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New Sleater-Kinney CD is out on August 20. That, along with Super Mario Sunshine for GameCube on August 26, is what I will be blowing my money on that month…

In other news, today’s my birthday. In other other news, people in Toronto are really rude. And they park badly. But their garbage is being picked up again.

Even with the current state of garbage collection in Toronto, tourists are still here in droves. Since I work very close to the SkyDome and CN Tower, I see lots of tourists at street level. Here’s a quick guide on how to spot an American tourist in a crowd. (Not that I have anything against most Americans. This is just for fun, really.)

• Men: often wearing t-shirts or hats related to 9/11, FDNY, or US Armed Forces. Baseball caps with the above subjects are a dead giveaway. Also, large Ray-Ban sunglasses.
• Women: big hair, especially big frizzy hair. Skin-tight or spandex pants. Cigarettes.

So I’m back, in the country and on my website. While I was gone, Stan moved, and where Stan goes, the server goes, and where the server was going, a new DSL hookup had to be done, and anyone who’s been there know how bad that can go. So we’re back. And PHP got upgraded, but for some reason the smart people at PHP changed the default way of accessing variables from web form POST data. So I fixed that last night. And now I’m back, as I said.

It’s nice to be back, thanks. Sometimes the best thing about your trip is coming home and seeing everything you’ve been missing. Like the people you love, the English language, high-speed internet access at home, and slightly more sane drivers. But I wish I could find Schweppes Bitter Lemon (they say it’s bottled in Canada – but NO STORE CARRIES IT), old world charm, and dense tree-lined streets.

So, it’s back to commuting, and now looking for a job, since this little stint is done at the end of August. Anyone looking to hire a gung-ho UNIX sysadmin who hand-codes tools in Perl, PHP, MySQL, and bash?

nothing like upgrades breaking my scripts! Bad, bad php.

Last two entries messed up. Let’s try again.

I’m coming home early, on Sunday. Don’t bug me about Newtontalk outages, but they’re being looked into. That is all.

in Yugoslavia. It is hot. I am taking a lot of photos. I miss Sandy a lot.
But I am having a good time. Not going to spend too much time writing here, rather I think I’ll write a whole page and post all the photos when I get back.

PS: it’s 4:50pm here.

Where has all the time gone? I don’t know, but let’s not answer that question right now. Let’s try to write and submit this whole entry before I accidentally close Mozilla and lose half of it. Good idea. So what do I have to talk about?

• First, a confession. When I first heard that Kylie Minogue was “back” (at least in Canada, she never really lost her popularity outside of North America), I laughed, immediately classified her as trash, and went to listen to something else. But the last few weeks, I started listening to it, and I like it. Most of the songs have a decidedly house feel, and I enjoy house music a lot. But I’m still a little ashamed.
• In other music news, this morning I finally gave Boards of Canada a good listen. They’re awesome. So awesome. Go and get it.
• NewtonTalk’s outage problems are gone. We hired some geeks to protect the wiring cabinet from Verizon techs. In return, they get to beat up Verizon techs. Win-win 🙂
• Tomorrow I’m leaving for a vacation! I’m going (with my Mom) for about three weeks to visit my grandparents and other relatives in Subotica (pronounced SOO-bo-TEE-tica, not SUB-ot-i-ka). My priorities will include relaxing, taking nice walks to the park, taking lots of photographs, eating some good food, and doing a minimum of computing and e-mail reading.
• When I get back, I’ll have a ton of things to do as usual. Some parts of this site need major work. I’m going to totally re-do the photos section. The hardware list needs updating. Maybe some design tweaks are in order too. I’ve got new software that isn’t on the Software part yet. UNNA badly needs an update. Sandy is going to miss me a lot while I’m away (and I’ll miss her a lot too), so we’ll have to do some fun outings – maybe do the tourist-y things in Toronto or something? I haven’t done that in a while.
• Yesterday I filmed presentations all day at an internal function here at work. When I get back, I’ll have to capture seven hours of footage (thank dog for FireWire and miniDV), do some (hopefully simple) editing, and master some VCDs.
• Also, when I get back Calum and I are going to hack my old AST Ascentia J30 into a digital picture frame, connected to a wireless network. Calum’s done this twice recently, and I hope to duplicate his results on old PowerBooks with my crappy P100. I can’t wait. More details will of course be here, and we might even roll a page together about doing this kind of thing.

I’ve also been thinking on writing a page on how to drive (at least on 400-series highways in Southern Ontario), cause there are many people who can’t. And I’d like to try and teach them before I beat them up.

NTLK is not down – that’s old news. More new news to come soon.

Insert threatening remarks to Verizon employees here.

This was written yesterday by me on the bus ride home.

Apparently I’m not the only person who thinks that most of the Toronto -> Guelph Greyhound drivers are morons. One guy waiting for the 3:30 with me today suggested applying electro-Shock therapy to some of them. Luckily today the driver of the 3:30 is the crazy fast driver I had at the beginning of the month (and never since). Chances are we’ll be there before 5.

One week until our big Symposium at work. I’m off the hook for grunt jobs during it, though: I get to help film the event. Speaking of filming, I also hare a brand-new camera to use: a Canon ZR40. It’s coming to Europe with my mom and I. It’s been so long since I shot anything, but I’d love to have the opportunity to work on a project. At my current and ongoing levels of commitment to everything else though…

The one thing that is certain in my life right now is Sandy. I’m finally at that turning point in life that I’ve been striving towards just a-out my entire life. It’s that time between schooling and, well, everything else. I’m really running my own life now. I’m fairly happy with the decisions I’ve made thus far. Sandy said something last week: The only reason you stay in a relationship with someone is because every morning you wake up and decide to stay with that person. Through good and not-so-good, I’ve been making that decision every day for over 18 months, and it’s been the best decision I could make.

Now pardon me while I administer some electro-shock therapy to the person In front of me. Boy am I glad I’ll be flying business class.