as a birthday present to replace the alternator. How's that for a cool mom?! When's the last time *your* mom gave you money to buy stuff related to cars OR stereos? My sister buys me presents from ThinkGeek, too, and this is how I know my whole family loves me, for sure. 2) Books I read two more Terry Pratchett books, the first two Discworld books. The hook is in deeper. 'Nuff said. If you can sense a glimmer of what makes Monty Python funny, and you know the value of a good pun, you need to get your hands on some Terry Pratchett. Books, that is. Terry Pratchett books. Leave the poor guy alone, now. Unless you're a blonde 17 year girl who gave up having great fun on Saturday nights for the honour of becoming a sacrificial virgin but then joined a group of guys to help save the world and fell for a 90 year old hero along the way. Something tells me Terry wouldn't mind meeting you. But first you should come over to my place. I have a spell I want to ~~cast over~~ show you. I also read Alan Alda's autobiography, Never Have Your Dog Stuffed. Like in M*A*S*H, Alda tells a dramatic story heavily dosed with comedy. Unlike M*A*S*H, there's hardly any M*A*S*H stuff in here. Don't read this book if you're after M*A*S*H stuff. Do read this book if you ever thought Alda was a good guy and he made you laugh. He mixes together a macro look at an unusual and interesting life, some smaller details that shine the light of interest on some of life's more normal events, and he does it all with Alda's classic sense of heartfelt drama laced with teh funnay. 3) Movies The Shawshank Redemption is up there on the list of the greatest movies ever. It pulled a tear or two from my eyes on the first viewing. It is an incredible story. But then, you already know all this; you saw it 'cause a good friend recommended it to you and you rented or bought it back in '95. A really good friend did the same for me, ten years later. Today I bought some DVDs, one of which was Herbie: Fully Loaded. Once I saw the video portion of it (I skipped the audio 'cause I didn't want to pay USD$2 for crappy headphones) on the flight from Atlanta to Ontario, CA, I knew I had to watch it, if only to satisfy my curiosity. It has a lot of the classic Disney story elements, so if you like Disney movies, check it out. 4) Hallowe'en Parties I went over to a friend's place this Saturday for teh Hallowe'en. It was full of people I didn't know, but I had fun anyways. This isn't normal for me. Poor skills at socializing with people I don't know is a character flaw of mine that I think I'm slowly correcting. Somewhat successfully, if this Saturday was any indication. Lots of good costumes. I have some pictures, but you read the stuff I wrote earlier 'bout the hard drive and the no-space thing and all that, so you know where they are. 5) Broken camera Speaking of pictures, my camera is teh b0r|<3n. Well, sorta broken. It still takes pictures and stuff. Here's the thing: I was out at the California Speedway recently. I took lots of pictures of DARPA stuff. I changed lenses many times to capture cars that were right in front of me, cars way off in distant parts of the course, and everywhere in between. Desert climate. Windy. Dry. Sitting in grandstands. Changing lenses often. Yep, I managed to get some dust inside the ol' camera. Now, my camera is an Olympus E-300. The Olympus E-series fourthirds cameras have something that no other digital SLRs have, and something that they all need. Just in front of the sensor there's a little thingy that vibrates at something like 30kHz. This vibration shakes the dust off of the CCD, where it falls to a little strip of stickyness and is trapped forever. Olympus is the first company to put something like this in cameras. This is a (formerly) unsolved, yet industry-wide problem for digital SLR photographers. 35mm folk just laugh; there's nothing except the lens for dust to get stuck on in their cameras, and lenses are easy to clean; the film canister has little felt strips to keep the dust off the film as it's rewound. The point-and-shoot people just laugh, 'cause their cameras are sealed; they can't change their lenses and they don't want to have to bother. For the dSLR people, when they get dust on their sensor, the brave ones put the camera in bulb mode (which locks the mirror up and opens the shutter, exposing the sensor) and try to clean it. The rest either send their camera in for servicing or toil with their favourite image editor to cover up the dust spots on every picture. The Olympus owners just laugh 'cause their cameras solve the problem. Now, let me be clear: my camera has no dust on the sensor. I took a bunch of pictures just to be certain. The supersonic wave filter (that's Olympus's marketing gibberish for their new, fabulous technology) did its job. Where I do have dust is in the viewfinder optics. Now, let me be even more clear: I showed my camera to a few people since it got dusty. Nobody's noticed until I pointed it out. It's not the kind of thing that gets in the way. Unless you're a crazy person who allows himself to be distracted by tiny little things like this instead of concentrating on the big picture (or in this case, the true picture). Those few little specks that I could see in the viewfinder but not in the photos themselves drove me a little mad, in the same way that a dead pixel which negligibly affects your entire laptop's picture drives a few geeks mad, except this is even less worrisome 'cause it doesn't affect the picture in the end. So, of course, I tried to solve the problem. I took the lens off. I looked inside. The mirror is fine. There's no dust or anything on it. I check the next piece, which is off to the left of the camera¹. To do this, I had to shine a light back through the eyepiece so I could see what's going on in there. The next piece in the viewfinder path is the screen with the metering circle marks on it. Here's where the dust is. So I take a little bulb blower and try to blow the dust off, holding the camera upside down so any dust stirred will fall out. Check. Nothing. So I try again. Still nothing. So I take a piece of lint-free lens paper and try to wipe it free. Bad idea. It turns out that this piece has concentric ridges, much like those paper-thin magnifying glasses have. That's probably why the dust managed to stick there. That's also why trying to wipe it, even with lint-free lens paper, made it worse. The ridges just trap and hold anything. There's probably a way to clean it with a circular motion, using some sort of cleaning solution, but that's impossible without taking the camera apart to get at that piece. So I'm going to send my camera in for servicing. When I get it back, if this ever happens again, I'm just going to ignore the niggly little tiny specks and concentrate on the big picture like a good boy. Now, also like a good boy, I've gotta go do my Monday house chores before I go to bed, so cheers.

¹ In almost every other SLR in the world, the next piece is straight up from the mirror, a classic pentaprism. The E-300 uses a porroprism design, where the mirrors reflect the light around the side of the camera instead of up, making the form factor kinda unique for an SLR. Makes me wonder, though, just how much dust would've gotten stuck there if the piece were on the roof instead of on the wall.

