Author: chuma

Work was sloooow. I can’t seem to stay awake. Must go to Guelph, see Sandy, see friends at pub tomorrow, have good time on birthday. Yes.

Reading I’ve been doing bu haven’t mentioned in a while:

• read Super-Toys Last All Summer Long by Brian Aldiss, the story which A.I. is based on.
• read Crome Yellow by Aldous Huxley.
• Currently reading The Man Who Was Afraid by Maxim Gorky.

Super-Toys was interesting. I haven’t seen A.I. yet (tomorrow!), but I already know enough of the plot to see the resembelance between the story and the movie.

Crome Yellow was interesting. It’s much lighter than Brave New World, probably Huxley’s most famous book, but contains similar elements – characters talk about theories and ideas about society, while the protagonist struggles to fit in with proper English society types. I might need to reread this one in a few months.

From the Apocalypse Watch section in today’s Chrominance:

…first on the list is the latest Sunny Delight advertising campaign. Maybe you’ve seen this, or maybe it’s a Canada only campaign; it involves an Austin-Powers-MiniMe-like villain scheming to harness the power of the California Sun. Ooops, too late, because Sunny D’s already done it!

What I’d like to add is this: Sunny Delight has been targeting their advertising for years to specific age groups in order to bombard one particular generation, in the hopes that they started using the product at an early age and keep using it as they grow up. If you think about old Sunny D ads, you’ll notice that they started by targeting young (less that 12) children (and their parents), then went for the more independant 12-18 year group, and now seemed to be targeting 18-24 year olds – until this putrid ad came out.

In my own humble opinion, another sign of the coming apocalypse is that Kraft Pizza commercias are starting to become almost carbon-copies of every single terrible commercial that McCain’s has made in the past 20 years.

AOL users who can’t follow instructions e-mailed to them: go away.

Yesterday was hot. Really hot. In the morning, a young woman fainted on my subway car. This past lunch hour I sweated down while running around getting all of the necessary pieces to get an ISIC card and a train ticket (photo, change for photo booth, visit TravelCuts, buy train ticket). And I had to pay $16 for the card which would have been free if I had gotten it in Guelph. Oh well. I also just figured out that if I buy a six-pack of Toronto-Guelph return tickets from VIA, the student discount is half off and it’s way cheaper than Greyhound. So I just did that. Yay.

I just mistyped that as ‘roast beats’ three times. Hrm.

Anyways, weekend was awesome. Saw Sandy after two weeks apart, on Saturday we went to the races at Mosport Speedway. I got to ride in the pace car before the races got rained out. It was still fun to see everything. On Sunday we went to a family barbecue at her Uncle Bob’s cottage which was lots of fun. There was good roast beast and other food, and after than we went tubing out on the lake. It was damn fun, although I got a few litres of lake water up my nose when I wiped out. But I took out Sandy’s brother and he face planted into the water, so it was all worth it 🙂

I already mentioned that the new Canada Post website is a putrid mound of Flash and ASP garbage, rendering it slow as all hell and totally unintuitive. Well, now I just found the “text only” site. If you go through the “splash” (shudder) page and select your language, there is a link at the bottom of the page that leads to a text-only representation. Why they bothered to use table cell background colours when every text browser I’ve ever seen doesn’t display them is beyond me. Anyways, the problem is any link from there goes to the same site as every other browser. Pathetic.

I was up late last night burning CDs, and didn’t wake up until 7:15. My alarm clock was doing something strange as well; the alarm didn’t sound very healthy. Maybe the 5+ year old battery is finally dying.

Yay for seeing Sandy this weekend. I miss her. Full weekend planned: car racing Saturday, family picnic Sunday. Woo. And I get to teach her how to use her new CD burner, and coordinate ordering her eMate… computers are fun.

Finally burned some good ol’ Canadian bands onto an MP3 CD.

.

When I was born they looked at me and said
What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy
And when you were born they looked at you and said
What a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl

We've got these chains that hang around our necks
People want to strangle us with them before we take our first breath
Afraid of change, afraid of staying the same
When temptation calls we just look away

This name is the hairshirt I wear
And this hairshirt is woven from your brown hair
This song is the cross that I bear
Bear it with me, bear with me, bear with me
Be with me tonight
I know that it isn't right
But be with me tonight

I go to school, I write exams
If I pass, if I fail, if I drop out, does anyone give a damn?
And if they do, they'll soon forget
'Cause it won't take much for me to show that my life ain't over yet

I wake up scared, I wake up strange
I wake up wondering if anything in my life is ever going to change
I wake up scared, I wake up strange
And everything around me stays the same

This name is the hairshirt I wear
And this hairshirt is woven from your brown hair
This song is the cross that I bear
Bear it with me, bear with me, bear with me
Be with me tonight
I know that it isn't right
But be with me tonight

I couldn't tell you that I was wrong
Chickened out, grabbed a pen and paper, sat down and I wrote this song
I couldn't tell you that you were right
So instead I looked in the mirror watched tv laid awake all night

We've got these chains that hang around our necks
People want to strangle us with them before we take our first breath
Afraid of change, afraid of staying the same
When temptation calls....

This name is the hairshirt I wear
And this hairshirt is woven from your brown hair
This song is the cross that I bear
Bear it with me, bear with me, bear with me
Be with me tonight
I know that it isn't right
But be with me tonight

When I was born they looked at me and said
What a good boy, what a smart boy, what a strong boy
And when you were born they looked at you and said
What a good girl, what a smart girl, what a pretty girl, hey

Happy Canada Day everyone! Hopefully the weather yesterday was nicer than there I was. On the coast of Lake Huron, the winds blew sand in my face. Yum! On Georgian Bay, things were nice and calm. Didn’t get to go swimming, but it was still a nice day out.

Visited some kind of buy/sell/whatever shop in Wiarton, and it was the largest single collection of crap in the entire free world. I should have taken photos. There was crap like discarded books from libraries, various and sundry useless and worthless tins, bowls, other things made out of glass, all for sale at exorbitant sums. There was even Cherry Pepsi from 1999 and 5+ year old fake maple syrup and strawberry jam. Mental note: never, ever go there again.

I just got an HTML e-mail from FreeDrive with a subject of “Having trouble with those E-Mail attachments?” No, actually, just those frickin’ annoying HTML e-mails, but thanks for asking! (Delete)