ThisBoyIsToast V4 >> March 2007 Archives

Kewl. I am sure Pat's Fantasy Hotlist, by a guy in Montreal, will be the source of much for my "books desired" category. I like that is one sub-genre of specfic. i can take things off the list and walk down to Bakka !!

Last night, as Marmy and I talked about the events that are leading to “Stop Cyberbullying Day”, she reminded me of exactly how evil people can be to each other. I have almost completely blocked it's existance out, having only vague memories of it, but in university there was a "club" dedicated to disliking me. A group of people whom I knew from classes and rez actively gathered to talk about what they disliked about me. And one of them was someone I considered a friend. This was a group of 20sumthins, not adolescent boys. Oh I knew I was an annoyingly depressive young guy obsessed with his own inability to be happy, but did I deserve such? I don't think so. And I imagine that if this had happened in today's age, there would have been a webpage dedicated to this "club". So people, quit being assholes. It doesn't matter how old you are or how much of an adult you are, when others act like mean schoolchildren, it leaves marks. March 30 07

I don't know why but I love the fact that there is a Ontario, California, as opposed to Ontario, CA. And that there is a Toronto, Ohio, as opposed to Toronto, ON. Typos can cause weird things to happen in the snail mail world. March 30 07

I wonder how long before this latest net scandal, the one i got upset about a few days ago, becomes the latest piece of web nastiness to break the "real world" barrier?

When a blogger goes out to pasture, sometimes the blog still hangs around and sometimes it just goes away. Remember Swallowing Tacks? While she parted ways with the web (as far as I know), her hubby is still around.

Where was I during these days of playing Diablo II ?? I can remember running to the local gaming network store in NDG and getting the expansion and getting a little involved. This was the first game that Marmy and I played, co-op, together. Funny, how in playing WoW, I can no longer do the all night gaming session. Is the game play just not as captivating or am I just too old?

Speaking of social networking (i really hate that term but i cannot put my thumb on why) I recently drank some Koolaid that, for the first time ever, had absolutely nothing to do with people who I work with or whom I relate with mostly via the Internet. Yes, I joined the facebook.

Part of me wants to snicker at the crop of Web 2.0 features & apps & wizbangers, otherwise referred to as The Evolution of Cat Blogging, but another part of me says that for each innovation we are moving ahead in technology. Blogs have proven themselves useful for more than cats; a few iterations later another useful tool will appear.

This review of Rushmore, as viewed from The Criterion Collection, reminds me how differently I watch movies right now. I can hear the echo of what I was thinking as I watched Rushmore all those years ago, when I actually thought about film. At what point did I go from watching odd indie movies because I thought it was cool to do so, to actually noticing I was watching cool indie movies because it was cool, to discontinuing the interest in cool indie movies to missing it. A weird road of regret to travel. My gosh, my road is well travelled.

Neat !! The 1000 journals project now has a book. Remember that art project? A guy setup a series of journals, some plain, some with covers done by designers, and sent them out. The receiver would decorate or write a page and send it on. The one I got went to Sweden but I do not know if it went further.

You know, I never heard The Tale of Eric and the Dread Gazebo but I can think of a couple of instances where it actually happened. Well not with a gazebo but some of my adolescent gamer friends were not... bright.

OK, so there is a community... er, body of people out there who write about the technology and concepts of building websites and everything else tangential to it. I know the names of a lot of people who do the conference circuit but don't have a clue what most of them write about. Some of these people, and the web-pundits who follow their work, don't like each other or the opinions they hold. From what I gather, arguements in comments can get pretty heated. Well, and I am purposely and ironically saying it this way, as things got even more out of hand.

What can I say? Marmy would say that men are pigs. Yeah, that pretty much covers it. But it's a very specific piggish attitude that is disturbing. People with opinions can be assholes. Some people are more likely to vent those assholish opinions on the Internet because they are relatively anonymous. And then there are the complete nutcases. They use their assumed anonymity to not just be an asshole but be a scary, fucking evil kind of person. It's too easy to connect this to "Guys in IT Hate Women". Sure, there is something to that but I bet you can find this sort of behaviour in just about every community. Hell, I had it pre-web days when I worked for the Ottawa Freenet. I was threatened on a weekly basis (with a baseball bat, with lots of nasty words, etc) when the free internet service was not available. Asshats are everywhere. What bugs me the most is that we tolerate it. We pass it off as "a little over the top" and just go on. Shouldn't we just shut all these folks down before they go one step beyond just being an asshole? March 27 07

I have a legal copy of Windows XP Prof, oh not the one I have installed, but I do own it. I am thinking about using it to get a legal copy of Vista... oh who am I kidding, why would I do that??

