ThisBoyIsToast V4 >> July 2007 Archives

Bwah hah hah hah hah !! It's a A global warning about jealous computers. I love the dorm room vid with the LT attacking her leg, especially the GRAHHHH sound it makes as it jumps.

OK, I had to supress a giggle at this 60 Seconds in the Life of the Galapagos Islands video highlighting the mating ritual of a pair of Waved Albatross. The jackhammer followed by a hiccup just got me.

Hee !! Before I played my first MMO, I feared to try because I thought I might end up like the bunch in The Guild. Luckily, though I did play a lot, I never did truly become addicted. In fact, I got so bored with WoW that I should get around to cancelling the account.

No need to be surprised by the number of cell phones in the The Items We Carry Pool but the number of iPods does; I suppose it's the digital world.

The Burgers of Winnipeg is something I would looooove to do for Toronto but I guess I cannot call myself a burger fan until I finally get to Dangerous Dan's.

I don't know why it irked me so much today but running into tons of people who have blogs with two posts for all of 2007, one from January stating, "So I finally set up a blog...." and another from March stating, "It's been a while since my last post...." and then nothing else. Please, what was the fucking point? The fact that I wasted my time clicking your witty blog title from probably one of your offline friend's blogrolls is all the worse by the fact that you are one of a couple of thousand of people filing up bits & bites on the internet with "i got a blog but I am not blogging" sites. Gee, I must be grumpy today. July 27 07

Heh. It's nice to know that the humour of the A&K Lick a Chick is still being appreciated world wide. This place was on the Bras d'Or highway on the way to my grandmother's.

I am sure if you dig into the 'papercraft' category i have hear you will find the source of this completed Howl's Moving Castle.

I am playing Half Life 2: Episode 1 right now and I was marvelling at how many crates and barrels there are in the game.

Gawddamn that MiniWheats vanilla jingle !! Gawds damn it all to hell. July 25 07

This one is for my bro from the Sto', gMoney. It's his favourite woman of the kitchen. But he doesn't read blogs so it's really for me. I should do a blog for offline people and then occasionally print it out for them to read.

Geek Out !! D War is a Korean monster movie with fighting dragons, massive explosions and an american setting. This is Eragon for action fans. I am a 14 year old boy bouncing in my seat all over. Also see the YouTube trailer.

OMG. They made a movie about the the guy stuck in someone's windshield. You know, the one where the woman drove home and waited for him to die instead of going to the hospital? Eeek. (via the Midnite Madness mailer)

Once again I read an article about a company that just doesn't seem to understand their own business. Imagine forgetting to bank on the hype and popularity of the iPhone. Skip rants on customer service coming out of these telecom companies down south, but if they don't know how to jump on a hype bandwagon and make some considerable dollars, then what hope is there for them? It's as if the entire business world is filling up with disgruntled, overworked, extremely tired and apathetic employees who are just too exhausted to care about their job. At what point is the business world going to be affected by this? At what point can bad business behaviour lead to change instead of the inevitable path to dissolution, sale or restructuring? Can I stil call it the era of Microsoft when a product that barely works is peddled successfully? Or should I call it the era of Conrad Black & Enron where the COOs and other 3-lettered bosses make the money while the company and it's employees and it's products/services collapse around them?

Really, how long can doing a bad job last? July 24 07

I just finished re-reading John Steakley's Armor, a battle-armor story in homage to Starship Troopers but little did I know that there might be an Armor 2.

Kewl !! Chore Wars, Earning Experience Points for Housework could be used to get Marmy gaming with me AND doing some of the housework. (*ducks*)

Giz wush zwah?!? So, email is represented by bikini clad Sims rejects and spam by fat guys in speedos? So who the fuck sits there and just watches their email come in?!?! (from tech crunch)

Hmmm, another decent Polenta Pie Recipe. Dried mushrooms seem to be a similar thread. Something to absorb the liquid I guess...

Halloo. Tonight, as I sweat to the humidity behind me, I did something I had intended on doing for quite some time. I made a (first) list of the RPG products I have collected over the years and wish to now get rid of. Selling on eBay is silly as many are on there in vast numbers and seriously, I don't have the patience. So, they are available for a) the cost of sending them to you b) a gratuity (your choice but some suggestions are coffee, beer, gift certificates to the Silver Snail, etc.) or both a & b. It's first come first serve and considering the latest Gallup Poll showed that not many are reading here (well, i will crosspost to my Vox site as that is tres geek oriented... my site, not Vox) it should be a small small audience desiring such. Oh, and I have also sent the list to a small group of possibly interested parties.

