Month: March 2003

Yesterday we took Oliver, the deaf pure white cat, to the College Royal Cat Show. We actually had a lot of fun there – I was a bit skeptical and had no idea what to expect, but it was very informal. At least they did have nice cages for all the cats to be in for a few hours. The judge was a vet and she talked quite a bit about each cat. There were some very neat and rare cats there – a male calico, and a white tabby, and some other pure-breeds. Oliver himself was definately the most active cat – he made lots of noise in his cage while the other cats were being judged. In the end he one a first place ribbon for best tail! His tail has a mind of its own, so this is only fitting.

Man, what a week. Work was hectic as ever. I finally rolled out some great tools for people only to have them blow up the server today. I don’t know exactly what happened, and I hate that feeling. My boss wasn’t mad at all, I mean we’re skipping a few development steps here 🙂 but I guess I take things like that personally – I want things that I create to work. I started the week off good because I was so well rested after being sick, now I feel like I’m back in that rut of sleep-deprivation and caffeine dependence. But hey, the weekend’s here, so its time to rest and not stress out. Maybe I should become a buddhist.

Anyways… sometimes I get ideas.

We sewed up our new apartment! We’re moving on May 1 back to Toronto. I’m excited. Sandy is excited and scared. We’ve already started to pack things up – we have a lot of stuff. I’ve begun eBaying things that we don’t need that other people might want. Especially electronics.

UPDATE: it looks like things are going to be okay. We might have to go pick them up and bring them to foster care somewhere in the Toronto-ish area, but I think they’ll be fine.

For the past half-hour I’ve been trying to find a no-kill animal shelter in Ontario, preferably in the Ottawa area. The deal is this: when my sister and her boyfriend husband, Sylvia and Daniel, left for their trip last year they left my sister’s two orange tabby brothers with one of Daniel’s relatives in Ottawa. They’ve since been moved and are living with his sister? I believe. Now apparently this person can’t take care of them anymore, and wants to get rid of them. So I’ve been helping my mom (who’s sick right now) to find a place where they can be put for adoption.

I’d take them in a second, but we tried that before they left and the larger tabby wouldn’t get along with our cats. We also now have three cats and both Sandy and I understand that this is the maximum number we can handle (we joked about naming our third cat Max instead of Oliver because he was the ‘Max’imum number we were going to have). My mom can’t take them because she has Emily, who is an FIV survivor and carrier, not to mention that Emily probably wouldn’t get along with them.

All this is choking me up inside… it’s hard to look at sites that just have pictures of cats up for adoption and not want to take them all in. I want to find these guys a good, permanent home – they don’t deserve to be shuttled around, and I’m kind of pissed off at my sister, but it wasn’t her fault – they were going to take them along but then all of the travel rules and their plans changed and they had to stay here in Canada. It just makes me want to cry. I’d go anywhere to make sure these two cats are alright, and they’re not even mine.

Right now I’m thinking about contacting Cats Anonymous as well as my friend Stan in Ottawa to see if he knows anyone who would make a good cat-bearing home. If anyone out there reads this and thinks they can help me in any way, please let me know – leave a comment or mail chuma@chuma.org.

Whenever I go out to get lunch and don’t bring my camera, I always see cool things that I want to take photos of! GRRR! Today in two minutes I saw a van parked outside the CBC building with “BREATHE” stenciled on the side, and also a guy driving down John St. on a Honda Elite scooter just like mine (but white)!!!

I wrote this up as part of a discussion from boingboing, but I should post it here. These are the gadgets I carry around regularly.

On the belt, a Motorola V101. Sure, it’s ugly as sin, bulky as hell, and sucks for actual voice calls. But it has a screen that you can actually read some text on and it’s beautiful for sending SMSes and using the ICQMobile integration just kicks ass. I think this phone is only available in Canada.

In my bag:

• Apple Newton MessagePad 2100. Still the most usable PDA ever created. I organize my life and my work tasks on this puppy, and wouldn’t change that for the world. Of course, I’m a little biased since I happen to also run a very large Newton mailing list… This is actually kept in a BurroPak padded sleeve inside the bag. If you were a Newton user and you remember the BurroPak from Landware, you get a gold star.
• Game Boy Advance with a 128 megabit flash cartridge. Real games on the go, and even Classic Nintendo games to boot.
• AVC Soul Player CD/MP3 player. Coupled with some Sony MDR-V150 headphones. I don’t need an iPod; CDRs are still cheap. If I scratch one, I just re-burn it from my hard disk at home.
• Canon PowerShot S230 camera. Man, I love this camera. It’s tiny, it’s 3.1MP, it uses CompactFlash, it shoots movie clips with sound, it has great low-light performance, and digital zoom that actually looks good. It has a Lexar 128MB CF card in it.
• AComData USB CompactFlash reader. It’s also nice and small. It’s mostly for using a 16MB CF card that I use to ferry files back and forth from work without exposing data to the wilds of the net. Also for showing photos from the camera on any PC, of course. For $20 minus $20 rebate, I wish I had bought two.
• Leatherman PST II multitool. For everything from a quick nail file to cutting wire. Also has a decent phillips-head screwdriver and three sizes of slot drivers, well suited for the inside of a PC case.
• Sanford PhD Multi. Stylus, Pen, Pencil, and only $15.

I’m back, 100% feeling fine. Returning to broadcasting at ya.

Sandy and I found a new apartment on Friday! It’s around the Don Mills & Sheppard area of Toronto, right across from Fairview Mall. It’s a nice building – possibly the only really nice one in that area – and it’s right on the subway, next to the mall, and 10 minutes away from Seneca, where Sandy will be starting her ECE course this summer. And it’s not in the ghetto. Ahem. I didn’t realize all the hoops you have to jump through to rent in Toronto – credit check, letter from your employer (or proof of other income), letter from your bank… but I did all that and we got it.

Yesterday it hit me like a sack of potatoes falling on my stomach. Today I am back, but running at around 80% capacity.

My cell phone does strange things when its battery gets really really low, like either turn on every pixel in the display, or just give a garbled display. Or the display is dying, which would suck and probably make me wish I had bought the stupid extended warranty.