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September 2007 Posts September 29, 2007
OMG. My printer is currently mimicking me like a parrot that would fall off if I put him on my shoulder. On days off when I am trying to be productive, like doing dishes or cleaning out cupboards, I do the work in starts and stops. I go at it, pause and get distracted, sit on the sofa, scratch at my nose, get back to the work for a while, and repeat the cycle over again. During one of these pauses I decided a CD cover had to be done and in the midst of printing it the printer pauses half way. It sits for about 10 minutes doing nothing and then prints a few more passes. Then it pauses. Then it prints a bit more. It should take all day to get one thing done. Just. Like. Me.
September 29 07 September 28, 2007  I think I might wander by The Word On The Street on Sunday if I am not too sleepy after (attempting to) going to a Nuit Blanche event or two. And this link answers my "but i am a pedestrian" question.
Oh man, the new Boll flick, Postal , of course based on the irreverent video game, is a pathetic-style (TM) comedy. Remember the horribly campy style of the guys who did Toxic Avenger? I think this is what Boll wants to do but will even do a bad movie, badly. I love my man Boll.
September 27, 2007 LMAO. Jeff's Gameblog posts the shortest RPG rules of all time, where there is a 50% of failing and a 50% chance of succeeding. Imagine if real life was like that...
September 26, 2007
I was just asked by an american company if the company I work for has a space between the "Al" and the rest of the company's name, you know, as in Al Jazeera or many other arabic names. I wonder if we were about to be put on a list of "Watch These Guys" by the DHS? But considering who we just transferred down there, it might be considered a terrorist action. Well, at least to the american female population. Yes, that was a dig Dan, in case you found this site :)
September 26 07
I was not the only one who enjoyed Reaper last night. As expected, it made me laugh out loud, and quite a few times. And this is coming from the guy that standardly doesn't enjoy comedies. I like witty lines, weird situations and a cast that obviously enjoys what they are doing. Sam had his soul sold to The Devil by his parents and it was to be claimed on his 21st birthday. Instead The Devil uses Sam as a bounty hunter collecting wayward souls in pretty much the same fashion as a half dozen other specFic series have done. The difference here is that Sam realizes he wants to do it because it gives a slacker boy some motivation, as in he is actually saving people's lives by sending the evil souls packing.
But it's the writing and acting more than the plot. Sok & Sam are hilarious, picking on each other and snarking back in forth in voices that I swear were taken from college friends of mine. We are not talking brilliance here but pretty damn good wit and a lot of fun. Smacking the bedeviled terrier with the door? LOL. Tossing a bottle at Sam's head when he claimed he had the power to move things with his mind? LOL. Drawing eyebrows on their coworker after a run-in with an arsonist soul? LOL. The Devil being a pretty nice guy, if a bit of a stinker? LOL. I will enjoy this show before they inevitably cancel it.
September 26 07 Oh. My. God. And yes, said in your best airheaded blonde voice. Heather relates her experience with an etiquette bell, a device that makes noises to cover the fact that you are on the toilet and making... noises.
September 25, 2007 This is kind of how I would like to do my photo wall. But to be honest I feel odd having it consist of 99% my own photos.
If this came in Queen Size, at what age would you be too old to come full circle and get another Star Wars sheet set??
OK, the only thing to watch tonight is Reaper. While I am pretty certain this show will be canceled after about 8 episodes, I know I will like it's irreverent quirky humour. Fighting evil souls with a dust buster (or dirt devil, if you will...) is right down my alley. Besides, one of my favourite sidekick actors is one it, one Tyler Labine from Brampton.
SPOILERS BELOW for pete's sake.
Last night's fare? Well, Chuck was light, as expected. It was a decent dose of computer & gaming geeks working in a knock-off of BestBuy ("If you Buy More you save more, if you save more you Buy More," -- best store motto ever) but with the usual the-writer-knows-shit-about-computers. "This laptop has a DOS override, " says Chuck when defusing the bomb attached to a laptop. But all he does is open a browser and goes to a virus laden website. Plllpthbhht. I like the Johnny Mnemonic style info-straight-to-your-brain concept but as to why he is able to process that info, who the fuck knows -- definitely not the writers. The show has charm which will probably let me forgive it for about a half dozen episodes.
