The Mad Perseid

Happy birthday to me! Happy birthday to me!

2006-02-17T09:18:00.000-04:00

I have just realized that The Mad Perseid blog is now over one year old, and has had over ten thousand hits! Thank you all for making this thing a bigger success than I thought possible, and I appologize for the prolonged absences. Sometimes, life gets in the way. Woo hoo!

And to celebrate, here're a few of my favourite Stargate: SG1 quotes:

O'Neill: "Captain, how do you know where to go in a place like this?"
Carter: "I studied the Tokra specs while we were on Vorash."
O'Neill: "You sure know how to have a good time."
Carter: "Having a good time now, sir."
O'Neill: "You go, girl!"

Jackson: "Teal'c, what is that?"
Teal'c: "A Goa'uld long-range visual communications device. Much like your television, but more advanced."
O'Neill:(TV Version) "Mmmm... Goa'uld TV..."
O'Neill:(DVD Version) "But does it get Showtime?" I've been told that that's the original quote, but it was changed to the other one when the SciFi channel took SG1 over from Showtime.

Teal'c: (Seeing a Jaffa fiddle with a mothership control) "O'Neill! Prepare yourself for..."
(Ship drops out hyperspace suddenly and O'Neill does the Dark Helmet bit from Spaceballs and flies head first into a bulkhead)
Teal'C: "...extreme deceleration!"
O'Neill: "Yeah, thanks, Teal'c."

Carter: "You know, you blow up one sun, and suddenly everyone expects you to walk on water."

Baal: "Do you not know the pain you will suffer for your impudence?"
O'Neill: "I don't know the meaning of the word. Seriously. 'Impudence'. What does it mean?"

Jackson: "What happened to you?"
O'Neill: "Carter."
Jackson: "She attacked you?"
O'Neill: "No, she tried to seduce me."
Jackson: "You... poor man."

O'Neill: "I come up with the Lost City, we go find it, yes or no?"
Kinsey: "No!"
O'Neill: (Looks at Dr. Weir) "Who are you, really, and why are you here?"
Dr. Weir: "I'll consider it."

Jacob/Selmac: "Jack, this ship will never fly again. I'd saying having the Supreme Commander of the Asgard Fleet owe you one is more important."
O'Neill: "Yeah. OK, the next mothership, we keep!"

O'Neill: (Sees Anubis' throne) "Nice!"
Jacob/Selmac: "Are you seriously considering salvaging this ship?"
O'Neill: "Why yes, yes I am."
Jacob/Selmac: "Jack, this ship belonged to Anubis."
O'Neill: "Excellent!"
Jacob/Selmac: "What if this is a Trojan Horse?"
O'Neill: (Waves his hands in the air) "Well, apparently, they did it wrong."

McKay: "Has a flair for the dramatic, doesn't he?"
Carter: "Yeah, pretty much all the Goa'uld are like that."
McKay: "But why wait? Why does the guy show up two days after this started to do his whole 'Prepare to meet your doom' bit?"
Carter: "I don't know. Maybe he wanted to make sure it was going to work first."
McKay: "That would be emberrasing, wouldn't it? 'Nothing can stop the destruction I bring upon you.' Then the gate shuts down. 'Oops, never mind!'"
Carter: "Yeah, well, that didn't happen, and we forty eight hours left."

Carter: "Why are you telling me this?"
McKay: "Just trying to bond."
Carter: "Why?"
McKay: "Hospital gowns turn me on."

Baal: "That one."
Jacob/Selmac: "How do you know?"
Baal: (Smirks) "I'm a God, all knowing."

Do you want to know more?
Stargate: SG1

Well, I'm still alive!

2006-02-15T17:33:00.000-04:00

Woo hoo!!!!!!

No, just kidding! I had a crazy work schedule over the last month or so, working nights, sleeping days, so nothing much of anything got done, not even blogging. Bah humbug! At least that's over with now, and there won't be any more graveyard shifts anymore. I hope.

Any, Yu the Great celebrated his 40^th birthday by relaxing and working through the night. Oh well, there'll be other 40^th birthdays, I suppose. Nothing much lost. LOL! It's just a day, people, nothing to get excited about. Now, the day of your death, now that's something to get excited about. Either you learn all the secrets of the Universe(including who's got my Klingon Academy game CD), or you drop into the abyss of nothingness forever.

I have a couple of ideas about new blogging posts, so hopefully I'll get to that soon.

Hope to see you soon again.

2006-01-28T07:58:00.000-04:00

It's Canada's Election Day

2006-01-23T14:30:00.000-04:00

Do you know where you vote is?

Do you want to know more?
Canadian Elections

The need for editing

2006-01-16T08:05:00.000-04:00

I don't entirely know how I came across it, but I was reading the FreeDictionary article about Ivan the Terrible, which itself is a copy from Wikipedia. One part of the article that hammered home the need for better editing talked about how Ivan the Terrible was so impressed with a cathedral that he blinded the architects to make sure they didn't build anything better. Then the article goes on to say, "Other less positive aspects of this period..." That just struck me as hilarious. I know they're talking about all the good things Ivan may have done, but you just can't help but connect it with the blinding of architects bit.

Edit people, please edit.

It's a strange world out there

2006-01-14T07:45:00.000-04:00

First, we have this story about a 'vampyre' wanting to become Governor of Minnesota. He also wants to impale captured terrorists in front of the state Capitol building. Seems he doesn't quite understand why civilized countries don't create public spectacles out of such things. He also hates “God the Father”, but not His followers and worships Satan. Well, I suppose, why not. In this promiscuous and permissive world, if a woman can marry a dolphin, why can't some Devil-worshipper run for governor and beyond?

Next, we have a story about an elderly woman running her car off the road and being stuck for several days. She was reported missing, but the police didn't even know where to start looking, because her crashed was completely hidden from view. She was finally rescued when a truck driver, who sat much higher than normal car drivers, finally spotted her car stuck in some blackberry bushes and called for rescue. The old lady survived for all those days by sponging up the condensation on her windshield and windows and drinking it. Way to go, lady, great job! The irony is that her car was full of groceries, but she couldn't reach them.

It turns out that I may be a bit of a pervert. When I first read that first story, all I could think after I finished silently congratulating her for her quick thinking and being thankful that it all turned out quite well was, “Mmmmm.... blackberries..... Mmmmmm......”.

Holy crap, it's Friday the 13th!

2006-01-13T19:59:00.000-04:00

And I didn't even realize it all day. So, here's a bit of info on the whole Friday the 13^th superstition. And, if you're really curious, you can also read up on the movie series, Friday the 13^th, just for kicks and giggles.

Do you want to know more?
Friday the 13^th

Forgive Your Enemies

2006-01-13T19:50:00.000-04:00

The Sunday's sermon was titled Forgive Your Enemies.

Toward the end of the service, the minister asked, "How many of you have forgiven your enemies?" 80% held up their hands. The Minister then repeated his question. All responded this time. . . except one small elderly lady.

"Mrs. Jones? Are you not willing to forgive your enemies?"

"I don't have any." She replied, smiling sweetly.

"Mrs. Jones, that is very unusual. How old are you?"

"Ninety-eight." she replied.

"Mrs. Jones, would you please come down in front and tell us all how a person can live ninety-eight years and not have an enemy in the world?"

The little sweetheart of a lady tottered down the aisle, faced the congregation, and said . . .

"I outlived the bitches."

Stolen directly from The Median Sib blog! All hail The Median Sib!

Do you want to know more?
Humour

Quantum computers, is it?

2006-01-13T16:50:00.000-04:00

I just found this news article, and I have to say that the headline is quite a bit misleading. “Researchers Develop Quantum Processor” Well, it sounds great, but is actually pretty misleading. They didn't develop a processor, so far as I can tell, they just developed a quantum chip. And when I say “just”, I don't mean that in any kind of derogatory way. Hell, a “quantum” chip, people! That's a hell of an accomplishment. And way beyond me, I'm afraid. “With quantum mechanics, an object can be in two places at the same time, as long as you don't look at it...” I don't even understand that!

But my understand, or lack thereof, isn't at issue here. The issue is the headline. Or does Yahoo, or whoever wrote the articule, not understand the difference between “chip” and “processor”? Sure, one day it can lead to a quantum processor, but I don't think it's there yet, so why call it what it's not?

Do you want to know more?
Quantum Computer

Take your well-earned place, please

2006-01-11T22:10:00.000-04:00

A new movie has now officially gaind the top spot on my Worst Movies Ever list. This movie is called Space Fury, and it is by far the absolutely worst non-Japanese produced sci-fi movie. Japanese sci-fi will always top any Worst Movies Ever list, that's why it has to be specifically excluded.

Needless to say, Michael Paré sure knows how to pick 'em, and this was certainly no winner of any kind of awards, except perhaps for the most unrealistic portrayal of Russians I've seen in a long time. For the most unrealistic portrayal of American troops, you must see the movie Act of War. In Space Fury, things get blown up, Russian separatists hatch a plot that outlives them, a Moscow prostitute is murdered, a Russian police detective(hah! I've seen Cops in Moscow, they can't fool me!) glares impotently, an American scientist is driven crazy, a misile is launched at a space station, an orbiting laser battery opens fire and a black American athlete makes a complete ass of himself as a space tourist.