Books, movies and techno-babble

2005-10-22T17:13:00.000-04:00

From the weekend-update department: A number of incredibly normal things happened this weekend (and it's not even over yet! How can I stand the excitement!). Let me use many more words than necessary to describe them all: 1) Books and Movies This weekend I spent more on books than I did on movies. And I bought three movies: Shawshank Redemption (tonight's feature presentation), Girl Next Door (I watched it before when I once borrowed it from a colleague, but it's good so I bought it to watch over and over... besides, it's the Unrated^[TM] version), and 50 First Dates which I watched last night. NormMonkey recommends 50 First Dates for the following reasons: * Stars Drew Barrymore * Happy ending is not a fantasy ending; it has some realism * It's a great comedy/romance -- better than The Wedding Singer, which I watched again this afternoon for completeness and comparison's sake. To clarify, I thought Wedding Singer was great, too. * Great character writing -- I can't think of any characters who played an average, run-of-the-mill part; they all had something unique and funny and/or charming, every one of them * Drew Barrymore is really hot and it really shows in this movie On the book front, I bought: Never Have Your Dog Stuffed by Alan Alda, the first and second novels in the Discworld series by Terry Pratchett¹, and Dancing Barefoot by Wil Wheaton, which I read this afternoon. If you've ever enjoyed Star Trek: The Next Generation and you're a geek, then pick up Dancing Barefoot or Just A Geek by Wil Wheaton and discover a little piece of life through the eyes of a fellow geek. Dancing Barefoot is packed with entertainment but it's short enough to read in a couple of hours (and not nearly as expensive as a DVD, which would've provided the same couple of hours of entertainment). Just A Geek, which I read a few weeks ago, is longer and yet still full of entertainment. Also on my list of books bought but not yet read is Hackers and Painters by Paul Graham, advocate of start-ups and all-round smart guy who kicks ass at writing entertaining and thoughtful essays. If you don't believe me, go here and read a couple of his essays. A long time ago I read a Slashdot post describing a new essay by Paul Graham. Curiosity lead me to one of his essays. That lead me to read all of them, and that lead me to buy his book, which I look forward to reading. 2) Techno This week I discovered Digitally Imported, a source of techno music. Allow me to describe a musical dilemma that this stuff helps with: I can tolerate, and indeed find joy in, just about any genre of music. My tastes lean towards stuff that is either sappy, like love songs, or 80's, or both. My favourite radio station is Majic 100 for those of you playing along in Ottawa. I'm much more tune-oriented than lyrics-oriented. I have built a small collection of just over a thousand songs that I enjoy so much that I'm willing to listen to them over and over and over and over and over again. Between the Gnurple Collection and the radio, the music lover within me is satisfied. The Gnurple Collection is great for when I'm doing nothing but listening -- walking, biking, driving, or Hardcore Listening². The radio is good for discovering new songs, but it comes with the price of advertising bombardment. However, there are some problems that remain unsolved: you need something to listen to when you're not in the right mood to listen to your favourite music, and you need something to fill the silence and drive you forward when you're involved in a task. Also, for situations like conversational or reading music, your favourite music is no good 'cause it pulls your attention away from the place where it needs to be. That's where techo fits in. The kind of techno I'm listening to is either classic techno, high-energyish sorta Euro-trance stuff, or slow chill-out techno (my favourite so far). The kinda music that has an interesting yet repetitive rhythm and tune and has no vocals. The high energy stuff is great for programming or scripting or problem-solving. The slow stuff is good for reading³. Either is good for conversational or background music. 3) Wiring stuff So, with my intro to techno in mind, a new problem arises: in my old apartment, I had set it up so that music from my computer was piped to both my stereos. In this way I was able to listen to the Gnurple Collection in either room without having to pull out my MP3 player which often enough lived in my car or at work. Here at the new house, wiring is a bit more challenging. I can't just cut holes in drywall and snake wires around on the floor. It has to be done right and it has to look good. So far this weekend I've got the basement stereo wired up to one of my computers for music, which is easy 'cause I can use the suspended ceiling. Getting a pipe to my living room stereo is going to be more challenging: up one floor, and I'll have to install an outlet in the wall. Tomorrow I think I'll cut a hole in the drywall near my living room stereo and drill a hole through to the basement ceiling. I'll be able to run a sound pipe up to my living room stereo, and at the same time I can use the same hole to go upstairs to my bedroom, which is the next likely place I'd put a stereo (or even just a set of powered speakers, more likely). This is challenging because I'll have to get some fish tape, some sheilded coaxial cabling (four channels: L/R for main room, another run of L/R for bedroom) and some junction boxes and RCA stereo plug plates for the walls. 3) Computer stuff So, to get the computer (Yoda) set up to play my music, which is either techno streamed from the internet or MP3s played from the Gnurple Collection (which is backed up onto a HDD on the same computer, Yoda), I needed to do a few things: * Get VNC running so that I can control the music from anywhere in the house via my laptop * Get Xine and gXine running so that I can play the techno streams * Fix some audio driver problems * Get XMMS running to play the MP3s -- granted, XMMS should be able to play the techno streams as well, but it requires a plugin that I haven't investigated yet whereas the streams work with Xine right out of the box. Anyways, so I did that. Now what's left is running wires inside my walls. This part is gonna be fun.

¹ I read the 25^th novel in the Discworld series, The Truth, recommended to me by a great friend, and unless something really bad happens, I do believe I'm hooked. ² Hardcore Listening is when you sit yourself down in a comfy seat surrounded by speakers or headphones, turn off all the lights, close your eyes and just listen. ³ I do have a collection of non-vocal Music To Read By, which is mostly classical and/or piano music, but my collection isn't big enough for non-repetitive hours of material. I also like to listen to classical music when I read, or sometimes nothing at all, but slow techno provides a refreshing alternative.

My tie rod is loose

2005-10-20T09:58:00.000-04:00

From the I-love-dealerships department: So, an update on the ol' car situation: I take the car into the dealership's garage this morning for replacement of the defective ball joint assembly under warranty. They call me back just now and tell me that the tie rod on that side is loose. This makes me wonder if a) the tie-rod problem is related to the screw-up on the ball-joint assembly and/or b) the mechanics have orders to "find" new problems, especially when doing work for free (e.g. warranty repairs). Anyways, it's not a bad problem yet, so I'm going to wait and get the tie-rod fixed when I do the winter tires. At the friendly non-stealership garage.

Show me your bushing and I'll show you my lower control arm

2005-10-17T08:43:00.000-04:00

From the I-love-dealerships department: So about a week before I left for DARPA my car started to make funny noises. Er, funnier-than-normal noises, that is. It started with a mild clunk whenever I drove over a bump. That turned into a moderate clunk on the bumps accompanied by a squeak in the middle of right-hand turns. Nowadays it's a kachunk that I can feel through the steering wheel every time I go over the little bump at my driveway, and it squeaks not only in turns but also sometimes when accelerating or decelerating. My car is not a happy camper. Now, I don't think I blogged about it but last July I took my car into the ~~stealer~~dealership to get a bunch of things fixed: radiator leak, plus ball joint in right front, plus ball bearing in rear left. (trust me, it all ties in together at the end of the story) I'm not a huge fan of my dealership. I've had a few bad experiences. The first was when my car got broken into a few years ago. The thieves bent the doorframe back. When it was repaired, the window was tough to open and close. When I asked, I told that's to be expected. However, it got so tough that eventually some of the gear teeth broke and I couldn't fully open or close the window anymore. I wrote a complaint letter where I talked about quality service and customer care and such things. In response, they agreed to repair the broken mechanism labour-free but they still charged me for the parts, some $200 or so. In another case, I went in to fix one problem (I think it was a belt replacement or something like that) and came out with another: the right-front light was loose in its socket. According to the garage the whole unit would have to be replaced at a cost of near $300. Now, maybe that light did manage to get broken at some other time, or maybe it was always broken and I just happened to notice it shortly after their belt replacement. Or maybe they broke it while they were in there fixing other stuff. The belts are on the right side in my front-wheel-drive car, by the way. (in the end, I decided not to pay $300 to fix a loose headlight fixture) Now we have this latest case, with the clunks and squeaks. Keep in mind that among other things, earlier these mechanics at the dealership replaced a ball joint at the right-front wheel. Being fed up with the dealership's style of service, I decided to try another garage recommended to me by a friend. I dropped my car off early Friday morning and got a call from Dennis, one of the two guys who works at that garage: the bushing is shot in the lower control arm. The lower control arm is part of the ball joint assembly. This whole assembly is replaced at once. The really cool thing about this was that Dennis a) noticed that the parts were relatively new and b) instead of just telling me that I need to replace the ball joint, he c) told me that he noticed the part is relatively new and recommended I contact the people who installed it for a warrantied repair. So now I have an appointment back at the dealership on Thursday to get the thing replaced under warranty (parts AND labour are both covered under the warranty; I checked). Here's the thing: maybe the dealership mechanics made a mistake when they installed the part; maybe they broke it on purpose to get themselves some extra business down the road; maybe the part is truly defective. The point is that I want a garage where I can say to myself with certainty, "There's no way they would've done any of those things; it must be a defective part." I don't want to feel this uncertainty about my mechanics' skills or morals. Naturally I'll be taking advantage of the warranty repair for the latest issue, but from now on I think I'll be going to Autotec, the friendly garage. I'm also trying to think of something nice I can do for them, seeing as how Dennis was a) honest with me and b) spent some time on my vehicle to discover the broken part and didn't get anything back for it. Next time I'm there I'm going to ask him to charge me for whatever time he spent on my car to figure out the ball joint problem. If that doesn't work, I'm gonna bring them a box of Timmy's donuts or something. Anyways, that's the latest story of my car. Now onto something else: HOCKEY! It's not my buddy Pete's birthday quite yet, but it's coming up and his excellent wife managed to get ahold of some tickets to this weekend's Bruins/Sens game at the Corel Centre for a bunch of us. Good seats. Ground level, row D, where you can see the pain in a Bruins forward as a Sens defenceman takes him to the boards. It was a great game. The Sens took the Bruins to the cleaners with a 5-1 win. The only disappointment was that because the Sens kicked so much ass in the first two periods, the 3rd wasn't as suspenseful and action-packed as possible. Heh. So that was the high point this weekend. Hrm, what else is new? Well, this weekend was really windy (like 45km/h type winds). I haven't taken the air conditioner out of my bedroom window yet and some of that wind managed to find its way through little cracks around the A/C and so the temperature in my bedroom is hovering around 15-18 °C. So on my way home today I'll be stopping by the hardware store to pick up a dolly. See, my air conditioner is somewhat monstrous and there's no way I'm gonna be able to carry that thing around, and wherever I decide to put it I'll undoubtedly manage to damage the floor (heh, "manage to damage" ... it rhymes ... heh) unless I put it on a dolly and roll it into its storage spot.