Background? For over 30 years I have played RPGs, that is Pen & Paper RPGs. But within those 30 years I might have played consistently for 10. The inbetween years have left me amassing a vast amount of second hand (and some new) games from various systems that attracted me. But the last few years, they have become more dust collectors that collector's items not even being read for enjoyment. And there is that nagging voice for me to clean out my life. Once I have done a few of these lists (boxed sets were mostly ignored on this one), I will move into the D&D, AD&D and 3rd Ed. D&D. These last will be the hardest to part with as I have a great great, vast nay giganimous fondness for D&D in all it's various forms. It will be hard to convince myself to part with even the most cursory glanced at source books.

But these things have to be done. Leave a comment if you want the Word file for LIST 1. July 18 07

So, based on the last post and the popularity of LOL Cats, I decided I am going to wash the cat, rinse him off into a pint glass, mix it with an american beer and sell it as a Best Selling Meme Beer. Gross? Yeah well, people are drinking this shite.

So you are looking at some website and giggling insanely cuz of a captioned image of a cat looking shocked or peeking at your from inside your toaster. Your mother doesn't understand why you found it funny or that you spent an hour looking at them. That's alright, just let her read this Time article.

I am making note of this post, Putting Canadian "Piracy" in Perspective - The Sources, and also noting the link to his short film. My ten second response to it is that the number of people taking advantage of piracy due to it just being easier (those people who never would have seen the movie in a theatre anyway) are actually being outstripped by the people fed up with sucky movies, terrible prices, draconic practices ("leave your cell phone, PDA, digital still camera and pride in this cardboard box please") and becoming the pirates & privateers. See Blork's fistfight as well.

This support article makes my head hurt. I am not the hardware flunky I would like to be and this kind of shite doesn't help. They say 32bit setups, like 99.9% of XP machines out there, max out at 3GB of RAM. So go ahead and plug as much in as you like; it's not gonna do much. But they are suggesting that Vista runs decently on 2GB but really should be 4GB. BUT considering few few people will be upgrading to 64bit, what the heck would you need the 4GB for? And will ALL machines run sloooooow? Argh.

Please, someone with more knowledge correct me. July 17 07

Until I can read the book in my hand, I will read A Preview, a preview of Warren Ellis's Crooked Little Vein, that is.

Hee. For my own squirrel girl (ask her about her amazing power over montreal squirrels) I give you a great lakes avenger.

This is an interesting article called The End of Science Fiction which basically speculates that some point in our future, when we have reached the era often defined in scifi, we will stop writing scifi. Well we reached 1984 and still continue to write after that. And we reached 2001 and still are going strong. Even when we do have Jetsons cars, I am sure we will be writing about a million years into the future, not just a few hundred or thousand. (via different elves)

While I love doing my own maps, this would be a fun campaign to design. Imagine a D&D world based on Planet Earth - Inversed.

This is just too cool. The original D&D was inspired by pseudo european style fantasy, of elves and dwarves and knights on horses. Imagine it was created using Greek Mythology and old Harryhausen movies as inspiration and you get M&M.

I am curious. Are you a lurker? Leave a comment. I am curious about the lurker vs regular vistor population here. July 16 07

I need a haircut. This weekend I avoided going to the local discount cutter or barber because I am tired of the "we just do not care" kind of haircuts I get from them. Sure, a 15 minute cute with only the clippers looks decent in comparison to the previous bird's nest of my head, but a week or more later it ends up looking weaver-bird-ish. I wish I could sneak home, like this guy did, and get a cut from my uncle.

My uncle became a barber while I was in university. He has the typical CB career path where you took jobs you could find, jobs that paid but none that would ever lead anywhere. I was pretty oblivious then so the only one I remember is his truck driving stint via the newspaper company my dad worked for. But at some point he ended up in barbering school, as his new father in law owned a sucessful barbershop & salon.