This movie has all the proper credentials to be so bad, so awful, that it is virtually impossible to tear oneself away from it. It sucks the life out you, and the only to get it back is by blogging about it.

Do you want to know more?
Space Fury / Michael Paré / Act Of War

Why didn't anybody tell me?

2006-01-09T18:48:00.000-04:00

I discovered today that a high-capacity MP3 player(say, in the 20GB range) can easily replace a home CD changer. It works surprisingly well, too. I found out, however, that you can't feed the MP3 into a stereo's CD input; it just doesn't work well, barely any sound comes out. Hmm, maybe the CD input is not amplified. Weird. I ran it into the Aux input, instead, and it works like a charm! Is life great, or what?

Do you want to know more?
MP3 / Stereo

Chocolate Fondue Fountain

2006-01-08T16:59:00.000-04:00

Now I've seen everything. A Chocolate Fondue Fountain. Well, I never. Can you imagine such a thing? Up to 5 pounds guey, flowing chocolaty goodness.

Do you want to know more?
Chocolate Fondue Fountain / Gadgets

Kitty Cannon

2006-01-08T08:25:00.000-04:00

A bit of perverted fun for y'all to enjoy.

Do you want to know more?
Kitty Cannon

A new version of 'Defend' is now out

2006-01-08T07:30:00.000-04:00

I've just released a new version of my game, 'Defend', version 0.6. There are many bug fixes and not a few new features. Please enjoy.

Of outsourcing to India, and the search for the almighty rupee!

2006-01-07T14:51:00.000-04:00

One of the more interesting phenomena of the modern age is outsourcing of work to other countries, especially software development to India. In this article I will attempt to summarize my experiences with and opinions on this subject. Since I am a computer programmer, I will present that side of it.

Software development is a ludicrously complex and time-consuming activity, and complexity and amount of time increase logarithmically as numbers of users and amount of data increases. It is not an easy profession to be in, regardless of which particular industry you work in. Hours are often ridiculous, as are demands by the user community. It is, however, a highly intellectual job, and one that can be very satisfying.

Because it is so complex and time-consuming, many companies, especially the larger ones, decided to outsource their IT departments to save cost. Usually that worked out quite well, because the company's own programmers would often be transferred directly to the new outsourcer to provide an immediate core of competence. Then came moving from one outsourcer to another, and often a whole new team would show up, learn the entire system in three months and then completely replace the previous team. That's how I got my current job, by taking it away from another outsourcer.

We eventually lost that contract due to unfortunate timing with the customer almost going tits up. The work went to another company in Canada, which sent it all to India within the year. And that's when the trouble started.

Most of us moved on to different positions within our company, and never really gave the lost contract much thought. I, certainly, never thought about it, until I heard from an old friend who had been hired by that old company to fix the disasters created by the India team. None of us had to worry about it for about two years, at which it was announced that half of our current contract would be going to India.

It took about three months from the date of the announcement for me to learn that the problems associated with the previous India team were not just a hiccup in the generally smooth transitions, but appear endemic to the software development industry in that country.

Apart from being grossly incompetent, I found them to be rude, abnoxious, arrogant, lazy, unwilling to listen to those with experience, and above all else, convinced of their own superiority. You're taking my job, the least you can do is show some sensitivity. And sending me highly insulting emails when I'm trying to ensure you're properly completing a monthly process(one that you have not yet completed successfully by yourself) is not very likely to endear you to me, especially when those emails are CCed to every manager under the sun.

As for competence, I'm not talking about lack of knowledge of the system they were taking over, nobody knows that when you first start a new job. That's something you learn eventually. No, what I'm talking about is basic software development skills, analysis, design, troubleshooting, investigation. None of those things they were able to do, even the supposedly more experienced developers they eventually added to supplement the kid that was sent.

At one point in the past, I showed an intermediate programmer a process he had to do every once in a while, on an almost-random basis. It wasn't a process I was particularly familiar with, mostly because it happened so infrequently. Almost immediately he discovered a flaw in the documentation I gave him, and was also able to suggest improvements to the process. When I tried to explain this same process to the India team, it was like talking to a brick wall. However, since they didn't even know how to rename a file, perhaps I was asking too much of them.

Nor does the language difference help matters. I've now realized that when people say that Indians understand English, what they really mean is that they can read and write English, but pronunciation and spoken English confuse them terribly. That sounds racist, but the funny part about all this is that they don't even understand each other when they speak in English. Though, I must admit that speaking the way they do makes it easy for them to manage recalcitrant customers, who just give up when they don't understand what the argument is all about.

What it all boils down to is that nobody sends work to India because they're so good at what they do, but because they're cheap. Though I'm not entirely sure what's so cheap about them. They earn a third of my salary, but it took five of them to do the job I did by myself with the occasional help of an intermediate developer. And considering the months it took them to fix problems that used to take a day or less, I'm less and less convinced that there's much in the way of cost saving by outsourcing to India.

Language barriers, lack of general software development experience, extremely high turnover, twelve hour time difference, extreme culture clash. These do not make for high quality application and user support.

Do you want to know more?
India / Outsourcing / Software Development

Woo hoo!

2006-01-06T20:01:00.000-04:00

Problem with the blog has been resolved!

It turns out you have to update your account every 30 days or so, or it gets deleted automatically. That's a bit irritating, but I guess I can put up with it in a free service.

Do you want to know more?
DynDNS / Dynamic IP

Parts of this blog are currently experiencing... technical difficulties

2006-01-06T19:57:00.000-04:00

Yup, yup, thats the ticket, that's what they're called.

Actually, my domain name got deregistered, and I'm currently waiting for the new registration to work its way through the Internet. Hopefully soon.

Of BOINCing, or what women want

2006-01-05T11:16:00.000-04:00

OK, I'll admit, this has nothing to do with horizontal negotiation or with women or what they want. But you might find it interesting nonetheless, at least some of you might.

A couple days ago, I downloaded a program called BOINC. It's a cooperative computing effort that allows certain projects that require massive amounts of computing time to utilize the free CPU cycles available on millions of idling computers. There're a number of projects you can lend your machine to and the program BOINC manages it all for you. It downloads certain work units from the project servers and processes them; when it's done, it uploads the results, updates your statistics and requests more work. And on and on it goes like that. These units take many hours to process, so it won't be hogging your Internet connection. The computation itself happens at low priority, which means that if you need your computer, BOINC automatically gives up control of the CPU to your other programs.

I joined two projects, Einstein and Rosetta. Here are the times required to process their work units on my home computers:

Computer	Einstein	Rosetta
P4 2.53Ghz Windows XP	4.5 hours	4 hours
Dual Athlon 1.2Ghz Linux	12 hours	8 hours
P3 667MHz Linux Overclocked to 720	25 hours

BOINC also detects and automatically uses multiple CPUs, if more than one is present. Each work unit process run on its own CPU, and since there's no constant switching between them, it doesn't seem to have any bad impact on performance.

I wouldn't recommend running BOINC on a laptop, due to their inability to properly dump heat, but if you want to see how your machines compare to others, this is a pretty good way.

Do you want to know more?
BOINC

"Other Blogs" Adjustment

2006-01-04T23:59:00.000-04:00

I made a couple of adjustments to the “Other Blogs” section in the sidebar. Specifically, the address for Princess Wild Cow blog was adjusted to take into account that blog's move to another server, and the “Girl Punch... The Perfect Blend of Crazy” blog was deactivated - it appears to be no longer valid or registered. Too bad, I kinda enjoyed that one.

Ah, penguins

2006-01-04T23:10:00.000-04:00

OOOOOPPPPSSSSS! I guess, I should've paid more attention, or at least not have posted quite so late in the evening. OK, the animation's fixed now.

Of course, I'm not entirely convinced this is actually real, and not somebody's photoshop skill showoff, but it's still pretty cute, whatever it is.

Stolen from Raging Wombat blog.

Do you want to know more?
Penguins / Evil Penguins

Tecnology marches on

2006-01-04T20:20:00.000-04:00

I saw something interesting at McDonald's this evening. An assistant manager was using some kind of hand-held unit to fill something out on it, then she checked the looks of the garbage bins and then she scanned something on the wall. I even went over to take a look. Sure enough, there was a barcode label stuck to one of the walls, near the garbage bins. She did this all over the restaurant.

My guess is that's how they track how well the peons are doing their work. Then they can create a nice presentation from it, complete with blinking words and colorful pie charts. All of it will be stunningly beautiful, though ultimately useless since it's easier to just tell the peons to clear out the garbage bins more often. Though, given the history of that particular restautant, maybe not.

For the longest time I refused to go into that particular one after work(the only time I can go there), mostly because by the time I get there, all the adult managers and assistant managers have left for the day, leaving the kids behind on their own with maybe a slightly older kid to oversee them. Now, let me tell you, that is one bad idea. They didn't want to work, they wanted to play, to crack jokes, to laugh and giggle and horse around. I gave them the benefit of the doubt, of course, I didn't automatically assume they were always like that. I was wrong.