Heroes ? I honestly wish it had started with more of a bang. The only thread that kept my attention, as in I walked in from washing dishes, was Hiro's -- I looooove the wayward British folk hero. And we well know that Hiro is going to end up being his own folk hero. But other than that and the down & out Nathan, not much interested me. It will get better so I will watch the season. Especially when Kristen Bell joins the cast for a few episodes. Grindy grindy grindy !!
Journeyman? My favourite style of all the shows.. I really like their cinematography and colour scheme. Yes, that kind of thing attracts me. For example, I truly enjoy the browns & earth tones of CSI:NY over the greens & yellows of CSI:Miami. It's a family man's Quantum Leap, as expected, with a man going back in time in order to ... create good time lines? confirm good timelines? defend good timelines? All we know is that he is tossed randomly back in time and given hints about a life he has to fix. But why and how? Who ever knows. And then there is a connection, a thin thread, to some organization that is doing this, that somehow reminds me of that baaaad movie Millenium with Kris Kristofferson -- ala dead girl on plane who doesn't really die but is drawn into the time travel organization. It had the typical, "are you nuts or on drugs," aspects which were resolved nicely in the statement, "I will always come home...." That gave me chills. This might compete with Medium for my favourite show that shows a bond between a couple.
Not a bad start and I washed dishes while watching so my butt & brain didn't turn to goo after three straight hours. I will have to DL the half-hour Big Bang Theory.
September 25 07 So, Crack use 'staggering' among homeless. That would explain why a woman with cerebral palsy walked up to us in the park yesterday and asked us where she could buy $20 worth of crack. Note of interest: about a decade ago someone who's knowledge I trusted corrected me when I said cerebral palsy stating it was cerebal palsy. Having not really seen it spelled out very often, I took them at their word. They were wrong.
STFU. I can understand every news station doing a story about the long lines outside stores selling video games considering the release of Halo 3. But if I hear one more fucking reporter compare the industry to PacMan & Tetris or say, "Oh I played a game or two back in the day..." I swear I will come down to the line and frag their asses. And I could swear that most stations were showing footage from Halo Wars as cut scenes. Look, every station must have one reporter who owns an xBox or a Playstation or reads Penny Arcade -- wake them up, give them a rough script and send them down for fuck's sake. September 25 07 September 24, 2007
I am wondering at what point did I actually begin to care about watching premiere TV shows for the fall season? It's not like anything has jumped out and caught my attention. Alas, I guess I will give a handful of shows a peek and see if they hold my attention. Tonight we start with Chuck, a geek does good in the spy biz? And there is The Big Bang Theory, about two nerds and a babe. Heroes is starting tonight so that is the "must watch" of the two specFic shows, the other being Journeyman, which will excite the time-travelling / Quantum Leap fan in me. But the latter will have to be a Torrent DL as they run together. That only tells me I need a hometech Tivo-ish machine.
Marmy, remember last night when I questioned what the current pop culture focus was? Well, based on the first two sitcoms above, the forthcoming American IT Crowd and other shows out this year, I would say the focus is nerds & geeks.
September 24 07 Heh. We are trying out Sharepoint at work... really, we are going to use but a number of us are playing with it until it becomes live, to find bugs and annoyances and build responses for them. Recently it started just crashing randomly on me and then moved all the way up to "click anything and it crashes IE". Not good. While I was doing the Googling of the problem (a few hours every now and then) I started doing screen captures so our MIS guy could have them handy when contacting M$ tech support. We could now have our own Crash Board. P.S. It turned out to be a compatibility problem when you have two versions of MS Office installed... I had one app from Office 2007 and the rest from Office 2003 Premium.
Back in the goodoldaze, people passed around photoshop files and altered a little here, a little there and created dezine mixes for no reason than it was fun. There was even an "official" one called Photoshop Tennis. I guess now in the days when you have to blur out every logo on TV, it had to be renamed to Layer Tennis even if it presented by said Adobe product. P.S. The "meet adobe CS3" flashie on the right side is a nice example of fun design & advertising without being intrusive... unless you ask it to. P.S. I just misspelled without as withought. How britishism. (via nack on adobe)
I should start this post mentioning I am a fan of Wes Anderson and looking forward to him seeing a 13 minute short called Hotel Chevalier, because I like the idea of an artist reaching a point where he can have fun with his medium, choosing to do things that are not about box office dollar. But then again, the only thing most people are going to watch it for is the "extended nude scene" of Natalie Portman. Remembering her fondly in Leon makes me feel dirtyoldman-ish but the geek in me likes the idea of Padme in her birthday suit.
