chuma.org

Month: November 2003

  • Thanksgiving? No Thank You

  • How you can tell one of your hard disks is dead.

    When this happens:

    That bad. Luckily the drive is less than a year old, so I will RMA it. Also luckily I burned the important stuff off of it last night.

  • the mustard of your doom

    Yes, I got my first speeding ticket ever this weekend. And I didn’t get off easy. Suckage.

    I got my latest order of cool very 3rd-party GBA stuff from Success. Including a new F2A 256Mbit flash cartridge and linker. Now I can finally put a 128Mbit game as well as a ton of other stuff on a cart! I feel like the most spoiled GBA player ever. I also picked up the stupid GBA headphone adapter in my order – for $1, how can you go wrong?

    I’ve been playing a lot of Mario & Luigi: Superstar Saga on my GBA. It’s a really funny and good game. Also, now that I have tons of space on my GBA, I can bring along lots of classic GB and NES games, by using Goomba and PocketNES respectively, and PogoShell manages it all.

  • crap.

    BBC NEWS | Europe | Serbia bloc folds after key role – c’mon, guys, you really don’t want to elect another insane right-wing nationalist government again. Remember the last time? Civil war happened? Civil war bad.

  • Fast Company | The Wal-Mart You Don’t Know – Amazingly scary and very well-written article about how Wal-Mart is so big that they reshape every single supplier they deal with – or else.

    Once Wal-Mart Canada starts selling groceries, we’re screwed.

  • Lately, I’ve actually begun speaking in domain names, or if Sandy says “Boy, does that suck!” I’ll follow up with “dot-com!” to get a laugh. Of course, any woman who laughs at a joke like that is a keeper.

    Jon asked if I’d be putting up a public interface to my DVD UPC data, and you’ll find it on the menubar on the left. Just enter a full or partial title.

  • List of all my DVDs

    My DVD List – List Titles I Own – finally, I have easily made a database of all of the DVDs that I own.

    I did this by:

    • “Borrowing” a huge list of DVD titles, UPCs, etc from a website with a less-than-secure CGI script (no, I’m not telling where)
    • Cross-referencing that data with a local copy of IMDB
    • Dumping the data into a MySQL database
    • Writing a quick and dirty interface using PHP
    • Using my serial barcode wand, scanned the barcodes on all of my DVDs – if the codes were found then it marked the entries that I have. If the code wasn’t found, then I had to enter them in manually – mostly these were Canadian-specific releases from Alliance Atlantis. For box sets that didn’t have barcodes on them anymore, I found them in the database, printed off their barcodes and taped them on.

    Yes, I’m a total nerd. But now I know exactly what I do and don’t own!

  • sick sucks.

    I don’t like being sick. I especially don’t like being sick when I have to miss work. I don’t link missing work. I like work. Anyways, I’ve had this cold-like thing since last weekend. I made it through work on Monday and Tuesday but had to cut Wednesday short, since I was in a daze-like state. Thursday was right out. I thought for sure I had strep. Friday was better. Today my throat isn’t sore, I’m just kinda dazed again. I hope this means that it’s going away.

    I did get a poppy the other day at the mall. Why aren’t there any people selling them on the TTC?

    And yes, those pig ads are for Telus camera phones. Once I realized this it ceased to be interesting for me.

  • poppies.

    A week until Rememberance Day and I don’t have my poppy yet. Gotta get on that.

  • my head hurts.

    Woke up this morning with a pounding headache. I’m trying to make sure that this cold I’m getting / have gotten doesn’t take over and reboot my system.

    This weekend we watched a few good movies. 28 Days Later, directed by Danny Boyle (Trainspotting). What a bloody wild ride that was. I found myself almost unable to move afterwards. Also, some of the shots and direction were so good I almost cried, they were so beautiful. Amazing amazing amazing. Ever since I took Contemporary Cinema in university, where we focussed on British cinema of the 1980s and early 1990s, I’ve been really interested in directors like Boyle, Stephen Frears, and Neil Jordan. Looking at IMDB, now I’m interested in seeing Dirty Pretty Things.

    In the more run-of-the-mill category, we also saw Runaway Jury. Which was alright. I think that Rachel Weisz could have been better, but otherwise it was a pretty good legal drama. I kinda predicted the ending though.