So, I quit going. Then, after half a year or so, I decided to give them another try. And that's when I discovered that with adult managers and assistant managers present, it was a completely different restaurant. Of course, I don't go there all the time(it is McDonald's, after all), but for those rare occasions when I have a craving for one of their uber tasty strawbery sundaes with nuts, it's the perfect substitute for food. Mmmmm... strawbery sundaes. Loaded with much sugary goodness, it is an excellent way to round out a day.

Do you want to know more?
McDonald's

The heat, and the crazy air conditioner

2006-01-03T13:40:00.000-04:00

Sometime during the late spring/early summer of of 2005 I bought a window air conditioner, and instantly breathed a sigh of relief. The thing actually made my apartment liveable during the hot days of summer, and with my big huge living room windows facing almost exactly east, it was doubly critical. During the heat waves of years past, the temperature in my bedroom routinely reached +35°C, sometimes even higher. During August 2002, the hottest part of that summer, I watched every movie showing in town, just for the chance to stay cool inside the air conditioned movie theatres, and many times I would wake up at night and go an after midnight drive in my air conditioned car. Needless to say, it was nasty. I was actually going to buy the A/C in 2004, but it was a cool summer, and so it was unnecessary.

In any case, when I had the A/C installed in 2005, I forgot to seal it. Not that it really mattered during the summer and fall months. Even on windy days, the hot(or warm) air didn't really seem to penetrate through the cracks between the A/C body and the window frame. But came winter, and it was altogether different. The cold air from the outside easily penetrated the cracks and on some of the days, I actually had to put on extra layers just to watch TV. Finally, I'd had enough and bought the stuff to seal the A/C with. And with that came its own problems.

One thing I didn't quite appreciate before I sealed the A/C was how much fresh air flowed into the apartment, not to mention allowing the whole place to ventilate with the help of the crack under the main door. When I first sealed it up, I was a little surprised by how stuffy the place suddenly became, not to mention that my temperature setting, having been high to counteract the cold air from the outside, suddenly roasted the place.

Of course, I must admit that with the sealant in place, it's much more comfortable, and it's still very easy to ventilate by simply opening the other side of the window. But I guess this shows I'm just never happy: automatic ventilation, but too cold versus stuffy manually ventilated apartment that maintains a comfortable temperature regardless of wind speed.

Human sexuality explained, or how to beat your meat!

2006-01-02T22:05:00.000-04:00

There's a commercial running on the radio here in town, I heard it today for the very first time. It's for a butcher, and the whole gist of it is that you don't need to cook from scratch, you can just buy their semi-prepared meat. The radio ad ends with the tag line, “You can't beat our meat”, which struck me as being so hilarious I almost crashed the car when I first heard it.

Now, my guess is that this ad was created by French-speakers for a (mostly) French-speaking company, because I cannot conceive of any other reason that that expression actually became a slogan for the ad compaign. Did they ask no English-speakers? I could, of course, be mistaken about the whole thing, but I'm pretty positive I heard them say what I thought they said.

Do you want to know more?
Beat Your Meat

Happy New Year!

2006-01-01T08:31:00.000-04:00

Happy New Year, everyone! I hope all your wishes come true, and more importantly, that you keep all of your New Year Resolutions™!

P.S. I hope to return to more regular posting this week. Thanks for your patience.

Understanding the orgasms

2005-12-30T18:06:00.000-04:00

Very important scientific information about male and female orgasms is presented here. Please be sure to read it all.

Do you want to know more?
Orgasms

Strange, very strange

2005-12-29T10:52:00.000-04:00

There's a strange difference between the DVD and TV versions of Stargate: SG1 1^st season finale, Within the Serpent's Grasp. When Daniel Jackson asks Teal'c about the floating gray ball they encountered aboard one of the Goa'uld motherships, Teal'c says it's a long-range visual communication device, much like our television. To which O'Neill replies in the DVD version, “But does it get Showtime?”, a reference to the Showtime channel on which the show used to run. But in the TV version that they showed a little while ago, O'Neill says, “Mmmm... Goa'uld TV...”. I still don't entirely understand why they changed it. The “Goa'uld TV” bit is funnier, I wish they'd've kept it.

Do you want to know more?
Stargate: SG1

The Ugly Overload blog

2005-12-29T10:00:00.000-04:00

Please check out the Ugly Overload blog, which shows pictures and writeups of some of the ugliest members of the animal kingdom. However, ugly though they may be, they're also quite cute, in an ugly sort of way. You can also find a link to it in the sidebar on the right.

Do you want to know more?
Ugly Overload

Shootings in Toronto

2005-12-28T03:22:00.000-04:00

This is not going to be a short article, so beware!

A 15yo girl was killed in downtown Toronto on Boxing Day. She wasn't even a target, from what I can tell, she just caught a stray bullet. Six other people were also injured, one critical. A sad day, a sad day, so everyone keeps saying, together with the usual mantra of lack of identity and alienation and all that. It even made news in the US, mostly because of Canada's blame America first mindset.

And sad and disgusting though all this is, why all the hand-wringing?

Must be because it's the first murder in Toronto through the 2005 year. No, that's not it.

Maybe it's because it's the first gun-related incident(or, for that matter, death) in 2005. No, no, that's not it. She wasn't even the first innocent bystander who got in the way of a stray bullet.

I'm confused. Is this not what society wanted when it created the ludicrously weak judicial system, the ineffectual schools and their worthless teachers, the pervading permissiveness and the broken families? Is this not what parts of society wants when it refuses to provide police with information about murders and other crimes? Is this not what society wanted when it gave weapons only to police and criminals?

This is what comes of all these policies enacted decades ago. Banning hand guns will have no appreciable effect, because the guns being used in these crimes are already illegal, in one way or another. We wasted two billion dollars on an ineffectual gun registry, and then we want to ban them?

Will a new identity of self help these... people? I don't know, but such an identity isn't something that just spontaneously happens overnight. It's an accumulation of many different things, all coming together at some point in time, and it's different for everybody. My guess is that these... kids... have nothing to believe in, and that's sad. Taught to believe in nothing and to respect nothing, they have no real appreciation for their communities, their society or their country. And, dare I say it, for whatever God their parents may or may not believe in. Or, for that matter, not even their own parents.

Canada's first reaction to any sort of crisis is to show how this(whatever this happens to be at any given moment) is America's fault. In this case, it's guns, and how the evil America is exporting its problems north of the border. Yes, I can see it now:

George Bush: “Karl, how else can we screw up Canada? After all, we stole all their good actors already.”
Karl Rove: “Georgie, we can send 'em more guns than usual. Their people will go crazy and we can steal all their water.”

The problem with this view is that it obviates Canada in general, and Canadians individually, from trying to solve the problem. “Ban the handguns!”, they roar, “If only America would stop exporting their violence!”, they add, but handguns aren't the problem; they're merely a symptom. Half a year ago, a man with dual American/Canadian citizenship and a bloody chainsaw walked across the border from New Brunswick to Maine and was admitted into the United States by the authorities.

“Stupid Americans!”, the Canadians wailed. “How could they let him in?” But in the midst of that wailing and anti-American orgiastic flows was burried an interesting tidbit of data: on the day he crossed the border into the US, was supposed to be in a Canadian court for a sentencing hearing, the man killed an elderly family. And when requested to, the American authorities found, detained and arrested the man in less than a day. The question, then, should've been: “Why was he released from Canadian custody”, not “Why did the Americans let him”.

What it all boils down to is that Canada has invested so much heart and energy into being “not American” that we have forgotten how to simply “be Canadian”, and hence the solutions to our problems tend to be judged from their percentage of being “not American”, not from their usefulness or validity. Will banning the handguns work? Probably not. People committing these crimes are already criminals, and are unlikely to abide by whatever the new rules happen to be.

Blaming it all on the poor isn't the answer either, since the vast majority of them don't commit crimes. There needs to be a more balanced approach to this, and it isn't all related to giving more and more money to the poor.

It has to start with the parents who can teach something more than “If you don't act the same way you did before, I don't love you anymore and I'm going to leave you.”

It has to start with schools which can teach something more than phonetically spelled English and lessons in how to diddle your 14yo student.

It has to start with churches which can teach something more than “Don't tell anyone I diddled you, but if anyone finds out, I'll just get moved to a different church and no one will be the wiser.”

It has to start with politicians who spend years as Finance Minister and then blow the whistle on major financial wrongdoing within the government while they still have something to lose, and not claim later that they didn't know it was going on under their very noses.

And first and foremost, it has to start with society that expects its children to be children, and just short adults that suffer no serious consequences(if at all) for any misdeeds, no matter how obscene or evil.

Do you want to know more?
Toronto Shootings / Crime / Canada / Anti-Americanism / Finance Minister / Scandal

Check this out!

2005-12-27T20:57:00.000-04:00

You'll need your sound up for this, and yes, it is work-safe! In fact, I encourage you!

I want one of these!

2005-12-27T20:47:00.000-04:00

Or maybe five of them. Want 'em, gotta have 'em!

Have a peek, but don't get caught!

2005-12-27T20:21:00.000-04:00

Play the perv game here. Enjoy!

