Category: my ramblings

I’m used to getting a lot of spam. The vast majority of it gets filtered out. Just now one slipped by my filter and I was about to delete it, when I highlighted it and saw it in my mail client’s preview pane. Now, usually spammers will add all kinds of junk characters to the bottom of a message to make it “unique” to try and foil spam filters. Well, at the bottom of this message was this text:

cannot help himself, and to obey promptly when he has fallen into tried to sit up, and collapsed upon my broken arm. Then Moreau appeared, saying. Prince Andrew looked silently at Pierre with an ironic smile.

What happens when I put that exact string into Google? Why, it’s Sun Tzu’s The Art of War!

How is it that with all of the cool new stuff that Microsoft has done to Windows, the Fonts control panel and installation screen has not changed in over 10 years?!

I’ve long hated movietickets.com. Every single movie at Famous Players has their ad in front of it, trumpeted about how easy it is, how you don’t have to line up, etc etc. What a crock of shit. I’ve never had to line up for tickets for two reasons: I always use the automated ticket machines to buy tickets (b/c I’m an Interac junkie), and if there is some HUGE event planned, there are usually always advance ticket sales (I bought tickets for LOTR: The Fellowship of the Ring a month in advance). If you use movietickets.com, you get the convenience of being able to print your own tickets, but it COSTS AN EXTRA $1. Lame. Totally lame.

Ticketmaster is now doing a similar thing for some venues. You can print your tickets and then not have to pick them up, line up at will call, etc. But getting your tickets in the mail is $2.25. And TicketFast service (printing your own) is $2.50. But it seems that now mail service is only available for venues that don’t do TicketFast. Allow me to say: bastards!

Not smoking, thank goodness, but caffeine. My three coffee per day average is not a good thing. I blame the rich, smooth flavour of the free Starbucks at work though, not my own weak will to resist it. Anyways. Instead of having a coffee-coffee-coffee day I’m going to start having a coffee-coffee-green tea day. Green tea has about half the caffeine of a cup of coffee, so if I can ease myself onto green tea instead, I’ll be dependent on less caffeine and I won’t be making my teeth turn brown. I did do this once, for about five months, and then I came back to work at Maptuit again and the free coffee was there… so good… mmm… slurp

I get tons of ideas. Mostly for software, web services, and the like. It’s kind of like I’m always thinking about how things can be improved, or what I want my computers to do and how to make it happen. The vast majority of these things never get done, because I forget them or I just don’t have the time to see them through. But I’m working on one such nugget that will be really cool by the time I’m done (which will be soon). Here’s how it works.

For a long time now, I’d wish that I had an inventory of my DVDs. I had actually started to enter all this data onto my Newton, but somewhere in the G’s I got really tired of it. Plus the program I was using, CardMEDIA, wasn’t really what I wanted. I know that all of the information about these movies is already out there: IMDB has it all, and you can even download most of their data for your own personal (not online!) use. Every DVD has a barcode, of course, but IMDB doesn’t list them (also you can’t download their DVD technical data, which sucks). Enterprising guy that I am, I managed to obtain from a poorly-designed website the list of 30,000 North American DVD releases: with barcodes, titles, studio, length, and rating. By cross-referencing the title with the IMDB data, I added director and plot summaries to my list, and I could add anything else that I wanted from IMDB. At this moment, I’m pretty damn happy with this.

The next step is to get this data on my Newton, so I can carry it around with me and build the list of things that I have. Once I load the data into a Newton database program (I’m using FilePad), I can use my InPath barcode scanner to scan my DVD barcodes and check off that I have the titles. Later, when I’m at the store looking at a $13.99 DVD deal, I can just filter out the titles that I have to make sure I won’t be buying something I already have. Etc, etc.

This is Felix, our latest addition. I totally can’t remember if I’ve posted a photo of him before, so here it is. Felix is a bit of a special cat. He is a polydactyl cat, meaning that he has extra toes on his feed. In his case, he has two extra toes on his left front paw and one extra on all other feet. This inevitably leads to nicknames like “bigfoot” and “alottatoes”. He also has a tendency to hit first and ask questions later: when he encounters something new, he’ll sooner hit it than sniff it. This even goes for things which he may want to eat, which means he’s on the table every day at dinnertime trying to whack some beets off your plate.

as you likely already know, we power-hungry North-Easters sent ourselves spiraling into a blackout on Thursday. I was at work when it happened. At first we thought we had just tripped a local breaker, but then the UPSes in the nearby machine room began their bleeping chorus. It took about an hour an a half to get home by car, since the subway wasn’t running (streetcars outside on King St. were dead in their tracks). Hilarity then ensued as the power stayed out for at least 24 hours at our apartment and our water and phone were down for periods of time.

We had a weekend getaway planned for Darien Lake. After finally getting through to them and finding out that they were open, we decided to go to Niagara Falls (where there was power) and spend the night, then cross over to New York on Saturday morning. All in all things went pretty smoothly. When we came back all of our fish were still alive, despite the fact that their filters were off for over a day.

Today I discovered that one of my MP3 CDs has two lateral cracks in the hub of the CD. (Photos to follow later today when I can get them off of my camera). This is the first time I’ve even seen that happen before. Time to make a new CD!

(update Aug 14) ah, here’s that photo:

I’ve discovered Advance Wars. Advance Wars is very, very addictive.

I believe I’ve failed to mention that we now have a second fish tank. This is just a little 10 gallon one that has five dwarf puffers in it. The puffers are pretty cool little fish: they’re kinda chubby and sort of flutter around in the water. Sandy calls them “water hummingbirds”.

Last week, our other tank almost had a catastrophe: the motor on our AquaClear Mini filter burned out. Luckily I discovered it before it was too late, quickly went out to the pet store and took the opportunity to upgrade to a Penguin BIO-Wheel 125 filter system. The BIO-Wheel is supposed to be the best one out there. I hope to replace the filter in the puffer’s take (currently a cheap Top-Fin one) with a BIO-Wheel mini soon.

Also, I sold my scooter. Sniff I’ll miss it. It was damn fun to drive, but I just don’t need it in the city, and I couldn’t justify keeping it. One day, I hope to get myself back into a position where I can buy a scooter, so I can zip around stupid gas guzzling SUVs.

I’m getting pretty tired of Sluggy Freelance. Actually, I’ve been getting pretty tired of it for a while now. When I started reading it back in 1998, it was funny, there weren’t too many characters, and the plotlines were easy to follow. I think I lost the plot somewhere in 2001, and there are about three or four characters who I cannot name. Plotlines that last for months are just too darn hard to follow. I got totally lost in the middle of The Storm Breaker Saga, and I mean, now everything is tied to the silly book of E-Ville and that stupid haunted house. I don’t even remember where the house came from. Maybe I just prefer to laugh when I read a comic. I know that I’ve gotten Sandy turned onto Penny Arcade in a big way, and she’s not even a gamer. (Heck, I’m not even a gamer).