Yes, I admit the possibility that racing games cause crashes but only because I don't have a license and the only racing game I play is the Burnout series and purely because it makes crashing soooooo much fun. But do fantasy RPGs cause random dragon slayings? Do superhero games cause random flights of fancy? Do WWII shooters cause Nazi hunting? Does The Sims cause house building?

Speaking of poo, and I guess it's poo day here at TBIT as this is the third in a row, but take a look at these probably yummy lil cakes that unintentionally look like doggie poo.

See !! I told you that the blogging parents of today are obsessed with Poo stories !! It wasn't just me as a non-reproducing kind of blogger.

Kewl !! It's something I would buy my dad so his interests (carpentry) and my interests (computer geekery) could coincide. It's called the Craftsman CompuCarve and essentially it's a computer design controlled router. No not, "handle your networking" kinda of router but a "make neat designs in wood" kinda router, i.e. rooter router.

If the messages you send in Twitter are called tweets, can I call the people who would send them via command line, twits? calm down, i keed i keed, i loves the comand line nerds as much as the next guy.

Remember the Level 1 Human Baby Creeper? I blogged it sometime in the past. What's best is the discussion on baby AC in the comments -- you KNEW it had to happen !!

This post by Megnut about Best chocolate chip cookie inspires me to go back to my late night cookie baking. Last winter when late nights at work (xmas retail hours) and other stuff had my nutty with stress, I found myself experimenting with various chocolate chip cookie recipes including the Martha Stewart and the Neiman Marcus myth. I have since altered it slightly but should continue the experiment.

I have been often known to say I like bad coffee. What I mean is that I like just about any coffee but I am really not fond of harsh coffee. Oh I can drink it to drive away the addiction-blues but it leaves my throat sore and a my tongue numb. Free work at coffee is fine and dandy but man, I do love to treat myself to the organic choices at The Roastery. Lip smacking good !!

Heh. This was the topic of the conversation that coworkers were having that left me not having a thing to contribute but their kids were saying worse things than, "Shit !!" I was 21 before I ever said the word fuck in front of my mom and I had been up for 30 hours straight at that time.

It's kind of odd these days. For background, know that I am the "non-breeding hetero" of my extended circle of friends and family. Surprisingly it didn't really affect me much as far back as a decade ago with many friends focused on jobs and homes rather than kids. And the friends with kids? Oh their lives were taken over and I didn't hear from them much. But more and more, the talk, even the talk amongst computer-geeky coworkers is dominated by talk about kids. I am completely out of my element and have nothing to contribute whatsoever -- lots of blank head nods. It wouldn't be so bad but now it's happening in blogs as well where the posts become dominated by "my baby did this in his diapers and it was soooooo cute." Well not really, but you get my exagerated "i ain't havin' a kid" point. But the comments in such posts are completely overwhelming! Oh well, at least this long in my relationship I am no longer having the conversation with my mother about it. My sister is the requisite grandkid supplier. March 21 07

Guh whuh say wha?? It's not that there is a meaning behind the R.E.M song What's the Frequency, Kenneth and it has something to do with Dan Rather but that a random mugging actually entered into pop culture. Yes, sometimes it seems language is a virus that people can pass along.

I really love viewing the working spaces of those creative folk. Notice that the old rule of "the messier the more productive" still seems to be presented? I wonder how much work is actually done by the ones that have the time to clean up their desk daily?

OK, I was one of the early ones to try out Twitter and abandon it due to boredom and "ok what now" response. But seeing twittervision makes me smile a bit more about it.

Man, that kills my arteries just reading about it !! But it does give me a slightly healthier idea of doing wNood's bacon wrapped asparagus and deep frying them in a batter. (thanks rob :)

I am on the last few pages of Steve Erikson's The Bonehunters and before the next one comes out I will definately either have to reread them all (yeah right) or dig deeply into the Encylopaedia Malazica. This is one series that definately needs an annotated edition. p.s. this site makes my eyes shine.

I just have to say out loud how impressed I am with the latest story line for Order of the Stick. It's a lil webcomic of stickfigure D&D characters and it's doing a great job of humourous in-jokes while keeping a strong and compelling story about a siege. The D&D references are just so spot-on.

OK, the concept started as teenage girls with webcams sharing their daily life, mutated into kiddie-porn-esque sites dedicated to men my age sending them gifts in return for "more intimate" access and now has spawned a fictional collection of videos referred to as lonelygirl15. I think this would have been more fun as a massive campaign for a movie.

Yup, this is the basis of mainstream science these days. Yeah the average person when browsing a news site with some scientific basis wants to see more stories about gay animals and music making you not dumber.