Do you want to know more?
Look for Bust

Well, it was to be expected, I suppose

2005-12-26T00:34:00.000-04:00

I came across an interesting article today. Basically, swap meets for sex in business establishments are now legal in Canada. The Surpreme Court sayeth so! Personally, I couldn't care less what sound-minded adults, in full possession of their faculties are doing of their own free will with each behind closed doors. Of course, that's exxageration for conversational effect; there must always be limits to everything. But in general, it holds true. If people want to meet at a bar and have sex with each other behind closed doors(or curtains), why is that any different from going to a bar, picking someone up and going home with them, issues of health aside?

But we're all sliding down a slippery slope and where it'll end, nobody knows. We've all accepted these things as inevitable, and in time, we don't even think about them anymore. The guy from Canadian Family Action Coalition(abbreviated as CFAC, which just struck me as funny for some reason), is upset that we have Surpeme Court judges “...literally imposing a new moral standard...”. He's worried about that? Not a year ago Canadian Surpreme Court judges literally imposed gay marriage on Canadians, even though nobody was entirely sure that Canadians, en masse, supported such a notion. But, as is often the case, nobody talks about that anymore.

Should swap meets even be discussed at the federal level, apart from when to hold them, I mean? It can be said that gay marriage affects federal mandates, such as labour laws and taxation and the like? But swap meets? What do a bunch of strangers who get together for free sex have to do with the federal government?

Do you want to know more?
Swap Meet / Free Sex / Canada / Federal Government / Prostitution / Supreme Court / Gay Marriage

And I thought it started off kinda slow

2005-12-22T23:58:00.000-04:00

Stargate: SG1 Season 9 started off kinda slow and a bit silly. But then we come to the episode “Ex Deus Machina”, and all I could think of, “I love that guy!”

Ba'al: “Over six hundred channels, and nothing to watch.”

Ba'al: “I'm turning in, we have a long day tomorrow.”

There were quite a few more, but I'll have to rewatch the episode with my laptop running to get them all. And there's nothing more disturbing than a System Lord in standard American clothing. Disturbing in a oh-my-God-that's-hillarious sort of way. LOL!

Funnily enough, in eight and a half seasons, this is the first SG1 episode in which we've heard Cliff Simon, the actor playing Ba'al, speaking in a normal voice as opposed to that Goa'ulded version that they do in post-editing.

Do you want to know more?
Stargate: SG1 / Baal / Cliff Simon

They Came Back

2005-12-20T22:01:00.000-04:00

What is it with the Europeans, and in this case specifically the French, and weird movies? They Came Back wasn't actually a bad movie, per se, but it was definitely weird. Called Les Revenants in French, it's a movie about people who have come back from the dead. Now, you may thinking, “My Lord Yu, what's so weird about that? There're tons of movies about people who come back from the dead.” And after I deal with your insolence for questioning my word, I explain.

It's not your average, run of the mill, zombie movies. These zombies are in perfect health(except their body temperature is 5°C lower than normal), they return well dressed, but they're odd. They're not responding to their surroundings the way normal people do, not even the way zombies do. Since they're all recently deceased(not more than 10 years), France(and the rest of the world), tries to integrate them back into society. They even brought the UN into this; something about the recently-dead-but-no-more are just like refugees. I wasn't aware that the recently undead enjoyed UN protection; Blade would be crushed. Basically, it's The 4400 without the special effects or superpowers but with 70 million people instead of just, well, 4,400.

The film doesn't bother even exploring, much less explaining, how or why the dead have back. No one, throughout the whole films, even appears to be curious about it. The other thing that struck me as a bit weird is that everyone seems to have been taking all this in stride. There much sighing going on, but apart from that they were all cool, calm and collected. Well, all except for Rachel who kept taking her clothes off for her dead-but-no-longer-though-somewhat-vague husband. It must be admitted however, that Géraldine Pailhas is really hot.

Though the film doesn't really answer any questions, or indeed even ask them in the first place, it's actually an enjoyable movie, if for no other reason than trying to figure the whole thing out.

Do you want to know more?
They Came Back / Géraldine Pailhas / Blade / Les Revenants / Blade / The 4400 / Zombie

A little joke in the meantime

2005-12-20T17:44:00.000-04:00

Professor Smith was teaching a class on anatomy at an all-girls private school. He asked Jane to name the organ of the body that can swell to ten times its normal size.

“I don't appreciate that kind of question, Professor Smith,” Jane replied stiffly. “You can be sure my parents will hear about this.”

Unfazed, he asked Cathy the same question.

Without hesitation, she replied, “The pupil of the eye.”

Professor Smith then turned to Jane and said, “Jane, I have three things to say you. One: you have a perverted mind. Two: you have not studied your lessons. And three: one day you will be faced with a dreadful dissappointment.”

Do you want to know more?
Jokes / Humour

Sorry, folks!

2005-12-20T17:39:00.000-04:00

I've been on training the last few days and usually come home with my blasted into the next dimension, and so there's no real power left to write with. Hopefully I'll return to normal(for me, at least) by the end of the week(aka when the training is finished) and will start posting again.

What am I learning? Basically about how behind the curve I am in current technologies, but mostly about how the entire software development industry has taken a massive step back in terms of technology, despite outward appearances. I'll post my thoughts on that in the next few days.

I take it all back!

2005-12-15T16:53:00.000-04:00

Everything I've ever said or thought about European movies, I take it all back. All of it. Of course, that means that I'll complain and bitch and whinge even more later, but for now, it's all off the table. Thanks to the Danish movie, The Green Butchers, my Euro-Movie-Appreciation meter is now almost half-full, as opposed to being almost completely empty previously. It's about a couple of butchers who make a... killing(heh!)... selling the other other white meat.

There's a guy who kicks people to display his displeasure; there's a neurotic guy who says 'sausage' too much; there's a brain-dead twin brother who wakes up the moment his life support is turned off; there's “chickie-wickies”, a meat dish so tasty no one could resist it; there's mystery(at least for the competitors) regarding the source of the “chickie-wickies”; and finally, there's a marinade that is possibly the best-tasting ever. In other words, it's a cooking show like you've never seen it before!

If you're offended by perverse subjects that are turned into comedies, don't watch this movie. If you have a macabre sense of humour, you might even like it.

Do you want to know more?
The Green Butchers / Movie Review

What's with the gay Stargate fanfiction?

2005-12-15T13:02:00.000-04:00

And I don't mean the funny, humourous kind.

I've been watching Stargate: SG1 for a long time now, and lately I've been coming across a lot of gay Stargate fanfiction, which is actually kinda funny considering that the show has rarely talked about or shown sex in the 8.5 years it's been on the air so far. Certainly, the new Battlestar Galactica is far more sexualized. And when I say gay, I really mean gay and lesbian.

So, what is it? I'm trying to understand what drives people to write that stuff. Don't get me wrong, I understand what drives people to write gay porn; it's much the same thing that drives people write non-gay porn. But come on, must we sexualize everything?

Do you want to know more?
Stargate: SG1 / Fan Fiction / Gay / Lesbian

Some things for you to peruse while I scribble more stuff

2005-12-14T09:32:00.000-04:00

On the right-hand sidebar you'll find a number of serial articles I've written since February. I'll summarize them in this post, just to give you a quick overview! I'll edit the “Reality” essay and post more as time allows.

USSR: The life and times of...

Reality and the World of 3D

An apartment renovator

Introduction
Part 1	Part 2	Part 3
Part 4	Part 5	Part 6
Part 7	Part 8	Part 9
Part 10	Part 11	Part 12
Part 13	Part 14	Part 15

An Aspiring Musician

A non-ideological firebug

A diploma and ulcer aspirant

Strange eBay Auctions

2005-12-13T23:59:00.000-04:00

Popcorn up the Nose

Stolen(Ahem, borrowed) from the Outrageos Ebay Auctions blog.

It's all in the audience, baby!

2005-12-13T13:54:00.000-04:00

Being a (insert-type-here) whore isn't all it's cracked up to be(heh!) these days. There are so many of us, and so many different types.

For instance, I'm a comment whore. Before I returned to permanent employment(oxymoron, perhaps?), I was a contractor, therefore a corporate whore; I sold my body to their highest corporate bidder, or at least one that currently had a use for me.

So when a call girl publishes a book about her exploits after having quit the business, does she stop being a standard whore and become an attention whore instead? And if she signs a movie deal, what then? That'd be the end of her career, I think. Once you're an attention whore, there's no going higher, maybe just bigger.

And more importantly, if she's in a country where prostitution is legal and apparently accepted, is it appropriate to congratulate her on her quitting the business? There is, apparently, nothing underhanded or illegal in what she used to do, so is there anything wrong with it? And if there is, so what? Homosexuality used to be the bane of all existence, but now gays can get married with no intention of being faithful with the full support of the state and society and even some churches.

Are all cultures and their values not inherently alike as has been said by the P.C. crowd many times? By thinking, “I'm glad she stopped being a call girl”, are you not de-facto condemning her entire culture?

Somebody, please explain this to me! Thank you so much!

Do you want to know more?
Whore / Call Girl / Attention Whore / Author / Raquel Pacheco / Bruna Surfistinha / Prostitution / Political Correctness

Look to the right, the right I tell ya!

2005-12-13T12:59:00.000-04:00

In an effort to make a bit more money, I've opened an online clothing store, Rainy Day Apparel. You can also find a link to it in the right-hand sidebar, which will feature one item from the store and will be changed... relatively... regularly. I haven't had a chance to add a lot of items yet, but I will as soon as possible.

