ThisBoyIsToast V4 >> July 2005 Archives

At some unknown time in the past I saw something about Cowboy Bebop that told me I wouldn't like it. It was early in my anime experiences and I think it was Spike's boots... too amateurish in their depiction. But I recently gave the late 90s scifi series a chance and I am now addicted. I still want Spike to change his boots.

What is weird is that I cannot but feel that Joss Whedon saw this series and was inspired to take a try at genre hacking and make Firefly. CB combines (despite the title) a sort of lowtech noir feel of setting and style and combines it with a not-too-distant scifi setting completely within the boundaries of our solar system. Cowboys are just bounty hunters -- our main characters' profession. Hyerpspace is there but only for planet to planet. Venus, Mars, Uranus, etc are all being teraformed and all have a sort of rundown look of frontier towns. Earth is a ruin as pieces of a cracked moon fall down onto it. The characters are rough and tumble and their are many depths to crime and business. I like it. July 31 05

I am obsessed with getting things done only because I never get anything done. Thus I am now obsessed with adding things done to my Ta-da List.

Oh, for those who haven't got it yet, this is the basics of the new site. I have never been one to focus of User Experience on my personal sites so I might have to explain a little to the novices.

The sidebar is repeated on most pages and on many pages only updates when the template it is attached to is updated. So the 'recent posts' might not be so recent on old individual pages. Most of my hot links are in that sidebar but more are found in the About page. And for those of you who haven't noticed, the main links to internal pages are right over there in the sidebar, just below the linkage.

The site DOES contain comments and they are found by clicking the little Thought Balloon. Right now, that doubles as a link to the permalink for Full Posts. The little toast at the beginning of Link Fodder posts is it's permalink but a recent development is that Link Fodder may or may not allow comments.

That is it for now. I am sure you can figure out the Archives for yourselves but please ask if you need anything. July 31 05

Something from the archives, now categorized. MetroStation.

I link to portfolios and design sites as future inspiration for my CD Covers. Such as Stopbreathing.

In response to a photographer being hassled for taking a pic of the One Bush Street building in San Francisco, someone arranged a Photo Flash Mob. If only all activism was as easy and most likely effective. July 30 05

I am a little afraid to learn more about Second Life in much the same way I was afraid to try out a MMORPG. It's a virtual reality world not much different than our own. That in itself is not very intriguing but the challenge of the interaction is probably the intriguing nature.

P.S. As to the fears of MMORPGs, ask J what else she does for fun these days :) July 30 05

This is just too cute. Kobito is a software installation project where invisible gnomes interact with a teabox on the kitchen table. With your magical LCD monitor you can see the gnomes and play little games with them. I want my own Kobito... NOW !! July 30 05

OK, not too long ago I bought a photoprinter and was happy with the results. At that time I was more concerned with clarity than with colour. Then I decided this was the perfect tool for creating my CD Covers since it could create decent-enough images and I hate hate hate hate hate Kinkos and their constantly changing policies and price structures.

*gasp*

Well, now I am annoyed. I am annoyed at printer profiles and monitor profiles and such. Really folks, in this day of "print your photos at home!!" there should be an inexpensive way for people to match the colours on the screen to those that come out of your printer. You can fiddle with the settings till the cows come home but that uses precious ink and paper. If the Photoshop Proof concept can make an image appear roughly as you see it on the printer, why isn't there a button to click to "using Proof Profile, match current image to Proof Image and Print" ???

OK, so I am outside my copy of Photoshop and inside my HP Digital Printing software. Shouldn't there be a way to easily change the output so what you see on the screen will match?!? It seems false to advertise photoprinting as the next best thing when they know it will be this difficult.

*sigh*

July 30 05

Should I allow Open Comments on the Link Fodder? OK, let us try it out for a while. July 30 05

Metroblogging.com. Take a bunch of local bloggers and make sure they blog about what is going on with the city. Pull it under one umbrella of blogging. Here is Toronto but I don't recognise a single one of the people.

R We D8ting? is about the interaction that is possible before an actual date, via the commonplace text messaging done with phones. Now not that dating is an option for me, but I am surprised I am not more into txt or sms. it is an off-shoot of the typical email but short and easier and focused on portable devices. but i seem to react to it the same way that people i know react to cellphones -- why use that technology when you can just pick up a real phone and talk. July 29 05

SPOILER ALERT. If you actually care about the secret in the latest Harry Potter book, do not watch this video of a man ruining it for a bookstore line. *snicker*

This is the way to make sure your company gets a bad light focused on them. Accordian Guy has a run in with a moving company that someone commented about on his blog. They didn't take kindly to the comment and attempted to bully Joey into deleting the comment. It didn't work.