Shortest one yet

2005-10-16T21:30:00.000-04:00

From the itsy-bitsy-teeny-weeny-blog-entry department: Just a quick update, with the hope that a real, more interesting blog entry will find its way here soon. #1: I've done a preliminary sort of the DARPA photos and gotten the grand total down to 318. That's 1.6G, and there's 1.8G of space left on my server. These two numbers just don't click, if you know what I mean. They ain't great dancing partners. They aren't having a good time under the boardwalk. They rented separate hotel rooms. What I'm trying to get at here is that I need to a) weed out some more photos and b) get some more space. The DARPA photos will be posted when either or both of these things happens. #2: The projector project is almost complete (as if it'll ever be fully finished, eh?). The two lights on the dimmer switch are installed and working great! I even found advanced instructions on the web on how to program it so that the time it takes to fade to and from bright/dark is longer and more dramatic. The outlet above the suspended ceiling is installed but I'm waiting to check it with a outlet wiring tester before I go plugging my $2k projector in there. So, what's left? * Come up with some sort of extra material, like a couple of blue feather boas or something, to cover up the tiny space at the top of the curtains. When the light above the piano is on, it casts an annoying light into the screening room just at the top edges of the room. Doesn't affect the picture, but it's annoying. * Paint the walls in the screening room a dark blue colour. This is sorta challenging because a) how do I delineate between the screening room and the piano room? Some sort of border is in order; and b) the ceiling is white and it'll be more annoying to paint because of its nature as a suspended ceiling. I'm not sure how it'll look with the ceiling left white and the walls dark blue. * Build or buy some sort of fancy couch so that more than three people at a time can enjoy movies. * Replace the ugly carpet in the basement. * Find a way to better hide the wires coming from the suspended ceiling to the components at the front of the room, under the screen. I suppose all this stuff about the projector room will become clearer when I put up some photos of the place, but since it's almost 22h00 and I gots ta work tomorrow, that'll have to wait. Oh, and this is turning out to be a lot longer than I thought it would. It may not be a contender for the shortest blog entry. Then again, it may be.

The One Without A Title Yet

2005-10-12T08:42:00.000-04:00

From the where-the-hell-d'ja-go? department: No, I'm not dead. I just haven't blogged in awhile. Okay, *two weeks*. Even for me, that's pretty bad. BUT! (you knew there was a but coming, right?) But, I'm back in town now and my fingers are itching to get back to da blogging. And I have a monster collection of photos from the DARPA Grand Challenge. Some of them are even good! So, lessee what's on the list of Things To Talk About^TM:

The end of the DARPA GC saga
The week-long Weekend Project

DARPA GRAND CHALLENGE SAGA: THE END The short story: my team didn't make it to the finals but I had a great time down in California. (you know I would never just leave it at that, don't you? It wouldn't be a NormMonkey blog if it didn't have five times the number of words required to poorly and lamely describe the dull events of my life, right? Let me tell you, in five paragraphs of a hundred words each, how I brushed my teeth this morning. You see, I started with a circular motion on the front choppers, then a deeper in-and-out action for them molars in the back.... ... and that was the sound of your brain, not on drugs, but on incredibly dull subject matter) OK, so, longer version, yes? Well, where did we leave off? I think it was two Fridays ago. I also think it's probably time to un-holster the bullet-maker for the Things That Happened Since Two Fridays Ago^TM part of our show (may or may not be in chronological order. Hey, it was two weeks ago, ya know?): * One of our team members and his great new bride joined us in California for the NQE just following their honeymoon in Hawaii. While they were out to dinner at the Old Spaghetti Factory (a well-decorated restaurant on Foothill Blvd. -- I want one of those blue chairs) somebody broke into their rented minivan and stole their laptop and camera. That really sucks. It sucks extra bad because they had all their honeymoon vacation pictures on there and now they're gone. * I met some cool people at the practise areas: a former DARPA guy who designed little hovercraft drones that are used for recon and now has his own small aircraft design/building company; the guy from Omnitech whose job is to hang around all day and wait for something bad to happen with somebody's safety radio; and Nicole C., a cute girl from the Army whose unit let her come out and grace us with her presence at the DARPA GC. See, the deal with the practise areas is that a bunch of us go out there with our truck, and then the two guys who're working on the software repeatedly drive the car around the area while the rest of us sit on our butts and do nothing except move obstacles around once in awhile, as needed. So there's lots of time to chat with the folks running the areas. * A brief summary of how our car did in its runs: Run one: we got out of the chute, turned right, and ran into a jersey barrier. And moved it. Those things weigh 16 tons (o/~ ya move 16 tons, whaddaya get / another day older and deeper in debt o/~ d:) Run two: made it through the first few gates and then stopped short of the tunnel, although we clipped the first gate and crushed a cone later on Run three: made it through the first few gates with no crushing action or contact of any sort, and stopped short of the tunnel again Run four: we skipped this 'cause we were having software problems with our car Run five: made it through the first few gates. Our brakes engaged at the bottom of a hill, and from then on they were engaged until our truck stopped in the middle of the tunnel. Turns out that the electromagnet which we use to hold our brakes in the disengaged position got weakened, probably from overheating. A software glitch caused us to stop in the middle of the tunnel, instead of just outside the far end, where we had programmed it to stop while it re-acquires GPS. So in short, we never did get to test our obstacle avoidance-ness or complete a run. * One of the teams managed to get their vehicle hopped up onto a bunch of hay bales, which consequently caught fire. * Another team's vehicle got out of the starting chute, turned right around and came back, running into one of the Jersey barriers separating the starting chutes and scaring the living daylights out of everybody in the area. * Yet another team ran into a wall at around 40mph and did a lot of damage to their vehicle. Somehow, they fixed it all up and manage to make it back, but were unable to complete their final run. * I managed to get away with two muffins and a free beer from Mimi's Cafe, a restaurant near our hotel (the official Nascar hotel, don'tcha know?) * Speaking of food and beer, we had a lot of good food and beers in between working and sleeping. Man, I was waddling (more than usual) away from those Chinese buffets. I guess I ate like a true American -- when in Rome, eh? ... and that pretty much summarizes all the stuff I can remember at this time. After the NQE closing ceremony, Dave and I made arrangements to fly home early, Dave because he'd rather be home *before* his firstborn child is... well... born, and myself because having three days of genuine vacation / recovery time seemed a much better option than going in to work immediately following a long early Monday morning of multiple plane rides. We got up at 01h30 or so to catch a shuttle to LAX for our 06h45 flight. So now you're thinking, "Is L.A. really 4 hours away from Ontario, CA?" No. It's about one hour away. The stupid shuttle guys made us get up early so that we could pick up *one* extra passenger on the way to the airport, getting there around 03h30 (2 hours 'cause we had to pick up the extra person, and hey a shuttlebus driver working at two in the morning doesn't cruise as fast as the rest of us, no matter how fancy his little GPS map thingy is). The shuttle guys have some silly policies which are supposed to ensure that people get to the airport before their flight (yeah, no kidding, guys. Two hours before we needed to be there. Who needs sleep anyways). So we sat around the airport for couple of hours or so. Personally I had no luggage so I was able to get my tickets from the express checkin machine, but Dave did so I decided to stick around with him until the attendants came to handle the baggage checkin. In the meantime we chatted with a fellow headed back to Toronto who also happened to show up early. I learned what "S S S S" means in the "Comments" area of a ticket. Turns out if you book a ticket only a couple of days in advance of your flight, you're a security risk and you get tagged for the extra special search. We also happened to run into a friend who just happened to have moved out to L.A. awhile ago and just happened to be heading back to Ottawa, and just happened to be on our flight. It's a small world. Nothing much else interesting happened. I mostly read and slept on the way to Toronto. At Toronto I rushed through customs to get to the gate early in an earnest attept to catch an earlier flight (they leave every hour, and if there's room they'll let you on earlier). Turns out that not only was the earlier flight completely full, there were 28 people on the wait-list in case some people didn't show up. So I waited an hour and took the flight I was booked on, getting home at around 18h00. Which leads nicely into part two of today's blog: THE WEEK-LONG WEEKEND PROJECT When I got home on Friday I finished the book I was reading. "The Truth" (Terry Pratchett, #25 in the Discworld series and also the first Terry Pratchett book I've ever read) was recommended to my by a great friend, somebody who a) knows great books and b) recognizes the kind of stuff I like and c) was thoughtful enough to intersect (a) and (b) into d) a great recommendation. Oh, and e) "The Inimitable Jeeves" (P. G. Wodehouse) is also turning out to be f) a good recommendation from g) this same. great. friend. who. Rulez! Anyways, I finished the book on Friday evening and on Saturday I went for a drive. As you may or may not know I sold my T.V. a few weeks ago. My plan was to wait until good prices around Christmas and then pick up a LCOS-type big screen television. I was thinking of 52" 16:9, which is pretty close to what I'd need in order to match the height of my old 32" 4:3 TV. While I was in California (see last blog) I saw a model I was interested in but the one in the store was disabled by a sticky fingered, er, free-lance technician. So I figured I'd go around to various stores to see if I could check out a working, non-disabled type version of said model. (you can see where this is leading, can't you...) So I was on my way to Kanata Centrum (a big blob of stores haphazardly scattered in a small area, for those playing long at home). On my way out there I passed by a little store called Signature Audio Video that I'd never heard of, so I decided to stop in and see what they're all about. They didn't have any LCOS televisions. (you know this story doesn't end here, don't you...) Imagine you're a gadget-loving technomonkey. You just walked into a store full of flashing blinky lights and plastic-encased technological wonders. There are people walking around who get paid to know things about and play with this stuff every day. What do you do? Of course, I grabbed the nearest available salesperson and started asking questions. Anyways, when I left the store a little bit later my brain was filled with ideas not about TVs but projectors. With Chad the TV Sales Guy I discussed TVs, looked at different models around the store, discussed pros and cons, and eventually the conversation lead to projectors. I checked out a bunch of different options and stuff (including hooking up my laptop to one of them so I could check out the quality of the projection). When I got home I got online and did a bunch of research. While I slept, the gadgetloving part of my brain beat the frugal part into submission (not much of a battle, since the gadgetloving part has fought the frugal part many times before and knows all the right moves) and then shoved gadgetloving part into a cage while I was unconscious. The next day I headed back to the store and came home with lots of toys. Let the project begin. After an hour I had the projector hanging from my basement ceiling. After three hours I had the screen assembled and hung. After three hours and twenty seconds I was watching a DVD on my new glorious 92" screen. But that's not where this story ends. Oh, no. Now that I knew the magic worked, I ran the power and signal wires from the projector through the suspended ceiling to their places. The next day, after work (yeah, I went to work on Monday, Canadian Thanksgiving. I decided it would be better if I were in the office to handle calls when nobody else was there, and instead trade for American Thanksgiving when there will be other people here while I'm away) when I got home I hung some drapes between the new "screening room" part of my basement and the rest. Yesterday I went to Home Depot to investigate lighting solutions. When I got home I did some peeking around above the suspended ceiling to ensure that all my plans would work. Today, on my way home, I will stop by Home Depot and pick up some things. If all goes well, The Week-Long Weekend Project^TM will be almost finished. Let me describe what I hope things will be like when I finish up. I walk downstairs to my basement, a bowl of popcorn in one hand and an ice-filled glass of lemonade¹ in the other. My basement is not the long room it used to be. Before me, dark blue drapes stretch from ceiling to floor, separating the screening room from the piano room. To my left, a set of shelves holds my DVD collection. Today I will not need to browse here, for in the screening room the Lord of the Rings trilogy (extended version with all the extra stuff) awaits me. I pass through the curtains and push a switch on the wall. The spotlights in the ceiling slowly rise, illuminating the couch. I set my stuff down on a little TV table and get comfy on the couch. A little bit of remote control jockeying starts the projector, DVD player and amplifier. As the screen warms up and the DVD menu appears, a little more remote control action brings a start to this evening of entertainment. The lights slowly fade to black as the opening scenes begin. The only thing that's kinda sucky about this is that my basement room is only 9' wide. There's only room for one couch across, which means only three people can watch at a time, a couple more if said people are *really* friendly with each other. The only solution to this problem that comes to mind is as follows: toss the couch and the coffee table. Now there's a big open space in front of the screen about 9' wide and maybe 7-10' deep. Now imagine that there's a set of steps there, 9' wide. Each of the steps is 2-3' deep. The rise on the first step is 2', and the rise on each of the next 3 or 4 steps is 1'. Rising above the last step is a wall that extends to the ceiling. The steps and the back wall are covered in plush carpeting, perhaps with an inch of foam underneath. There are random small pillows scattered everywhere on the steps. In the corners on the top step lie the two rear speakers. Back in boarding school at St. John's-Ravenscourt we had something like this in our TV room, although that room was some 30' square and probably 15-20' high. That was perfect for boarders 'cause it holds lots of people, it's fairly comfortable and durable, and the carpet is durable and easily replaceable. Well, I probably won't do the steps-seating thing, although I like the idea. My room is probably too small for it, and I can't figure out how people would get into the room. And the projector hanging from the ceiling would probably be in the way. Maybe the idea isn't all that bad, though. Maybe I could build something smaller that still has two levels to it so that six or seven people could be comfy.

¹ Yeah, OK, I know it's almost winter. In NormLand ice and lemonade are welcome year-round. Popcorn too, for that matter.