P.S. The image was the sidebar in a MSNBC News story about the supervolcano underneath Yellowstone Park. That supervolcano was the basis of one of those science-dramas I love to watch cuz we all know how much I love my disaster movies. March 19 07

Yeah, you too can get a body (looks down at expanding belly) like a full-on Spartan. The video shows the cast of 300 working out in a way that few gyms could do for you. I hate gyms and the idea of organized exercising but that looked kinda fun.

So, yesteday afternoon we downloaded, attempted to watch and turned off Blood Ties. It is a new crime drama with vampires series based on Toronto-based books by Tanya Huff. Marmy was very fond of these books during and after her vampire-interest days. Well I must admit, we didn't make it through. It wasn't very good and not good in that oh-so-obviously-canadian TV sort of way.

I like that the show is based in Toronto and I don't expect the show to be a faithful version of Toronto. It is neat seeing Chinatown and King W and streetcars and such. It is fun hearing local nightclubs mentioned. This fun is sort of overshadowed by bad bad dialogue. Hell, even Blade: The Series was better written and acted... or maybe just directed. Sometimes a decent director can take a bad teleplay and run some fun into it. It had me doing one of those typical TV Viewer sort of things saying, "If stuff this bad gets on TV then we could so easily be writing TV."

Examples? Oh most of it is just too bland to be enjoyed but lack of research or even awareness lines always bugs me. Sure CSI misrepresented furries in that episode but at least it called them furries. If you are going to have geeks in your show then forget them having a LAN Party to play an MMO and if they are playing an MMO then play WoW, and call it WoW. It's not that difficult. If the teleplay was shelved 10 years ago then it explains things but doesn't forgive them. And why do goth extras always look more goth than the Supporting Cast Goth? And take a look at a recent jeans ad and update the Hottie Male Vampire. Lestat is done boys & girls. Cop and partner dialogue has been formatted by Law & Order and CSI and a dozen other shows. So why make it sound like a straight to video cop movie from 15 years ago?

We do need a decent replacement for monsters and vampires and such and I guess the best we will have is Supernatural, which does have the snappy dialogue influenced by Ben Edlund. The show lacks something but is soooo much above this one. March 19 07

Last week, there was a lesson to be learned. Marmy had decided she needed lessons in the DC Universe, the number of MegaCrossovers, in particular. Kent, the man with the massive wall of graphic novels, rose to the occasion and offered to be the tutor. I accompanied for sake of company and amusement. She came away with probably more questions then she had answered but also with a stack of collected crossover stories from about 5 different DC "we destroya da universe to put it back togedder" stories.

After reading a few issues of the garish 80s "Crisis on the Infinite Earths" (pink sky? oh its explained) she realized that there were gaps between issues. That's because its a MegaCROSSOVER series. Sure, there might be a dozen or so main comics but almost every other DC title of the year was affected. So, I says to myself, I imagine someone out there has collected the entire mass comic collection on BitTorrent. Did they? Yah and a few Gigs later it was downloaded. Me so bad, me love the interweb.

P.S. The most recent crossover is 9gigs in it's entirety. March 19 07

The old saying about washing your hands vs knowing enough not to pee on your hands is appropo but how do you know what the previous guy did ??

I guess it's cuz I stopped reading Civil War (Marvel comics outlawing of superheroes and killing of Captain America massive crossover storyline, in case you didn't know) very early in that I don't get this Roughhousing joke but I do have to say that it somewhat traumatized me. Oh I do love my run on sentences.

So Bruce Sterling decided to take the wind out of the SXSWers with a rant about blogs and mashups being dead in a decade. I can easily envision such happening but only when a significantly accessible and attractive technology comes along to replace blogs. As for mashups, yeah they are an "in the now" kind of thing. But for blogs, I want to say that now with the world being given the power of self-publishing, we will be doing it in one form or another forever. I want to but I cannot.

Once, the same statement could have been said for the static personal site. It was relatively easy to make a website for yourself based entirely around whatever theme you wanted. While most looked attrocious, they were still personal. Host Your Site webbies came along and things began to look a little generic. Then journal sites came along and things became a little linear. Then Blogs came along, they regained some personal touches, but were quickly supplanted by Host Your Blog webbies and things went back to looking generic. Soon, something else will come along and replace blogs. We will look back and notice how quaint it was to blather on daily about nothing. When a site updates daily with an article or observation, it will be once again a "daily column" not the business's blog. Oh journals and daily blathering wil still be around somewhere, but something else will overtake the majority of people who go to a tech conference whether it is SXSW or Banff (why do i always want to type bamph?) Blogs in the Snow or whatever. March 15 07

For the most part, the art of sculpture is stuffy and uninspired. Then you get Strange statues around the world. (via joe, newly of TO)

I used to write something I called "vignettes", ultra-short stories on the back of postcards that I sent to friends. They were often stream of consciousness and sometimes reflected the card they were on. I don't send postcards any more but this Ficlets could be a repository for these streams.