Please note that this isn't just begging for money the way some bloggers do; this is actual merchandise with various designs. Soon I will also be adding my own graphics to the products.

I know you find something to your liking there.

Do you want to know more?
Clothing / Merchandise / Online Store

Something new on TV

2005-12-12T11:24:00.000-04:00

I found something new and exciting on TV the other day. Well, actually about a week ago, or so, but I've been sick, so gimme a break! It's called The Fight Network(TFN) and the programming on it is, how shall I put it? Hillarious! Not always, of course. Boxing matches and regular wrestling are one thing, but it also features women's pro-wrestling, non-WWE pro-wrestling, pro-wrestling from Japan(now that's funny!) and also plenty of kung-fu movies, the silly kind where people fly through the air and vanish in the blink of an eye.

Frankly, I was under the impression that WWE basically obliterated all other pro-wrestling circuits, but I guess I was wrong. They're out there, they draw huge crowds and they have a raw, unpolished feeling that seems to ruin so much of the WWE productions for me. However, they still have silly plots and rivalries, odd costumes and names, and most importantly, blows that barely seem to connect but do a surprising amount of damage that can be shrugged off at a moment's notice. In other words, it's professional wrestling.

But most importantly, the channel features a violence warning ahead of every single one of its programs that is absolutely hillarious! I hope this channel is part of my regular cable lineup and isn't just in preview mode. I'd hate to have to pay extra for “So You Wanna Fight”. Oooo, I think I feel a post coming about that.

Do you want to know more?
The Fight Network / TFN / WWE / So You Wanna Fight

Now that was one freaky movie!

2005-12-11T09:27:00.000-04:00

And I don't mean that in a good way. A Return to Salem's Lot. I knew nothing about it when I watched it on Space the other day. For a while, I toyed with the idea that this was a career crash for Michael Moriarty of Law and Order, but that was before I realized that the movie came first(1987 vs 1990).

There was one funny line. “I've seen vampire bats before, so I'm used to that. What I'm not used to is them wanting a conversation later.” Or something to that effect. Basically, it's a vampire flick, where the vampires want... well, I didn't quite understand what they wanted, but I think it was their biography written, so that in a few hundred years, humans would see how good they are(they drink cow blood, and taken huma only on certain occasions, which for some reason tended to be every couple of days.

They even featured a very young Tara Reid in the movie, playing a ten-year-old vampire ho, in what appears to be her very first movie. The woman who did the nude(somewhat) scenes, Katja Crosby, didn't benefit from the... ahem... exposure. She did one more movie with Michael Moriarty, It's Alive: Island of the Alive, and that was it; I haven't seen that movie, so I can't really comment on it.

Speaking of ten-year-old vampire hos, they even had a wedding between two vampires that looked like they were ten years old. Apparently, once you're a vampire, you don't change visibly, but you're still mature individual, so I guess for them it was OK, once you get over the Yewwww!!! factor.

The highlight of the movie, I thought, was the old man who blew into town looking a guy, so he said, and passing around his picture. He got really pissy when someone suggested to him he might be a Nazi hunter. “I'm not a Nazi hunter. I'm a Nazi killer.” He brought a much-needed element into the movie: somebody to care about.

All in all, I give thing 3.5 out of 10.

Do you want to know more?
A Return to Salem's Lot / Michael Moriarty / Tara Reid / Law and Order / Katja Crosby / Movie Review

A make-up post

2005-12-09T17:27:00.000-04:00

To make up for all those days I haven't been posting, here's a little game for y'all to enjoy. Use the left mouse button to jump and also to swing the club.

Do you want to know more?
Penguin

Sorry about not posting!

2005-12-09T16:47:00.000-04:00

Sorry about the no new content thingy, folks, but I've been sick as a dog the last couple of days. Only now can I sit up long enough to write this. I haven't been outside in two days now, though I have some hope I'll crawl out there tomorrow. Here's hoping!

Wacky Canadians, and the Universe at war

2005-12-07T14:05:00.000-04:00

At first, I thought it was a joke. After all, the story first came from PRWeb which is a free press release website that essentially anybody can use. But then I found the man's Wiki page and now I just don't know what to think. I mean, really, what is Canada coming to?

That a man who has been a Deputy Prime Minister and a Minister of Defense of a serious country(at least, it used to be) can come out and accuse the President of an allied country of formenting an intergalactic war(interstellar war is not enough for him? - we have to worry about a war between galaxies now?) and not be publicly laughed at is not a good sign for this country. Personally, I think that Yahoo News was kinda trying to subliminally indicate they thought he was full of crap when they put the following quote into their article:

The Canadian Senate, which is an appointed body, has held objective, well-regarded hearings and issued reports on controversial issues such as same-sex marriage and medical marijuana.

If by “objective” they mean supporting the desires of the Liberal Party and by “well-regarded” they mean saying what the groups likely to scream the loudest otherwise wanted to hear, then yes, I agree, the man's full of crap. But there's a larger issue at stake here, one that affects Canada now, as a whole.

Canada is currently sliding down the slippery slope of hatred-du-jour, and it will be very difficult to climb back up again. Our country, and more importantly, our entire political landscape is being more and more defined by hatred of America in general and Bush in particular and less and less by Canada and Canadian issues. Unlike Canadian politics, American politics are transitory in nature. Bush will be gone in less than 3 years and what then? Canadian politicians(read the Liberal Party) are so used to being able to divert the country from problems by simply barking up the American tree that I wonder what will happen when that's not an option anymore. I got flamed the last time I wrote about this subject, mostly because so many people(I'm guessing Canadians) misinterpreted my post as being too pro-American when, in fact, it was actually pro-Canadian.

However, that's neither here nor there, but actually someplace else. Back to the intergalactic warmongering Bush. What I don't quite get is anybody can say this with a straight face and expect people to believe them, not to mention believe it themselves. I realize the man's basically a pinko, but even they should have some brains. And what about our media? How about saying negative about it rather than just reporting it? Of course the man has the right to say and believe what he wants, even if it makes him look a fool. But shouldn't the media do a bit more than just repeat what he said? How about some analysis? Demand for proof? Or even a simple “they can travel thousands of light-years to get here and are worried about a few piddly weapons we might deploy on the moon?”

This “hate America first and think tenth” disease is apparently very debilitating to the mind. I hope these people get well soon.

P.S. This whole story might still turn out to be a hoax. If it is, “Never miiiiind....”

P.P.S. More and more do I believe that this whole is a hoax, and it's all thanks to the PeaceInSpace website. Remote viewing? Interviews with the “Galactic Federation Leader”? That's some bad New Age stuff you people are smoking.

Do you want to know more?
Paul Hellyer / UFOs / Intergalactic War / Remote Viewing / New Age

Woo hoo!

2005-12-06T19:18:00.000-04:00

Do you want to know more?
BLOGinSPACE

A business for sale

2005-12-05T19:03:00.000-04:00

An interesting business opportunity has come up. I wonder how much it'll go for eventually.

Warning! Do not click if easily offended! Not work-safe, though perfectly legal!

The squirrels are coming, the squirrels are coming!

2005-12-05T16:43:00.000-04:00

So instead of the Mongols, Russians now have to contend with crazed squirrels. In typically post-modern style, I postulate a conspiracy theory that the Cats™ and the Squirrels® have formed an alliance to destroy the Dogs©. What proof do I have? Proof? I need no proof, it merely matches my beliefs about the evilness of the Cats™ and especially the Squirrels® and the pure victimhood of the Dogs©.

We here in North America had better watch out, though. The Squirrel-Net™ is very well developed if somewhat stealthed. We can never know what an unprovoked attack on the inoffensive dog population will occur. But are dogs really the innocent victims they portray themselves to be? They are, after all, closely allied with Da Man©, that most hated of the land mammals.

Watch the news, dear friends. Soon shall we know all. Or, at least, suspect more.

And if you're not tired of all things squirrely, here's a dinner table tidbit.

Do you want to know more?
Russian / Mongol / Dogs / Cats / Squirrels / Conspiracy Theories

So sick!

2005-12-05T13:20:00.000-04:00

I'm currently suffering from a terrible disease that afflicts bloggers from time to time. I guess it's my turn now. It's called TFC(alternatively, it's been called WFC). That's the short form; the long form is “Trolling for Comments”(or, alternatively, “Whoring for Comments”). I prefer the second form, but maybe I'm just a pervert.

Have I mentioned how I love comments?

I love them green,
I love them bleen,
I love them blue,
I love them true,
I love them anyway
That Man can type!

So you see, dearest readers, you have forced down the path towards the unthinkable and the horrific: the creation of bad poetry(I may be many things(a bastard, as some women have called me), but a poet I am not). I promise you, however, that commenting on my posts will prevent any more abuses of the human spirit.

Warnings are getting out of hand

2005-12-04T11:59:00.000-04:00

The other day I got the Mr. & Mrs. Smith DVD and watched it. It's a pretty good movie, all things considered. But what really pissed me off were the anti-piracy warnings at the front of it, followed by trailers for upcoming DVD releases. There must've been a good two minutes, if not more, of this crap, and you can't skip past it, either of it! So, in a couple of years, when I want to sit down to watch the movie again, I'll be forced to watch trailers for movies I may already have, or have already decided not to get.