Infrequent update #1

2005-09-30T18:26:00.000-04:00

From the who-needs-a-driver? department: You'll have to excuse me if the next few entries seem a little rushed. They are. Time is constrained. I'll probably limit myself to 10,000 words (heh). Oh, yeah. And since internet is kinda constrained as well, entries will be brief, big, and infrequent. So, recent events: 1) Travel day (Monday 20050926) Started as a rainy day in Ottawa. I got up and finished all the crap I should have done the night before, like packing clothes, calling for a taxi, etc. You know what I'm talking about. Anyways, I'd just finished eating some leftover barbequed and marinated-in-pickled-pepper-juice pork (heh) when the taxi showed up and it's off to the airport for yours truly. Met up with some of the other team members. Jim got tagged for a random search, as did the guy just in front of me (heh; now they'll never notice my terrorist bombs and illegal contraband. Until they read this. Oops). The flight, being a Delta flight, stopped in Atlanta. We flew there in an uncomfortable CRJ-200. My neck will never be the same. In Atlanta we stopped to have some beer and chips 'n' salsa before boarding an old 676-300 to Ontario, CA. We got not one but *two* snack packs (woo!) while the folk in first class enjoyed wine, caviar and a full meal (they even brought out a cow so the lords and ladies could mark their cut). The movie was "Herbie: fully loaded". I declined to pay $2 for the crappy headphones, and then discovered that I've lost my little airplane headphone adapter (again). But Herbie was just as enjoyable without the sound, thanks to Lindsay Lohan. Cool fact of the day: part of Herbie was filmed at the California Speedway, where I'm currently spending large parts of my day working on an autonomous ~~wall-crusher~~ vehicle. I spent a few minutes watching Herbie not for the ~~babe-o-licious Lindsay Lohan~~ exciting plot but instead checking out the layout of the garages. I knew before ever showing up at the speedway what the place I'd be working in for the next weeek and a half would look like. So four of us got in at around 18h50 (having left Atlanta at 18h00) and grabbed a rented car (how many engineers does it take to figure out how to flip the high-beams?) to do the ten minute trip to our hotel, the official Nascar Hotel dontchaknow, and right near the epicenter of Rancho Cucamonga. When we arrived we ran into two of the others traveling from Ottawa on the same day. After we dragged them from under the car (get it? "ran into"? heh ... heh ... ok, tough crowd) we asked them how their trip went. They left two hours before us and flew from Ottawa -> Toronto -> Chicago -> Orange County, where they got a car and drove for almost two hours to get to where we were. After we dropped our stuff in our rooms we went and had some food and beer. 2) Tuesday We spent the morning working on our vehicle in the parking lot of the hotel. Then we headed over to the car wash to debug our truck and made our way to the Speedway. We checked in and worked on our vehicle some more. I got to sit through the Team Leader's meeting which was basically a review of the rules, schedules, Q&A and so forth. Then back to the car to do more work. I also took the opportunity to head to the other garage bays to take photos of the other vehicles. They kicked us out at 22h00 so we went to get food and beer. 3) Wednesday We woke up at just before sunrise (bleah!) and headed over to the Speedway. We got there at 06h00 and did a little bit of work before they took all our cars and lined them up behind a stage, in front of the infield grandstand, for the opening ceremonies. Nothing terribly special, but some great photos -- BTW when all is said and done and I'm back in Ottawa I'll be organizing the photos, but I probably won't have time 'til then -- especially after the speeches when everybody got to mingle and stare at the ~~hot twin Axion Racing sisters in less-than-short-shorts~~ other vehicles. I got lots of photos. Back to the garages to tinker some more and await our inspection. We passed that with no problems at all. Around 13h30 I headed over to the track to watch the first few competitors do their runs. I was a little surprised at how well the first few did, and astounded at how incredibly well the second team (Stanford) did: they did a perfect run in better-than-minimum time! They really set the bar high for everybody. I saw three teams finish, one stopped inexplicably in a totally benign area (turns out that the car didn't crash, the computer did d:), one came close to ramming a wall but got E-STOP'd in time, one took out part of an obstacle, and then there was us. We went out of the starting chute, turned right, and rammed into a wall. The DARPA guy put us in PAUSE mode instead of DISABLE (which is fine, that might be their policy for this kind of thing) and while DISABLE releases the brake clutch and kills the engine, PAUSE throttles down and applies brakes normally (much slower) so it didn't respond to the PAUSE in time to prevent ramming the concrete barrier. Our truck is quite heavy, especially with the rubber-filled tires (over 250lb. each) and we actually managed to *move* the Jersey barrier. We also horked our bumper, although Kevin did a great job on the bumper and frame he made. Were it not for his excellent work on that stuff that accident would have been fatal for us. Anyways, I didn't watch any of the other teams after that 'cause I went back to help assess vehicle damage. I hear that about half the teams did alright, while the others had problems. We've already fixed the problem that caused our accident, we've assessed the equipment for damage. The GPS doesn't seem to be operating properly but the rest is fine. Once the GPS issue is resolved we should be ready to operate again -- hopefully getting in some practice runs before they put us on the track again. Well, it's late at night and I hear the call of my pillow. Photos to come later (I've taken 222 so far, but a lot of those are multiple attempts at the same photo; it's probably around 80 unique photos). 4) Thursday We met a little later this morning (06h30 -- the sun was *just* rising) and headed back to the Speedway to check out the GPS. Stanford was kind enough to lend us one of their antennae to help us troubleshoot -- as it turns out, our GPS problems were due to the antenna just as we'd thought. I guess that little antenna is too delicate to handle our truck's lust for Jersey barriers. We phoned up our supplier and arranged to pick up a new antenna at their office in Torrance -- about an hour and a half away from the Speedway. Tom and I headed out to pick it up -- turns out it was a good thing we both went 'cause with two of us we could take advantage of the carpool lane -- that really helped. I was amazed at the smog hanging over L. A. Crazy, man. Crazy. I got a couple o' photos. There's even "Official Smog Stations" where you can get your car checked to make sure it produces enough smog. We got back from Torrance and installed our new antenna with no problem. Turns out that while Tom and I were gone we got ourselves a practise session (using Stanford's antenna -- thanks Stanford!). Apparently the practise went alright -- our truck made no amorous moves for any Jersey barriers. We headed back to the hotel early 'cause there was nothing else to do on the car -- Jim and Dave had a lot of planning and work to do on the software which was easier to deal with at the hotel. I headed back to my room and tried to read my book, which ended up as a little nap. When I'm moving around and doing stuff I'm good to go, but I kinda shut down as soon as I switched to doing nothing. Later on, Tom and I headed back to our Speedway garage to work a little on his concept LIDAR -- we bought some sheets of clear plastic and cut it to make a window for the front opening. Just as we finished up with that, we coordinated with the others to head over to Omaha Jack's Steakhouse and Brewery for dinner (that is, they called us from the restaurant and said, "Hey, we're eating now". They wouldn't even take our advance order for beer!). Home of the big ribs man; big ribs -- and a good porter, too. Stopped at a Sears on the way back to the hotel -- we went in looking for a measuring device for calibrating our LIDARS but I took the opportunity to look at some big-screen TVs, except the model that I'm thinking of buying wasn't working. On closer inspection it looks like somebody ripped off the lamp. I'm surprised the store doesn't put any security on their stuff. Those lamps are expensive. While at Sears I picked up a couple of shorts and a shirt. We also grabbed some beers, then headed back to the hotel. Some of us watched the end of an incredibly stupid movie with "The Rock" and Sean Aston (I have no idea what it's called but it was so bad it was funny... "Oh, that's just methane deposits. No big deal." "Apparently you don't know anything about methane deposits!") before ending the day. 5) Friday (hey, that's today!) Got up and headed to the garage at 06h30 again, although Jim and Eugene headed in earlier. We had another opportunity for a practise run which went OK -- we used it to try tweaking a bunch of settings and grabbing a lot of data to analyse. That brings us to right now, which is lunch. More to come later. A couple of PHOTOS are uploaded. Find them here: http://www.gnurple.net/gallery/darpa-nqe.

Go west young man!