LOL. I hadn't heard the story behind that cute little guy I inadvertently took a picture of the other day. They ask where is lepos? It seems he is everywhere. NYC, LA, Toronto, etc. all have lil compute r generated pics of him plastered to the side of typical street art walls. I love the amount of street art out there which seperates itself from the gawd-awful tagging that covers walls, mailboxes, windows, dumpsters, etc. I think I might have to have my own set of Lepos. (thanks kent!) March 14 07

At the beginning of the web my favourite design style was grungey-dirty such as these 30 Dirty Designs, with one of the reasons being that I could imagine myself easily doing such. It was not as easy as I suspected.

It's kind of weird to notice that you have been drinking a slightly hazelnut flavoured coffee for a couple of days by realizing your sore throat is symptomatic of your allergy of nuts.

*cough* March 13 07

The Lord of the Rings as a D&D game has been done since the internet was written on stone tablets. But with the existance of the movie, we have a whole new way of presenting it.

Hmm, it seems in Japan that tiger piss is crystal clear and quite cute. Or so this YouTube - Japanese Toilet Training for Kids vid tells me.

The guys who are making the previously mentioned game also did Rag Doll Kung Fu. It looks like a lotta fun and that's coming from a guy who has a "Kung Fu Friday Disciple" pin on his bag. But to be honest, I had not see many KungFu movies before or since the fateful fridays.

It looks like LittleBigPlanet is likely to be the next Katamari. Well, it could be for me. Very much so in that I will be playing it years after hearing about other people playing it and raving. Go me.

This is too frickin' kewl !! He draws lil versions of himself and inserts them into photos. Tee hee !! P.S. He also has a 365 Project. (via drawn)

What a completely fucking moronic statement (read the sidebar of the story) from a Toronto city councillor.

I have no idea what I am doing tonight (i.e. probably nothing) but my brain has told me it will require Ale. March 09 07

Last night, on some Family Channel show with teenage girls, I saw one girl chase the other talking about relatively unknown names for common things. This morning I saw this link. What do you think it means?

I, for one, am completely for sale to potential advertizers to do reviews on your product. All reviews come with the following disclaimer / warning: my review writing skills are seriously lacking AND nobody reads this site. But that said, that stalker chick in southern california will buy everything I review.

P.S. These are my names for the recurring cast on Heroes: Absorbing Guy, Webcam Girl (and Her Sister), Tech Kid, Healing Girl, Flying Guy, Hero, Painter Guy, Man in Black (or Horn-Rimmed Glasses Guy even if they aren't horn-rimmed glasses), Mind Reader Guy, The Bad Guy, The Haitian, Kitty Pryde Guy, Splodey Guy, The Invisible Man, Internet Girl and the yet undepicted Chameleon Girl. I believe the last character may become Reality Bending Girl depending on what we get to see of her. P.S.S. Hot skirt. March 06 07

One of the joys of working downtown, one which I am yet to actually take advantage of much, is being so close to the delightful foodstuffs of Kensington Market. For example, I can go over and pick up fresh chorizo sausage for Chickpea and Chorizo Soup. I also had no problem getting chipotles in adobo sauce for Marmy's squash soup. And that reminds me -- I want to learn how to do my own sans-nuts mole sauce. March 06 07

So, I was doing my mid-morning, all my email is read and answered and tasks attended to, reading of webcomics when I looked down and saw this in my task bar:

OK, so it's probably tasty but can you send extremely overdue Xmas presents protected with Chocolate Bubble-Wrap??

There is an issue of the comic Invisibles that features an american concentration camp. It does not seem so far off these days.

Now THAT is the way to do a birthday cake, well at least if you are a robot fan, and really, who isn't a robot fan?

Really, at what point in Search Engine history will the majority of search hits be to other search engines' results? March 02 07

Yeah you could put on tron sneakers (you can tell the age and hometown of a man by what he calls typical leisure-type shoes) with a tron track suit and go to a tron rave and geek the night away.

It's not too hard to envision going from the REAL ID act to trench coated men stopping fearful citizens on the street with the statement, "Papers please..."

It's snowing, hella snowing; where are my mittens made from the hair of my mom's dog? Did I just say hella?!? March 01 07