I have always wondered about things like this. The internet, especially since the onset of forums, blogs and commenting systems, has often been used for, "i need to do this; whom do you suggest or suggest against?" Moving companies, auto repair shops, rennovators, etc. are businesses rife with bad reputations and shoddy dealings. We need to protect ourselves.

Luckily, if I ever need a moving company (in the past it has always been a friend with a license and a rented truck) I have one in mind here in Toronto. They are Avenue Moving (nice pic Scott :) and I deal with them at work and while on personal/work relations with them, I have never heard anything but good things from customers. July 29 05

The New York Times tells what us used-books buyers knew all along -- that they help new book sales. To me, the reader of series and authors, it's obvious. I pick up a "one of nine" fantasy series by BFF Jowling and can only find three of the series once the first one hooks me. I go to Indigo or Amazon to find the rest. If I want to try out a new author, I buy a couple of used but if I am hooked, I buy what I cannot find at Indigo. It just seems obvious to me. July 29 05

So Nathan Fillian, better known to me as Capt. Malcom Reynolds of the Serenity was at Warp 1, the comic shop I spent alot of time at in Edmonton. He was buying an issue of the recently released Serenity comic for his mom. They tried to charge him more than face value for the book. Now he wants the browncoats (think trekkies but fans of Firefly) to boycott the place.

I don't remember much about the staff but the "anime chick" (would come to work in cos-play regalia) and a few who were decent but I do remember the boss/owner as having quite the asshole rep. I imagine he is not the only shop doing so; the Grey Region here in TO always has popular comics bagged and "re-priced" according to saleability. July 29 05

Spinach Bomb found me via a post i made in 2002 and updated me to his new sketchblog. neat!

It becomes apparent very quickly that this article about Beck and Scientology is more about Scientology is Evil than it is about understanding Beck. Oh I am pretty sure that Scientology IS evil (scarily effective in it's nature but too convoluted in it's structure to be anything but set up by alien overlords) but an article masquerading itself as a guide for journalists should at least try to hide it's foaming at the mouth opinion. Of course, that is the purpose of the parent website. Makes me wonder if anyone has ever done a list of entertainment people mixed up in Ronnie's cult. July 28 05

I used to think it would be neat to have a whole bunch of really obscure designer style teeshirts but then i noticed, after seeing someone on the street wearing one, that if you don't see the design clearly, it looks like a dollar store produced tee.

I wonder if I will ever see the ad that produced all these bouncy balls on Flickr?

OK, it's called cableyoyo and it untangles your computer cables. But having a half dozen of these behind your computer cannot be any more helpful, can it?

Relating to the previous link is FONTSMACK, a site that provides the font files you can use in that method.

I seem to slightly rember posting this in the pre-category days. It's sIFR 2.0 and it is about embedding fancy fonts into your webpages without resorting to Photoshop designed images.

Do you like Furries? Of course you do! So look at an entire gallery of them.

The Jacket. I like movies about time travel, the reasons to seek it and the consequences of changed time lines. This one, which smacked of the current Hollywoodish Indie feel, was enjoyable but not entirely fulfilling. The look (scotland and quebec?!?!) is incredible as well as the soundtrack (eno) and the rough, everyday life is hell visuals of the characters. Jack is a soldier in The Gulf who was shot through the eye but somehow lived. Back at home he befriends a lil girl, is picked up by an ex-con driver, gets blamed for the ex-con's murder of a cop and ends up in a Cuckoo House. Tortured by the asylum's head doctor he heads 15 years into the future to the positive focus of the lil girl. He needs to change her life around for her and does. July 27 05

War of the Worlds. I finally got around to seeing it. I liked it, as I thought I would. But I am beginning to see the formula of a Spielberg movie, and not in the ways we have all noticed over the years. I liked his First Act, in which the end of the world is nigh and the emotional toll of we have no hope is gut wrenching. I wanted to hide in the rural hills avoiding crowds and the massive tripods walking everywhere. I wanted to scream at the soldiers at how they were throwing their lives away but cheer them on when they knew they were dying only so refugees could escape. I got into the shoes of the characters right up until they were trapped in the house basement. Then it went back to being a movie for me. July 27 05