The entertainment industry claims it wants to eliminate piracy. But their actions are so ass-backwards that there's no doubt in my mind that they force at least some of us who actually buy our movies to reconsider it, if for no other reason that to not be forced to watch propaganda that doesn't apply to us.

Basically, what it all boils down to is that I'm being punished for something I don't do. Thanks a lot.

Do you want to know more?
Mr. & Mrs. Smith

So full!

2005-12-03T22:53:00.000-04:00

Oh boy, I'm so full I can barely move. Chicken wings, mmmm. tasty! So tasty!

Do you want to know more?
Chicken Wings

War of the Worlds, a surprising find!

2005-12-03T19:26:00.000-04:00

I just watched the movie, H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. This was a direct-to-video production by something called The Asylum, not the more well-known Spielberg one or even the original one. It's been so long since I've seen the original that I can't remember it, so I'll ignore it for the purposes of this post.

Funnily enough, despite coming from a group of people who make low(or no)-budget horror flicks with lots of nudity and blood(I got this from the two previews that are on the DVD), this was a surprising gem of a movie. The acting was astonishingly good for an independent film, and the animatronic tripods were pretty cute, too. At least, they looked animatronic. If they were CGI, that was the cheesiest CGI I've ever seen.

This film was not ruined by two whining kids that should've been abandoned at the start, and I actually cared about the characters. Hell, I even wanted to see more of the crazy sargeant/general, just to see how far into the depth of insanity he was going to sink. Of course, the film still suffers from the same ending from which all War of the World movies suffer, namely the aliens dying from some bacteria or virus on Earth, but that's not a reflection on the film makers, but rather on the outdated story on which the film is based.

I cringed when I first pulled it off a shelf in th store, but having watched it, I'm glad I did. I enjoyed it.

Do you want to know more?
War of the Worlds / The Asylum

Gay marriage and the roaming charge

2005-12-03T01:00:00.000-04:00

There's a story about George Michael getting married to his long-time boyfriend. Once you get over the Yewwww! factor, you think, “Well, good for them!” I'm always glad to see people(of whatever sexual persuasion) enter into a commitment to one another, to be faithful and all that. Of course, I wouldn't know, I've never been married, but I've been so informed that faithfulness is a required part of marriage. Not to say that everyone succeeds, but I guess you're supposed to try.

He said: "Gay relationships are a bit different. I'm sure we'll be allowed to roam if we want to. But we love each other dearly"

But I fail to understand the point of getting married if you plan on going into the thing expecting that you will not be faithful, and that your partner isn't going to be, either. But more importantly, is that really a tenent of gay relationships? Is this lack of respect for one another, not to mention the dangers inherent in “sowing your oats”(and does that expression mean to gay men what it means to straight men?), so rampant in the community that I haven't been able to find any news articles on the web that say he's full of shit about that? I don't mean straight men, I mean gay men(and for that matter, lesbian women), getting indignant about the whole thing? After all, he generalized about every single gay relationship out there. Are you people afraid of speaking out, or do you agree with him?

Frankly, I never would've commented on this story at all, if it hadn't been for that quote of his. If the idea of marriage means so little to you, why did you fight tooth and nail across the whole bloody planet to have that right? But if “roaming” is something that doesn't naturally occur in gay relationships, why isn't anyone calling bullshit on him?

Do you want to know more?
George Michael / Gay Marriage

Brain-dead in France

2005-12-02T12:58:00.000-04:00

I know that sounds flippant, but it's not. There's a serious news story about woman getting a partial face transplant. I'm not entirely sure what that actually means, but it sounds serious. One thing that caught my attention was that the donor for the procedure was another patient who was brain-dead. Now that struck me as kind of weird because with all the controversy in the US about life-support and withdrawing thereof, all they really wanted to do was turn it off, not take your face... off.

Somehow, the idea that the movie Face Off could ever be more than fourth-rate entertainment is more than a little appalling. But more than that, it's one thing to be an artifically kept-alive vegetable(we can thank religion, which values existence far more than life, for that), it's something else entirely when they're taking visible body organs from you.

Do you want to know more?
Face Off / Face Transplant

Possibly the unluckiest bankrobber ever!

2005-12-02T11:42:00.000-04:00

Story

Freegans not vegans

2005-12-02T10:10:00.000-04:00

Well, that kinda rhymes, doesn't it?

There's a story circulating out there about people who root around other people's garbage looking for food that can still be eaten. There's something very disturbing about that. These people aren't poor and they're not homeless, they just take a philosophical stand against waste. That's what they say, at any rate; I just call them cheap. They call themselves “freegans”.

It's true that we throw out too much food(though I question the 40-50% study referenced in the story), but I don't know what condition it's in when it hits the garbage bin. Nobody separates their throwaway-but-edible foods from their spoiled foods or from other contaminants. I can see it now. You accidentally break a vial of iodine, throw it out with the rest of your garbage, it contaminates some letuce you've also thrown away, a freegan eats the letuce, promptly falls ill and then sues you. That's just what you need.

Not to mention the stench. Garbage stinks, especially in the summer, and that stench permeates everything in the bin. I wouldn't be able to look in the face of a head of lettuce after I've met some of its friends in the bin.

And then there's pride. I'm not talking about pride in your own holiness that keeps you from getting medical help for your child. I'm taking about more generalized pride. It may be a commodity the homeless can't afford, but I've never been a big believer in false humility or acting to the lowest common denominator.

Feel free to disagree.

Do you want to know more?
Freegan

Quote of the day!

2005-12-02T09:34:00.000-04:00

"A woman drove me to drink, and I never had the courtesy to thank her."

W.C. Fields.

What is this town coming to?

2005-12-01T23:58:00.000-04:00

So a couple of days I came out of the apartment to go to work and noticed that the neighbour's car had a completely flat tire. I thought nothing of it, maybe they had a flat, maybe they damaged the stem. So I went to work, and afterwards I went to get gas and that's when I noticed that one of my tires was completely flat. After pumping in 30psi of fresh, beautiful air, I drove home. A neighbour told me several cars had their tires slashed. In the morning, I came out and found that tire completely flat. When I took the car in for service, the tire guy found a 1.5" wide slit.

Now, all I want to know is what are you people thinking? How does that brain of yours work? Do you wake up in the morning thinking, “Well, today I'm gonna slit someone's tires!”? And really, have you nothing better to do? You did it at night, so obviously you don't work or go to school. Grow up.

Of new ideas, and the problem with sci-fi

2005-11-30T11:31:00.000-04:00

On the face of it, the latest episode of Stargate: Atlantis, Epiphany, wasn't really all that bad. It had hot babes, ascended beings, McKay going crazy, and a super-powerful, impossible to stop monster that was semi-invisible. What it didn't have, however, was an original plot.

I counted at least four plot elements from different sci-fi shows:

The semi-invisible monster that was the unconscious creation of the local inhabitants - straight out of The Forbidden Planet.
Facing the semi-invisible monster with a knife - straight out of Star Trek: TNG episode Darmok(I think).
Being lost on a planet for several months - straight out of Stargate: SG1 episode 100 Days.
A local woman trying to, and succeeding in, seduce a lost Stargate crew member - straight out of Stargate: SG1 episode 100 Days.

There might actually be more, but those are the ones I noticed on my first viewing.

Now, that's not to say that it I didn't like the episode nonetheless, I did, but I think it exemplifies a problem that's been prevalent in sci-fi, especially tv and movie sci-fi, for a very long time, that is, a complete lack of original ideas. This is one reason why all the comic books and video games are being made into movie, not matter how unsuited the story lines were to the big screen. The argument is being made that they couldn't give them the movie treatment before because the special effects were not really there, but I think it is much simpler than that: they're out of ideas, and if they couldn't remake stories written in the 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, they'd have to quit making sci-fi.

Sci-fi, in general, is a product of its time. Star Trek TOS, taking place in the early 23rd century and created in the 1960s, uses B&W tricorders, tapes for data storage and blinking lights for computer displays. Star Trek: Enterprise, taking place a 100 years earlier and created in the beginning of the 21st century, uses full-color, graphic computer displays and personal datapads for storage. As well, in TOS, there were no female starship captains, in fact it was suggested once that men somehow kept women out of the big seat. In Enterprise, a woman was in command of a freighter, and one was preparing to take command of the newest Starfleet vessel.

I suspect that we're in for a long seige of movies and shows that are all very similar to each other in certain particulars but which differ in circumstances. Want to make a show about evil aliens eating their way across the Galaxy? Andromeda and Atlantis did that already. Want to make a show about aliens taking over human bodies as hosts? Stargate did that already, though even it probably wasn't unique in that respect.

One interesting twist that Stargate laid on the whole super-advanced-alien-ship concept was that of burning fires aboard ship. The ships are so advanced, and so powerful, that they don't even have to worry about wasting oxygen by burning it up with torches. Hell, not even the Borg did that.