2005-09-25T19:39:00.000-04:00

From the who-needs-a-driver? department: Well, the weekend is almost over and tomorrow dawns a new day and a new adventure: autonomous vehicle racing! I'm part of a team of people who've written some software and modified a truck to drive autonomously. We're competing in the DARPA Grand Challenge 2005, where 40 teams, picked from well over 100 initial applicants, will compete in the qualifying event. From there, 20 teams will actually run the race. Our team has already passed our site visit and made it into the top 40! Here's the scoop: two hours before the final race starts, the 20 finalists will be given the race route. If our car can run the ~175km route in 10 hours or less AND beat all the others, we win the big bucks: $USD 2M -- of which most will be returned to our company, Autonosys, and some will be divided up among the team members. So as you can probably guess I'm pretty excited, and it's that time (the night before travel-day) when I get to run around, make sure I have everything I need, pack stuff up, empty the ol' laptop bag and all of that jazz before the trip to Ontario, California tomorrow. DONE: * Cat feeding arrangements made, thanks to a good friend * Reading material acquired * Battery for camera charged * All outstanding photos on CF card and laptop sync'd to photo storage USB-hard drive TODO: * Pack (passport, laptop, camera, books, clothes, swimsuit, MP3 player plus charger, cell phone plus charger, DVDs) * Feed cats * Empty litter, take out all trash and recycleables * Call to schedule a taxi * Celebrate the finishment of packing with a milkshake In other news, my sister and bro-in-law came to visit this weekend -- they showed up at 00h30 on Saturday morning, we did the house tour, sat arund to talk and drink for an hour or so, then off to bed. Next morning we goofed off for about an hour, then headed to Cora's in Kanata for brunch. After that we did our weekly call with my mom from the comfort of their car (we were gonna do it before heading for breakkie but ... well, nothing really goes as planned where certain read-headed members of my family are concerned :). Finally, we headed off to Bayshore where they picked up a present for the wedding they were going to that afternoon, and I picked up THEIR wedding present which I'm about two months late on -- at least I got her birthday present on time! I went and bought myself a third wireless thermohygrometer -- now there's one downstairs, one upstairs and one outside (plus the base station on the main floor). While I was at Radio Shack getting the thermohygrometer I saw a cool gadget: a little pen on a retractable cord, connected to a carabiner. It was all cool and shiny and my silly brain justified buying it by thinking that I could put it in my car -- I'm always writing mileage on my gas receipts so having a pen there would be useful. Besides it was only a buck. Later I realized how difficult it is to write with a pen whose top is tethered by a spring. Not to mention that there's always a pen in one of my pockets. Ah, well. I guess I'll have to donate a buck to charity. OK, back to Saturday: I pretty much goofed off for the rest of the day. I had an afternoon nap that totally threw my brain's chronometer off. When I woke up, it felt like it was two hours ahead of real time, but because of the nap I knew I wouldn't be tired enough to sleep until two hours LATER than usual -- for a grand total of four hours of brain offset. I like my brain but sometimes I'm not so proud of its ... er, eccentricities? Let's just say that sometimes it's a really great thinking brain, and the rest of the time I'm awake. (thank you very much, and hey try the fish!) So on Saturday evening I was in front of my computer screen not blogging (or is that "as usual, not blogging") but talking on da IM to a friend who was in a similar predicament. She managed to wake up at 17h00 and probably had a similar discussion with her brain to the one I had just finished with mine. Anyways, we figured that we'd need something to do for the rest of our messed-up day/night/something and ended up going for coffee -- or a frozen hot chocolate in my case -- to chat and stuff while we figured out what to do. That turned into a walk to Chapters where my cellphone's scratchpad grew with about three new titles of books I want to get. From there we decided to head over to Tucson's for some tunes, which turned out to be a really great idea. I'd forgotten how much I love da live music. See, normally live music is that crap they play at dance bars and discos. Tucson's on the other hand plays blues and jazz and good ol' fashion rock and roll -- the kinda stuff I love. I'd forgotten about it 'cause I hadn't been there in ages to hear music. The last time was before university, with my dad and sister! (one of my annoying quirks is that I don't get out and do much by myself, which turns out to be a catch-22 in the meeting-people department) Anyways, we had a great time listening to the Five Man Electrical Band. These guys have been around for ages, as I learned about five seconds ago while hunting for that link (*grin*). They totally rocked on the instruments on Saturday night, but their vocals weren't great. However, I get the feeling that they were just having an off night and that they really are good vocalists as well as great instrumentalists. In any event their tunage woke up a part of my soul that had been dormant for far too long. I love the live music, and I gotta make a point of getting back to Tucson's way more often. After the music was all over -- we stayed 'til they finished their last set, around 01h30 or so -- we headed our separate ways. Me to find my bed and she to go have lunch. In keeping with the photo blog idea, I'll leave today's entry with this: Yep, that's right, it's my lunch from today! (how fresh is that?! d:) Today's lunch was barbequed chicken, topped with Heinz 57 sauce and marinated in leftover pickled hot pepper juice (a surprisingly good marinade as it turns out), served with rotini in a tomato-basil alfredo sauce. Lots of room for improvement in my first attempt at food photography (I know the art of food photography has a name, but I don't know what it is, which tells you something about my skill at it, eh?). I shoulda used a blue tablecloth and a matching knife. The chicken has a little piece missing (you can see the white bit on the right) where I impatiently snagged a trial piece (it turned out really well in the taste department). Oh, and the corners where the table is missing at the top? Suckage. Hrm, what else? I coulda used a bit narrower DoF. Still, it makes me hungry to look at it.

Avast!

2005-09-21T14:14:00.000-04:00

From the me-timbers-are-shivered department: Well, I totally missed Talk Like A Pirate day. Arr. In other news, I haven't written any new posts in awhile, and that's just no good. I've been working on a little essay-like document that explores listening to music, but that's no excuse for not coming here to write stuff in my lil' ol' online diary. Let's go back to last Saturday. What were you doing? I was tearing down walls. No, not my own walls. Why would I do that? I was tearing down somebody else's walls, of course. My good friend P&M's house has been under constant renovation since, well, since longer than I can remember, actually (good thing I'm starting to write stuff down here, eh?!). Last year they built an extension onto their house which added a room to every floor. Last Saturday we started on a project that will ultimately end in a really cool master bedroom. The first step in this process was to remove the walls in one of the existing rooms. Demolishing stuff is fun. Tearing down plaster and lathe walls is especially fun because it pretty much *has* to be done the fun way: whacking it with hammers and crowbars and pulling and tearing pieces off with your hands. It's one of those situations where taking a piece of wood and busting it across your knee while grunting isn't totally out of place. We finished that up, got cleaned up and then headed over to Adam's (Adam is a P&M renovation-helper regular and was helping with the busting up of walls, btw) house for an episode of TV-watching, PS2-playing, checking out Adam's own renovations and just general hanging out.