OK, I stripped out all the usless code like menus and such so the six years of blogger posts are live in the Archives. For newbies, yes the previous version was a butcher paper pink. I will update the About page with previous versions someday soon. July 27 05

Weird; a lil quirk of MT I am discovering. It's made of multiple static pages. A single entry will be listed on the index, the monthly archive page, the categorical archive page and it's own page. If I add a category, I have to rebuild ALL those pages to reflect the new category(ies). It's OK, at the MT Site's infancy. But when I have 500+ posts (easy with the fact I am posting every link I think is neat) it is going to take a while to rebuild. Let's hope I run out of new categories or find everything I need soon. July 27 05

Somewhere in the wilds of northern Ontario, north east of Lake Nagagami, there is a giant piece of tape holding it together.

Yes, I Like Drawing ™. No, not me -- him! And on garbage!

How come when I work the useless shifts (11-7 or 12-8), the shifts in which I waste my mornings and am too tired to do anything after, I always see the stack of projects that I could do if I only had the time. But on days off, I see the dishes and dustbunnies (rhinos really) and think about only a walk in the rain. It's also comicbooks wednesday. July 27 05

If I liked eggs I would be wild over this Egg and Muffin Toaster.

These giant killer robot guys are all over the ComicCon footage. Are they a band? Are they someone's art project? Are they some expensive promotion?

The Thinking Writer is a site about writing screen plays, assumingly from a screenwriter's point of view. In days past I fancied myself a writer in the rough, an scribe amongst the plebes. I knew all I needed was the drive and the subject matter and I would pen the next "great canadian novel". Or at least the next Belgariad. I even liked what I wrote and shared it with people, and I have never been one to actually like what I create.

But somewhere along the way I actually started reading what I wrote instead of seeing it the way I see a book I am reading. And I saw the horrible grammar, the unbelievable cliches, the reused structures, etc. I stopped writing, but for vignettes written on the back of postcards. Today I don't think I could write for Wizards of the Coast let alone pen a novel.

Yet in all those years of writing I never actually envisioned one line of a screenplay. Even though I LOVE movies and the structures that combine to create them. I have read very few screenplays. I have read even less about them. I wonder if I could write a screenplay? July 26 05

So how do you announce to people that they might have to clear their cache or something similar in order to see the site if the only place you can announce it is at the site? July 26 05

Hi folks; I guess this is a wave hello and a thankyou for being so patient. Inserting some text to extend the first paragraph of this post beyond one line; Firefox has a weird 'first-line' bug in it.

The site is pretty much back; OK so only the weblog is back. Soon I will revive other elements of this and make it once again a personal site and not just a weblog.

I have finally done the move from Blogger (gawds rest ya lil blogger account) to Movable Type. I needed more power and more so needed categories. So far the new tool has been fun to play with and using a combination of IF statements and RegEx I have been able to do most of what I want to do with Categories and Archives.

I am happy with how most of it came out. Other things are still in the works. I am happy that for the first time ever, there is a minimal of graphics -- some backgrounds and a masthead. I am still tweaking the CSS of the remainder text. I am happy that I have two mains types of posts -- Link Fodder and the usual bloggy Full Post. I intend on adding Photo and CD Cover to the list. I desperately have to work on navigation, right now the links just get you around, and I intend on more maleable sidebars in the future. Basically, if I don't activate the site now I won't ever do so. I could tweak forever.

Comments are on but only for Full Posts. I have Blacklist installed and I will play with it's settings until the spammers go away. Or I will install other toys to slow them down. Or if things get too bad, I will shut the fuckers up entirely.

Be prepared for things to change around alot until I am happy. July 25 05

Really, in these days of templated or non-design, a nicely designed weblog still does it for me. And I was brought here because she did the site look for Suw.

Poppy Z Brite, known for her gothy southern novels, did what many young Goths do. She moved on.

It's a portfolio and it's called intransient. It's Canadian and possibly Torontonian. It also has a photoblog.

Neat! I don't know how long this will last but it's the Google Moon. P.S. Click the zoom as far as you can get.

Of course, just before I go live I install MT-Blacklist .

Rather than doing a story about only local people, the BBC does a story about a worldwide set of photobloggers, including Toronto's DDOI.

I heard the interview on CBC and here is the Postcards website he said he had.