September 20, 2007 I linked to something similar to this a while ago but these Writers' Rooms are just fun to look at. I guess it's part of my productivity obsession (more with people who are than actually being so) in that I love to see the rooms where people do their work, the books surrounding all the people who write write write. Can you be a good writer without being surrounded by good books? Can you be a good writer without reading a lot of good books?
September 19, 2007 Now, is this live performance of Tank! , a theme from the classic anime Cowboy Bebop good for it's music or good for it's reference? I do think it would go over well in Vegas.
Everything being built on the web these days is all about the community. Where do the loners fit in with all these cliques? When I started on the web, it was all about personal websites. YOU had a site where you put all your stuff. Hell, even when blogging took off, it was about personalized blogs on YOUR site. I think that was the main reason I stayed away from Livejournal, even though i had an account when they started. But now everything is community driven this and community building that. Everybody is Facebooking and MySpacing and TubingYou. They are counting beans ("friends") and using templated personal sites. I am about to re-design some of my own personal brands on the web and I realize that I am back to being a lone voice in a 40 visitors a day world, a highschool loner, in a 500+ friends world. How about all us loners make a community?
September 19 07 We use Lenovo computers exclusively at work so it was only a matter of time before someone asked for one of these Thinkpad Reserve Edition laptops. All dressed in leather and slimline as hell, they really seem to be nothing more than the X61 in a fancy suit.
At the The Movies is a great site dedicated to the reviewing of movies with Roger Ebert and all the guys I consider nothing more than his sidekicks.
September 17, 2007 Heh. I knew it had to be out there but I forgot to look for the The Angels Have The Phone Box tshirt. Now if I can only find one of the DVDs with the easter egg, my life will be complete.
September 14, 2007 I really like the first of the two "believe" trailers that are making the TV rounds for Halo 3. Most people know my fondness for war movies and I must admit to having a softspot for the aging vetern thinking back image.
September 12, 2007 I have probably blogged this before but what the hey, it's milov.nl's anime listing. so far i have liked everything he gave an 8 or more.
September 11, 2007 September 10, 2007 Are you a fan of My Neighbour Totoro? Are you interested in being absolutely traumatized by a fan image of it? Of course you are (via danelope)!!!
Remember the rumours about Peter Jackson directing a Halo movie? Well it seems that Weta did do some teaser mockups. *whine* I want mooooooore.
September 07, 2007 LMAO !! This makes me giggle out loud. It seems some anti-racist clowns foiled a KKK rally. Now THIS is the way to take care of militant haters -- just laugh at them. (thanks jer)
September 06, 2007 September 04, 2007
I often accuse the current crop of pop culture media barons as being "too old to get it." To be honest I imagined that the majority of TV & Hollywoodland to be old gray haired men, still afraid of women with power, of black people and of anyone not fitting into the man/wife/2.5 kids mold. But looking at NBC Universal, not many fit my image. So how do you explain why TV sucks so badly these days? Fake Steve Jobs argues it out here but really, mainstream media always had a knack for sucking. At least most of the suckage now is ironic -- such as the current crop of "reality TV". Nobody watches those shows as if they are truly real and not scripted, produced and edited out the yin-yang. Do they? There is no lasting value to most TV and I will argue that there definately should be. It has to be more than throw-away "popcorn" media. It's a shame that I have to go hunting american & british cable channels to download for decent TV.
September 04 07 September 03, 2007
Speaking of just not being geek enough, while I watch Anime I am just not all that into it. In other words, while I love some of the story writing techniques, animation styles and fantastical action, I just don't have the energy to be otaku. For example, I didn't know the differences between Shōnen and Seinen, but it does say that the latter might be included in terms when I am searching for something new.
September 02, 2007
It's strange but I seem to have become simultaneously the curmudgeonly old man shaking my cane at kids on my lawn while still have the geeky kid inside of me. In particular, I am speaking of my tolerance for the nerd. I was the socially inept 14 year old trying to explain how great D&D and the X-Men were to those who just didn't get it or give a damn. But at my age, there is a certain amount of understanding that what you are passionate about might just be a little too left of center for most of the rest of the world.
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