MP3 player madness

2005-09-15T09:02:00.000-04:00

From the too-many-DAPs department: Well, yesterday I talked about a migration towards more photos. So be it! Today's post looks at the insanity that is my MP3 player collection. I'm a typical engineer/geek type guy: I love the gadgets. I have three players I actually use, and three dust collectors. Not surprisingly every single one of them has something blue about it. The active collection ARCHOS The big one is an Archos Jukebox Recorder 20. It's old. I don't think you can even buy these anymore 'cept on eBay. It's got a laptop HDD and holds about 20GB. I got it just before they came out with the cooler version that had an FM tuner in it (you can't buy that one anymore either -- DAP models spend so little time on the shelf you wonder if the truck with the latest models is on the road even as you browse). I built a holder out of sheet metal and covered in duct tape (~~what project doesn't have duct tape?~~ to protect against sharp edges) which I mounted to the dashboard of my car. Things I like about it / use it for: * Runs RockBox, the world's greatest DAP software * Big enough to hold my entire music collection * Replaceable batteries * Lasts a long time on battery power (for a HDD based player ... did I mention RockBox?) * Shuffles *very* quickly, remembers random seed and playlist position (go RockBox!) * Easily adjusted sound settings (I have five customized settings for my desk speakers, crappy budphones, good headphones, car, and home stereo), one of a million rockin' RockBox features * Use it in my car, especially on long trips * Use it at my office desk * Use it with the stereo at home * Did I mention that it runs RockBox? IRIVER The iRed one with the iBlue iScreen is an iRiver iFP-899. iIt comes with free extra i's! This is my first flash-based player. It has 256MB. My boss bought it and then decided he wanted something else, so he offered it to people in the office. I drooled a little (new gadget reflex response), borrowed it to try it out and then I broke it while trying to update the firmware. I bought it off him and sent the unit in for replacement. They sent me back the full kit, so I have spare holders and cables and stuff. My collection of mini-USB cables grows. The thing I actually like about it most is that because it only holds four hours of music I had to write a script to load it with a selection of random songs. I like writing scripts. They don't let me out of my box into the world of development very much at work. Things I like about it / use it for: * Blue EL screen (heh) * Plays Ogg-Vorbis files * FM tuner * Replaceable AA battery * Use it as my office desk radio (I keep four NiMH batteries and a charger at the office for it) Things I don't like: * 256MB? That's only 4 hours! * Crappy non-UMS interface -- there's a firmware update out there now that will allow it to be a Mass Storage device, but I won't touch it with a ten foot firmware pole. This is another reason I needed to write a script for loading it: the linux interface to it isn't perfect. SAMSUNG The tiny one is my latest toy. It's 512MB and it's so tiny I wear it practically everywhere, which means I look like a total nerd. On the other hand, a cute girl at the grocery store asked about it, so that's a good thing. Things I like about it / use it for: * Tiny! Not quite MobiBLU-sized, but still very small * Blue LED (heh) * FM tuner * Replaceable AAA battery * Great battery life * Use it when walking, biking, whatever * Draws comments from cute cashiers Things I don't like: Unless it's in shuffle mode, it plays all songs alphabetically^[1]. When it *is* in shuffle mode, it doesn't remember the randomness seed (none of the DAP firmwares do this, except RockBox of course d:) so when you turn it off and then on again it can't remember which songs it's already played for you. It remembers the song you were listening to, but the next random song won't be the next shuffle song you were going to get if you hadn't turned it off. Crap, that makes no sense. I'll try again, this time with examples and hand illustrations: imagine you have ten songs on your player. You've listened to 4 of them in shuffle mode; you're in the middle of the 5th; five are left to play after it. If you don't turn it off, you will finish the one you're on, hear the final five, and as the last song finishes you will have heard each of your songs exactly once. If you *do* turn it off, however, when you next start it back up here's what happens: you will finish the song you were on, but instead of hearing the final five it will re-shuffle and play a random selection from the original ten songs. You'll end up hearing some songs from the first five before you ever get around to hearing all the songs from the last five. OK, so maybe there were no hand illustrations, but there were a lot of words. If you're not going to have any pictures, you should at least have a thousand words in their place, right? Here's the thing about me and music: I really, really like listening to music in random order. Right about now all zero of the people who read this blog who know me are saying, "Yeah, that's why we get a Young MC, followed by Joe Cocker, then Star Wars Imperial March, and finally O Canada." They may have a point, but here's the thing: most of my music is sappy and/or 80's and/or Barenaked Ladies. With those three categories I describe at least 80% of my collection. So it's mostly all in the same theme. With a few exceptions, it does flow pretty well on random mode. It's a lot like listening to Majic 100, without the talking and commercials (and with a bonus X-Files extended intro, or O Canada (remember when radio stations used to play O Canada at the start of every broadcast?)). (Another thing to note is that each and every song that goes into my collection is individually evaluated for inclusion. I don't just rip every CD I own. It's a lot more work, but I end up with a collection I really love) The more important thing about shuffle is that the alternatives to shuffle are no good. The choices are: a) listen to them alphabetically. Young MC will be followed by Z. Z. Top. As good (or bad) as shuffle, but with the same order every time you listen to it. Also, you'll end up hearing all of the songs by one artist before going onto the next.^[2] With my monster collection of BNL songs, you'd never hear anything else. b) make playlists. This is no good because it takes effort to make playlists. I'm lazy; I just want music. Besides, there's two things wrong with playlists: 1) unless you shuffle your playlists, you'll always hear songs in the same order, every time through. If you *do* shuffle them, what's the point of the playlists as an alternative to shuffle? 2) if you build playlists, odds are you'll get attached to playing a select bunch of them. This means there are some songs you'll rarely hear. Also, unless you're really smart about building your lists, you'll probably end up with too many songs you really love and not enough of the ones you only somewhat love^[3]. Boy, this talking about shuffle has practically turned into an essay. Hrm. The "rant about advertising" essay. The "shuffle" essay. I may have to start an essay section!

^[1] I've solved this problem by modifying my script that loads random songs onto the player. Now, as it randomly chooses songs to load, it prefixes the filename of each song it loads onto the player with an index number. Then I just set the player to non-shuffle mode and I get a random selection of songs whose order will be retained through power cycles. It's basically a single-use, shuffled, filename-enforced playlist. Just what the doctor ordered! ^[2] This assumes that your files are listed with artist name first. If you've got them title-first, then it's a little more like playing them shuffled, except the order through is the same every time, and there's an additional snag: you'll hear all versions of a particular song one after another. I have three versions of BNL's "If I had $1000000". I have two versions of "Killing Me Softly" by different artists. ^[3] Music needs to hit you in waves, a repeating cycle of songs that grab your attention and songs that are more background to your mind. If you go outside on a bright sunny day, after a minute or so you're accustomed to it; you don't notice it's bright anymore. If you keep going inside and outside, you'll notice how bright it is each time you go outside.

Fall is coming

2005-09-14T09:54:00.000-04:00

From the autumn-looms department: The season of running the air conditioner every night, of barbequeing at 20h00 while it's still light out, of lying in the sun, of water-skiing, of gorgeous girls in short shorts and spaghetti straps, of bikinis on the beach, of biking for hours, is coming to a close. Unfortunately I don't have any pictures of gorgeous girls in short shorts and spaghetti straps, so we'll have to settle for this lame BBQ photo that I took last night. Gotta love the crappy background isolation job I did, especially around the feet. Click on the photo to see a slightly different version. I also took some moon photos, which explains the new Gnurple dot Net header image. The best of the bunch can be found here. There's also a three new photos of the house here. And that concludes today's short blog post. I had a rant about advertising that I was going to post, but it's mutating into a full-blown essay of some sort. In its current state it's incredibly dull to read, but I'm working on it. I'm noticing that this lame blog is migrating towards becoming a lame photo blog. I think this is great. I need to get back into practising my photographic skills. A friend suggested that I get into a photography class or club to do more practising and learning. I think that's a great idea and I'm gonna look into it. I still want this blog to be my diary, my writing skills sandbox, my creativity outlet, but I think adding photos every once in awhile only makes my little star shine brighter in the sky of lame blogs.