I called myself my uncle's head dummy, as I let him cut me exclusively while he went through school. While I was in uni in CB I only went to him and once I was in Halifax, I would only get my cuts when I visited home. There was a strange sense of peace associated with his cuts, an assumed fact that he would do as I like and do a great job, so I could just sit and relax. And he didn't ask me standard stupid barber questions, as he knew my life so conversation was casual. He also knew I was a quiet guy so he shut up when I he sensed I was not in the mood to talk. My head never had it better.

I get about one good cut a year, the rest being annoyingly barely adequate. Luckily I pile on so much product these days, I can pretty much ignore the messes they do to my head. But I am tired of the product and the stickiness and the mess so this time I think I will have to pay money to get my head done. Let's the thatch roofing begin. July 16 07

I look at michael sippey > (un)filtered and like the clean, especially the clean of the icons representing the handful of categories. I have an ever emerging ton of categories, being created as the whim hits me. More like tags than categories. Is it time to update them, to go through the almost two thousand MT posts and re-categorize in anticipation of the latest redesign and reimagining of TBIT? Almost two thousand?!? July 13 07

Is it worse to be detached from the various online community networking "tools" or to have tried them and found them useless after a while because... well, you are as much the outsider in this current online world as you were in the old Real World?

"PEEN - The end of a hammer head opposite the striking face." I knew that -- the cool hammers, for the cool kids of carpenters like my dad, were the Ball Peen Hammers. But some of the 33 Names of Things You Never Knew had Names are things I didn't know. I think they were cheating when they gave medical terms for body parts. ALL body parts have medical names, even the most minute and mundane.

It's been years and years since I linked to a Jakob Nielsen article. Yes friends, welcome to TBIT, your source of, "quickly written, shallow postings."

I am sorry but this latest a-lister meme is something that makes me giggle out loud and have coworkers ask about the smirk on my face. Maybe if I had a Faceball, they would know. Also see the intro.

Is it possible to have dehydrated my body while sleeping? I didn't feel particularly sweaty last night but I am feeling all cloudy headed and dizzy and for no good reason. It's how I feel when I am sunstruck but the brief walk I made this morning could NOT have done it. July 10 07

Heh. Back when we started blogging in Montreal, during the good ol' days, Ed had some comics done about his blogging. I don't think anyone's life is complete unless they have a cartoon made about some aspect of their life.

Hee !! I love these examples of destructive kitty behaviour. We have Marcus VS Hp deskjet, and we have Printer Cat (don't lose your head kitty !!) and Hewlett Pussy (what's in here???) and finally spike vs the printer (baaaad print head, baaaad). I could go on. Imagine a dot matrix reaction?

I need my Customer Service category now. This article (from boing boing's link) made me first think that Sprint cancelling customers' accounts after too many CS calls could be a legitimate issue. At The Store, there were problem customers who made a big deal out of every transaction no matter how innocent. They bought "as is" furniture and then disputed the claim with every person in the company other than the staff at The Store they bought it from. They returned everything and asked for new ones, even if they knew the price they had paid was for the value of a returned item. They essentially wrangled a 50% discount out of everything they purchased. I was relieved to hear they got a "i am sorry but perhaps this is not the store for your business" letter.

But in briefly reading the article, it's definately the "you are taking too much time so go away" side of effective customer service. "We have to be able to quickly and efficiently serve customers," is what they say. In other words, it's not the positive resolution of their issue but how quickly the customer is off the phone. The customer of value these days is the one who spends the money and doesn't complain about the problems. Being able to present "speed of resolved issues" to a shareholder meeting is worth more than happy customers. As customers, we used to think we had succeeded when we got our grievance presented to the CEO or similar management power, but today I think it would be best to be able to present troubles to the shareholders meeting, to the real people in power. And no, I don't mean buying a dozen shares. I mean the true shareholders who invest in companies with millions of dollars. July 06 07

I never knew that Marvel also had a reference to a primary earth on which their comics take place. It is Earth-616 and I love how it was an inside joke on Heroes. By primary earth, we mean the world which the majority of comic stories take place... as opposed to the Marvel Zombies world, which is alternate, having a Colonel America instead of a Captain.

I loves me some post-apocalypse. Little did I know there was some more mainstream fiction that be called such, like The Road by Cormac McArthy, a great name btw.

Holey moley, I actually looked behind me when this Virtual Barber Shop started. Yeah, 3D sound without red & green headphones.

You know, rather than buying me this Inigo Montoya T-Shirt, I suppose I could just get some stickers and a sharpie. Wouldn't do well in the wash though.