I don't know what the future holds for sci-fi, but as we reach the limits of American sci-fi, I hope other countries step up to fill the void. Different countries, different ideas. The French, for instance, made the excellent The Fifth Element. It was, in many ways, a very good movie, but more importantly, it was different. Of course, you had to see it in wide-screen format to get the point at the very end, but otherwise it was an excellent movie. On the other hand, it was eight years ago, but maybe the French are up to a good sci-fi flick every ten years or so.

Here's hoping for a decade of sci-fi movie making that's not just rehashing old comic books.

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Sci-fi / Stargate: SG1 / Stargate: Atlantis / Star Trek / Star Trek: TNG / Star Trek: Enterprise / The Forbidden Planet

Oh, the banality of it all!

2005-11-29T11:40:00.000-04:00

Once again the entertainment industry misses the mark. A year or so ago, movie theatres used to force everyone to watch “you are starving us so please don't pirate movies” clips that purportedly were made with people who really work on movies, though I have my doubts about that. Now, the funny thing about that is that they had the wrong audience. The people who were being forced to watch all that actually paid to see the movie. Twenty years ago, before the advent of the VCR, that was basically all the income they would get, what the people paid at the theatres. As well, years ago, there were no force-fed commercials on the silver screen, though I must admit that the revenues from those ads probably goes directly to the theatres.

This is why the DVD set of Stargate: SG1 Season 8 is so irritating. I paid money for the damn thing, why should I have to sit through all the warnings about piracy. And you can't turn it off or fast-forward past it, either. You have to sit there and watch it in English and French, and it runs for a good 30 seconds! What's up with that? And on top of that, they took away the director's commentary that was a part of every DVD since about Season 4(I think).

And then, on top of it all, when I buy blank DVDs for my privately-produced content that has nothing to do with movies, I have to pay a surcharge because they can't convince people to shell out $25 for a movie. I haven't bought a movie in a long time now(frankly, I've bought all the movies worth buying), and the only music CDs I've bought recently have been in $6(approximate) pile at Zeller's. I won't pay $18 for a CD with a half-dozen tracks on it, and I can't be bothered to pirate, not perhaps because of any moral restraint, but simply because I consider most modern music to be absolute and unmitigated pile of crap. But more importantly, I've got better things to do than always sit in front of a computer looking for music and then having to listen to it all. It makes it much simpler that my car's CD changer doesn't support MP3.

So what have we learnt? Despite not needing a lot of music, I'll still buy it when it's cheap enough, and despite liking movies, especially sci-fi and horror, I will not pay $25 for a DVD unless it is really, really good. Show me inexpensive(under $10) movies, and I would buy a lot more. There're probably many other people like me. Is anyone in the great ivory towers paying attention?

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Stargate: SG1 / Music / MP3 / Piracy / Movies

Government defeated

2005-11-29T09:52:00.000-04:00

So the crazy so-called “minority” Liberal government of Canada has been defeated. Hurray! Kick those gun-registry-lovin', feminist-suckup, Quebec-bribin' fools out of power. Of course, that's really only the first step. Need some fresh blood in the Halls of Valhala(no, wait, umm, sorry, I meant the Parliament Building). Of course, Canadians aren't likely to replace them during the upcoming elections, Canadians love their Liberals too much and dislike the so-called evil Conservatives. My fear is that the NDP will gain real power and that would be a disaster(damn reds and greens), but we'll see. We'll see.

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Canada

Ha! Must learn to spell peanut!

2005-11-28T20:32:00.000-04:00

And it's not spelled penut!

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English / Spelling / Peanuts

Penut allergies

2005-11-28T14:52:00.000-04:00

I hadn't really realized that penut allergies can be so deadly. Something to watch out for.

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Peanut Allergies

The attack of the killer fly

2005-11-28T08:55:00.000-04:00

A few nights I did something so stupendous I was forced to re-evaluate myself in my own eyes. I went to bed at my usual random hour of the night and lay there reading when I heard a buzzing. This puzzled me at first because my ears hadn't buzzed all day(a surprising occurence). Then I finally saw: a big, HUGE!, fat fly, doing the vampire walk on my ceiling. The thing was absolutely insane. It would on my ceiling, then launch itself off and perform a number of insane and very painful-looking maneuvers that involved much bouncing off of walls and window blinds and me. Needless to say, I decided to do something about that.

So, with a trusty dish cloth in hand, I waited until it settled again on my ceiling and knocked it off. The fly vanished(I still have no idea where it went), but in the process I lost my footing and knocked down a nightstand lamp I've had for almost 8 years. The lamp, the lampshade and the bulb all became collateral damage and shade debris flew everywhere. It's amazing how much crap flies off(Heh!) a dried out lampshade when it breaks.

All, however, was not lost. During this altercation, I proved a Holywood -ism to be true. In the movies, when a lamp falls, the bulb inside invariably dies. There is a flash and the bulb goes dead. That's exactly what happened when my lamp fell. With all the other Holywood -isms like modern cars screeching when coming to a halt despite widespread use of ABS, cars exploding the moment they leave the ground and hot alien chicks always falling right in the arm of some loser, I was never really sure about that one. Now is my life complete: I have proven something to be true.

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[tagname]

Quote of the day

2005-11-28T08:22:00.000-04:00

My doctor told me to stop having intimate dinners for four, unless there are three other people.

- Orson Wells

Stolen from(ahem, borrowed from) Savvy Fat Burning Food's Community Journal Blog.

The scourge of payments

2005-11-25T09:56:00.000-04:00

After dinner last night, I went to pay the bill, and as usual, wanted to line up by the center post where all the debit card machines are. There was a bit of a lineup there, so my waitress took me over to the bartender area to pay, and lo and behold, what did I see? A shiny new wireless debit card machine. She got really pissy with me, too, when I told her I didn't want to use it, I'd wait for the regular wired ones to free up.

Now why, in the name of all that's holy, would I want to have my debit card and pin info broadcast wirelessly? The system is probably short-range and encrypted, to boot, but still. Why?

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Debit Card / Wireless

They blew up Betsy!

2005-11-24T10:50:00.000-04:00

Well, OK, I don't know that her name was Betsy(it probably wasn't), but she was kinda hot, in a “beat you over the head with questions about clowns” way.

To wit.

As many(some, all, few, whatever) of you know, I'm a bit(well, OK, quite a bit) addicted to Stargate: SG1. One of my goals from earlier in the year was to get all the seasons of the show on DVD; I'm proud to say that I have accomplished that goal. That said, however, it must be admitted that I wasn't really a very big fan of Stargate: Atlantis in the first season. It looked more of the same to me, but with animals with a pedigree ruling the galaxy. And it became a soap opera almost immediately. On the other hand, the acting was great, the humour took the edge off the darkness of the underlying plot and the stories really weren't all that bad.

The second season has, in my opinion, much improved the show. Of course, they have a ship now, and that seriously improved the old Star Trek: DS9 show(before it becamse a Dominion War soap opera), just as it has Atlantis. There's a new character, too, one who does much to counter-balance the political correctness leanings of some of the others.

But what the show really needed was information about the Wraith, the main enemies, and the first season provided virtually none of that. Now, the Wraith are shown in a different light. Still the genocidal maniacs who eat entire planets, they're shown to be able to devise defenses to unusual attacks, as well as having some sort of societal structure. However, the fact remains that we're sadly ignorant of the more critical aspects of Wraith lives.

Does the WETH(Wraiths for Ethical Treatment of Humans) organization exist in the Pegasus galaxy? Do they try to put an end to the disgusting practice of eating one's pets? Or putting them in danger during major space battles? Do they write letters about how it's OK to blow up another hive queen's ship, but please leave your pets out of it? Do they make impassioned pleas for vegetarianism or is sucking the life out of an elm sadly unsatisfying?

Do the Wraith celebrate Wrthmas? That would be the day that the first Ancient came home from a hard day exploring some misbegotten cave on some uncharted planet and sucked the life right out of his family? On Wrthmas, do the Wraith give their pets presents? Maybe a new pair of boots or maybe a new dress. Betsy seemed well dressed and not particularly starved.

Which brings up another question. What do the pets eat? Exactly which hive ship is responsible for producing food for the pets that won't cause Mad Human disease?

If a Wraith pet owner gets really, really hungry and eats his pet, will he feel bad about it afterwards? Will his buddies on the hive ship make fun of him?

Those are the questions, and more besides, burning bright in my mind. The thought of blowing up Betsy made me feel sad, so sad.

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Stargate: SG1 / Stargate: Atlantis / Wraith

Seaquest and the bane of free power

2005-11-23T11:16:00.000-04:00

I hadn't fully realized before how much of a utopian pipedream the show Seaquest, DSV really was. I think it wasn't until the episode about free underwater power generation that I finally saw the show for what it was.

To understand the utopia, we have to understand what, exactly, is free power. Or, indeed, what is power. According to the NB Power website, power is the rate at which electricity is consumed. So, free power is power that costs the consumer of that electricity nothing. Trouble is, it's an impossible dream. Much like free medicine, you can only ignore the realities of the situation on the ground for so long before it starts to collapse.

Many people claim that there's an abundance of free energy out there: solar, wind, water, etc. and that we should therefore abandon fossil fuels. They are, of course, absolutely correct. The sun is our main source of free light and heat for the entire planet(for only 12 hours a day), and much of it is wasted if not collected by solar panels. Winds blows regardless of what we do and spinning turbines can make use of it.