You my electrical lip balm flava

2005-09-09T21:18:00.000-04:00

From the energetic-music department: If you've ever played Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit 2 then you know what I'm talkin' about: "Fever for the Flava" by Hot Action Cop. I heard it in one of the American Pie movies, grepped the name and artist in the song list after the credits, and the next thing you know I recently got hold of the song itself. I don't know what it is about this song. Something about the beat and the tune just energizes me. It's like an automatic thirty attitude pluspoints just for listening to it; sixty if I listen to it on a Friday right after work. Maybe you have to be introduced to the song through playing the game, to feel the rush of taking corners at 100mph with your friend half a second behind you and gaining, while listening to this song to build the energy association with it. Maybe it has this effect on everybody, or just people who "get" it. As soon as I got it and listened to it a couple of times I knew that I just *had* to play it on my Friday drive home (ASIDE: anybody who knows me knows what Friday right after work means to me. My drive home is about 45 minutes. During that time I unwind and change from work mode to life mode. Friday right after work doubles the positive effect on my attitude. See the first paragraph of this post). I had a couple of other songs on my music player that also happened to have some energetic-ness to them, and the total effect for my Friday drive home was pretty amazing. By the time I got to the grocery store I was bouncing on my feet. That got me thinking of making a special "energy" song playlist. Here's my take: it's no good to simply take a bunch of high-energy songs and string 'em together; too much of a good thing would just become a familiar numbness that fades into the background. A sequence of songs needs to lift you up to a high energy level and then slowly ebb back in a series of song-energy waves to keep your attention and have the right effect. I naturally lean towards slower, sappy/cheesy music so my baseline music -- the lowest or "normal" point of the wave -- needs to reflect this. So far, here's what I have for the lineup. If you: * like 80's/sappy/cheesy songs (for those playing at home in the Ottawa area, think Majic 100) * occasionally turn up the volume on a slow song as well as the fast ones; * appreciate older music as well as newer; * appreciate cover songs for their merit even if you love the original version ... then you might enjoy this lineup: Evanescence - My Immortal (the full band version) Aerosmith - Don't Wanna Miss a Thing Hot Action Cop - Fever for the Flava (Hot Pursuit 2 version) Goo Goo Dolls - Give a Little Bit Uncle Kracker - Drift Away White Snake - Here I Go Again Hot Action Cop - Fever for the Flava (original)

Car super-washing weekend

2005-09-08T09:18:00.000-04:00

From the clean-cars-r-us department: So I cleaned my car last weeekend. Sounds like a real pile of fun, doesn't it? Surprisingly, I spent two days (!) on this episode of fanatic sudsmanship. SATURDAY Without going into *too* much boring, lame detail, I basically spent the day on the interior of the car -- well, with part of the day taken up by barbequeing food and taking rain breaks to watch TV episodes on DVD. After renting a steam cleaner early in the morning and trying it out on some sofa cushions and futons, I got started on the car. I started by emptying the cabin of all its junk. Among the crap were prints of Google maps, various receipts, a cardboard drink tray of the sort fast-food places give you -- that sorta thing. Then I took the two front seats out. This was so easy to do that I'm gonna keep the option in mind next time I have something big to transport. The geeky part of me wants to take the passenger seat out permanently and mount some kind of mobile computing platform there instead. I don't even know what I want it to do -- it's just the idea that fascinates me. I did at least two steam-cleaning passes on the seats and then steam-cleaned every upholstered and carpeted surface inside the cabin (except the roof, and the visors -- I even did the tiny upholstered bits on the door panels!). I probably did five or six passes on the driver's side floor carpet which was full of the kind of salt stains and dirt that only five years of Canadian winter can visit upon a car by way of boots. I cleaned all the plastic areas inside the car first with soapy water, and then with Armour-all for that shiny UV protection it gives (what can I say -- I like shiny). More soap and water to clean all the areas around the door-frame that seem to collect dirt and oily grime with gusto for later transmission onto your pant legs. I was pleasantly surprised at how much easier it is to clean the interior with the two seats out of the way. Next I attacked the windows, first with Windex and afterward with soap and water once I noted that Windex leaves some kind of film that sunlight picks up on the windshield. Dish soap, on the other hand, leaves the windows as clean as... well, as clean as a drinking glass! No film! Finally, just as darkness was setting in, I emptied the trunk (except for the subwoofer unit) and steam-cleaned all the carpeting. Then I put about half of the stuff that came out of there back in and that was it for the day. It was too dark and I was too tired of car cleaning to put the seats back in, despite the fact that I had to return the steam cleaner the next morning -- an activity for which a driver's side car seat is pretty crucial, you realize. SUNDAY I spent today on the car's exterior. The day started with getting up fifteen minutes earlier than planned to reinstall the driver's seat so that I could take my rented steam-cleaner back to the store. Fifteen minutes may not sound like much, but when you value sleep like I do, it's really annoying -- especially on a weekend. The line-up tool at the tool rental department of the store was incredible. Everybody who rented something for 24 hours this day would actually get to use it for 48 because of Labour Day Monday. When I (finally) got home I started on the car's exterior with a pass using the pressure washer. Then I prepared a bucket of soapy water and cleaned everything except the tires. That took awhile, especially getting rid of all the bug-guts stuck on the front. By the time this was done it was time for lunch, and a quick DVD break. When I got back I did another, quicker pass with the soap and water, and then a rinse with the power washer. I dried the car with the chamois. I re-cleaned all the windows with soap and water. Finally, I did the front and back bumpers, and the door handles, with Armour-all. Mmmm, shiny. By this time I was really happy with how everything looked and I was tired of cleaning the car so I decided not to wax the outside at this time. Instead I snapped a few pictures. Next weekend I'm cleaning the house and the weekend after that my sister is visiting, plus I need to prepare for a trip to California, so the waxing will have to wait awhile. By that time the car will probably be in need of another exterior washing. There ends the saga of the car super-washing weekend. AZROLB heaves a sigh of relief. But the post isn't over yet! What about Monday?! I can sum up Monday with three words: 1) DVDs; 2) food; 3) sleep. LABOUR DAY MONDAY Well, that's not quite true. I spent a little bit more time with the car on Monday. You see, ever since I accidentally broke the dome light in my car a year or two ago, I've had this plan to embed some blue LEDs in the roof. The plan involves a blue EL strip across the middle (stretching between the driver's door and the front passenger's door) and four blue LEDs positioned above each of the passenger seats. The hole in the roof where the dome light control used to be will be occupied by a small metal plate, spray-painted to match the interior, and containing a slider switch (to control whether the lights activate when the doors are opened) as well as a toggle switch (to switch the lights on or off regardless of the door). Most cars have a single tri-position switch: OFF, DOOR, ON. I think more buttons and knobbies are better, so I'm gonna have two. Today I was planning to make some progress in setting this up. I started by testing the EL strip on a 12V power source to see what happens. It glowed. Woohoo! Then I tested the blue LEDs. They glowed. Woohoo! Then I smelled something burning. Ah, crap! I got out the multimeter and it turns out that my 12VDC power source puts out around 17VDC. I blew the resistor, and maybe the blue LEDs as well. Doh! Then I took the multimeter out to the car to try and figure out which wires leading to the dome light were which. After a futile search to get any voltage to register on any combination or permutation of the wires, I checked the fuse and -- after retrieving the repair manual to figure out which fuse... it was the "BODY" fuse for those following along at home -- discovered it was blown. The manual also told me which wires were which for the dome light, but with the blown dome light fuse (I checked to see if there was anything else important on that fuse, but there isn't really) and the blown resistor on the blue LED string, I decided to call it a day. Maybe I'll play with that some more this weekend if the house cleaning goes well. In the meantime, here ends another overly wordy post from the mind and memory of the NormMonkey. Cheerio.

Add-o-Matic is back!

2005-09-08T08:50:00.000-04:00

From the whats-wrong-with-deepthoughts department: I just tried to add a deepthoughts this morning and discovered that I'd managed to break some file permissions the last time I was monkeying with it. Lesson: Always test your project after you monkey with it. Number of times learned: More than I can count, man. Resolution: I resolve to make the same mistake of not testing after I make changes on some project in the future. C'mon, let's face it, it'll be a lot easier to keep this resolution than something like, "I will always make a full test as the last step of making changes." I mean, who does that? If everybody did stuff like this then the poor technical support people out there in the world would be out of a job! In any event deepthoughts is up and running again. I tested it! It really is working^*!

^* As of 20050908 with no guarantee I won't muck it up at some later date in the future by trying to make it better.