It is dylansisson.com and it's a portfolio thingy for a pixar character creator.

My Boring Ass Life is Kevin Smith's blog and starts almost every post with "Wake up, have a shit..." *snicker*

Not exactly sure what KCRW: Music Exchange is all about but if it introduces me to new music then it's good. Do I need an iPod to listen to podcastsm, though?

Old soundcards are a bitch to reinstall even if you know what model it is. This is the REAL set of drivers for the creative Labs CT4810, not the crap that those advert, pay-for driver sites give you.

Not just compared to WalMart, the Costco way of running it's business seems so logical and so at odds with the way other companies are run.

“From day one, we’ve run the company with the philosophy that if we pay better than average, provide a salary people can live on, have a positive environment and good benefits, we’ll be able to hire better people, they’ll stay longer and be more efficient.”

That says it all for me. July 14 05

We had found the perfect apartment. It was a 2 bedroom plus a den off one bedroom. It had a tiny bathroom with a shower and a MASSIVE bathroom with a tub. It had a huge kitchen and a decent livingroom. And it had a pretty nice balcony. It was near College and Dovercourt and close enough to the need amenities. It was a decent price, more than here but affordable.

The first hint of trouble was that there were two listings. One was by the tenant stating it was a sublet and the other was by the landlady stating it was a rental. On friday we saw the apartment and loved it. We arranged to meet on Monday and provide rental agreement deposit and references. On Monday no one was to be found and the landlady's husband was sleeping instead of meeting us. On tuesday she agrees to meet me and I head out to the zone. But it seems that ten minutes after I left, not fifteen minutes after she agreed to meet me, she called and stated someone had offered her more and broke our agreement.

I did not hear this until later. I sat in front of the place and got the message she called. I called her and told her I was waiting and I would like an explanation. A half hour later she called back and stammered that she was offered much more than the agreed upon amount. We lost the perfect apartment.

Fuck her. July 13 05

And next is Nevil Shute's On the Beach. I need a wishlist.

I will also add Riddley Walker but I believe this is more esoteric than most "after the boom" books.

I like books about the end of the world, or more particularly, the things that happen after the End. Thus I will buy Walter Jon William's The Rift.

When I lived in Montreal, I knew little about the TamTam on the Plateau, or more specifically, at the foot of Mt Royal. All I knew is that it involved people drumming and smoking weed and other pseudo-hippie-ish stuph. I didn't know they shared the mountain with Live Action Role Players -- pseudo SCA-ish types with swords and shields. Well, someone was at least amused by them, at most annoyed as fuck by "nerds with swords" and decided to mock-attack their little game. Thus we have Zombies Attacks !! This is tres funny. Almost as funny as "Lightning Bolt !! Lightning Bolt !!" July 11 05

MakingRoom Magazine, "...a magazine about the process, intention and results of image-making."

OK, this entry on Amber's photoblog has her celebrating her birthday with Kevin Rose of Systm and Screensavers fame. Why? Everyone thinks it is because they are seeing each other. They may be, cuz really.. who knows, but I imagine it was because he was in Toronto taping his episode(s) of Call For Help TV.

Meanwhile at Kevin Pereira's moblog, he gets a snap with his CO-HOST Sarah Lane and everyone thinks they are dating. Once again, they may be, but who really knows. Why is everyone (obviously including me) talking about this? Isn't the Tom Cruise schtuff enough shite for you? July 08 05

Jeremy linked to the iPod mod in wood and I was impressed. Though there is a shadow of a previous version post in here (somewhere in the Blogger Blogchives) it once again made me think of the Bruce Sterling novel where people were modding cases using materials gleaned from the natural environment. I don't remember why it was cool but it had something to do with having something nice vs something off-white plastic. I remember reading it and considering giving my father (a woodworker) plans for a desktop PC in oak. I never did. But this modder did... do a wooden case, not give my father plans. July 08 05

Compare, a Plugin for Movable Type; used in this site.

Of course we knew that Bloggers would react quickly to London blasts and it would have been hard to believe otherwise considering the comparisons to 9/11. The first thing we heard were, "Are you guys alright???" in any group blog, Flickr Group or whatever where Londoners might visit. I like that; no blast related curiosities, just cries or worry for fellow Internet Users.

On a personal note, our store District Manager called to wonder what the vibe was in Toronto considering we have a subway as well. She was wondering if it would affect sales. July 07 05

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