However, though sunlight and windpower are essentially free, they're also incredibly useless. We, at our present level of technology, are consumers of electricity. Even our nuclear power plants are basically giant kettles that produce electricity the old-fashioned way, by spinning turbines. We can't use sunlight or windpower or even nuclear power directly, it must be converted into something useful.

It is that conversion that trips up any idea of free electricity. You need plants to assemble the solar panels, you need plants to manufacture the components of which those solar panels are made, you need to manufacture auxilary supplies such as nuts and bolts and the like. You need to ship the assembled panels to their final installation site at some solar farm, which means you need vehicles, fuel for those vehicles and you need roads. Once you've got it assembled, you need transmission lines(or batteries, choose your poison), you need distribution stations, etc, etc, etc. And all of this needs power of its own, and more importantly, it needs people to operate every step of the process, and people don't work for free, at least not in normal societies. And on top of it all, all this equipment, roads, supplies and people have to be replaced, repaired and educated on a continuous basis. In other words, it's a never-ending money pit.

“But we wouldn't need to rely on oil and we wouldn't have to pay for the fuel of our electricity!” people say. And that would be really great. But solar panels require huge tracts of land and wind turbines require a place where the blows in right direction at the right speed on a relatively consistent basis. The wind doesn't blow the same way everywhere at the same time, and there are many, many places in the world where the sun doesn't shine 12 hours a day. Those places need a constant supply of electricity just like the rest of the world, and since solar power can only be used half the day, the panels need to generate twice your daily requirement during the daylight hours. It might be better if the power collection and conversion happened in orbit and was somehow beamed to the surface, but that, too, involves massive engineering and human costs that I don't even want to consider at the moment.

In the Seaquest episode, they hooked up the country to underwater generators that used the tides and the electricity was going to be free, because . They even went so far as to disconnect the rest of the power grid. The lights went on, the underwater generator blew up and the lights went out. It would've been far more realistic if instead of bad engineering(isn't that always the case in ultra-socialist utopias?) turning off the lights, they had an accountant look at their books and say, “Wait a minute! How do you intend to pay for the upkeep of this station? Where will you find the money to pay the deep-sea divers who don't come cheap?”

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Free Power / Electricity / Seaquest / Oil / Utopia

How much is your blog worth?

2005-11-23T09:31:00.000-04:00

My blog is worth $11,290.80.
How much is your blog worth?

Theatre and The Fee!

2005-11-22T19:15:00.000-04:00

Of all the ridiculous ways to suck money out of people, why do theatre tickets carry service charges and the like? It's not as though they're doing you a favour by selling tickets to you that you could get another, more difficult though ultimately cheaper, way. What is it, exactly, that I get for that service charge?

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Theatre / Surcharge / Service Fee

The Oblongs, the cartoon

2005-11-22T14:13:00.000-04:00

There's a crazy cartoon out there called The Oblongs. It's about a family of mutants who live in the poluted part of their town. The father has no arms or legs(though apparently he's really good in bed), the wife has no hair and is a lush, one kid has ADD, another kid has a growth on her head that apparently came from bovine growth hormones, and the other two kids are actually one and a half because they're cojoined.

Their friends are no better off. One has no lower jaw, another is a sickly-looking French Goth girl and another one is so fat she usually takes up half the screen.

That said, the father is a loving though none-too-bright head of the family and the mother is the nymphoniac glue that holds the whole thing together. In one of the episodes, the ADD boy couldn't get any sleep for weeks because he was used to falling asleep to the rhythmic thumping of the parents' headboard against the wall and the mother wailing, "Oh God! Oh God!" throughout the festivities. Unfortunately, the parents couldn't get on to any hanky-panky because a stripper had stepped on the father's penis and injured it. Did I mention he has no legs and is therefore built close to ground?

This cartoon runs very late at night, thankfully. In most ways it is more disgusting than Family Guy, The Simpsons and American Dad put together. It is also much funnier, in many ways. Thank the Middle-of-the-road-Deity for PVR.

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The Oblongs / Family Guy / The Simpsons / American Dad

Miss America - Out of Money

2005-11-21T18:43:00.000-04:00

It never really occured to me to wonder where Miss America got the money for those scholarships until this story came out. It's just not the sort of thing I've usually been interested in. During my life in Canada, I think I might have watched a small part of one of their shows and that was it. But I guess, based on the story, a significant portion of their funding came from TV viewership. Which is kinda odd, come to think of it.

What, exactly, point does Miss America serve at the start of the 21^st century? In an age of loving ourselves for who we are and finding the inner beauty(for lack of evidence of outer beauty) of those around us, it is, after all, a pretty discriminatory organization. Looking back a dozen or so winner, I can find no evidence of overweight or homely women winning the titles. So, right there, Miss America discards more than half the women, no matter how otherwise worthy.

Maybe, in the early 1920's, I can see Miss America serving a purpose; you could make a case that, back then, it gave certain women a leg up in the world. Can't help everyone, after all. But today? In an age where more girls attend post-secondary institutions than boys, can it be said they need a leg up?

With few exceptions, the profiles I've read are singularly unimpressive. They read as a whose who of your local telephone book, or what the girl next door could accomplish with free money if she were pretty enough and could twirl a batton on the right kind of stage. I have yet to see an accomplishment in the field of obstetrics, dentistry, child psychology, psychology, heart decease, cancer, HIV/AIDS, computer software, computer hardware, propulsion, power generation, power storage, food processing, or any of the thousands upon thousands of fields. Accomplishments in those fields are left to men and to homely women who have to make a name for themselves the old-fashioned way: by actually earning it through skill and determination. (Alert! Exaggeration for conversational effect!)

None of this, of course, means that the show should be cancelled forever and ever. But maybe the fact that the viewership has fallen off dramatically is an indication that the general population is seeing this show for what it is. Maybe it's time to move on.

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Miss America

Men, clothes and the running dime

2005-11-21T17:34:00.000-04:00

It's amazing to me how weird it feels when a coin falls through the hole in your pant pocket and rolls down the length of your leg. But, let me tell you, it's even weirder when two coins do the same thing at the same time. It even gets to be somewhat of a lottery, taking bets on which one's going to fall into my shoe and which one's going to go on the floor. If you're looking for a random number generator between zero and two, it gets no better than that.

Yes, I know, I should get it fixed.

Alone in the Dark, I was so not scared

2005-11-21T13:48:00.000-04:00

So, yesterday, I finally watched the movie, Alone in the Dark. I'd wanted to see it when it first came out a few months ago, but was more than a little miffed when it disappeared from the theatres in two weeks flat. Now I can see why.

The only thing that made this horrific waste of an otherwise perfectly good hour and a half was Tara Reid, and she didn't even take her clothes off. It's not that she's that great an actress, it's just that she's great eye candy.

When, in the movie, they said the Abkani had opened a gate to another dimension(an evil one, imagine that; nobody opens gates to an indiferent dimension, one in which no one gives a damn about ours), I wasn't really expecting an actual gate, with an electronic lock, of all things.

The gun battle scenes were ridiculous, they didn't use the guys with snakes in their heads(heh! imagine that!) nearly as well as I thought they could've, and I still have no idea how the damn thing ended.

All in all, I give it my patented “I'm glad I didn't have to pay for it but I didn't cut my wrists over it either” rating.

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Alone in the Dark / Abkani / Tara Reid

SG1 Season IX

2005-11-19T09:37:00.000-04:00

The new season of Stargate: SG1, Season 9, is finally upon us. It started off kinda slow, which was to be expected, considering that they're basically starting the show over again, with new characters, new enemies, hopefully new alies, and the like.

A couple things I'm a bit worried about. First, I hope it doesn't turn into a soap opera. The first three episodes of this season are basically one episode, a very long one episode. This is very similar to Season I, where the first 3 episodes were basically about the same thing. I hope they cut that out after the third episode airs. I don't mind the odd two-parter, but I don't want them one after the other.

One thing that surprised me about the second part of the S9 premier was the on-screen, full-in-yer-face burn-a-woman alive then show the charred remains sequence. Of course, they resurrected her a few moments later, but even so, it was surprising. Though, I'm not entirely sure why I'm surprised. It is running on Space, after all, and virtually every programs that airs on that station includes a violence warning. Enterprise even used to carry mature audience only warnings on some of the episodes. Maybe it's a one-off, like the full frontal nudity or the surprisingly graphic sequence of the symbiot burrowing into a person's neck in SG1 pilot, Children of the Gods. Well, only time will tell.

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Stargate / SG1 / Season 9 / Enterprise

Wing music

2005-11-18T23:14:00.000-04:00

Of all the things I've seen on South Park, Wing Music has to be beyond the pale. Who could've known that the Chinese woman signing her way through the episode was based on a (supposedly) real woman. She even has her own website, plugged at the end of the episode, and she even looks somewhat like she did in South Park. Unbelievable!

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Wing Music / South Park

Of mice, men and keyboards

2005-11-18T21:48:00.000-04:00

So I finally had to go out and buy myself a new keyboard and mouse; my wireless Logitech combo had finally given up the ghost. Oh, they still worked, but badly. The scroll wheel on the mouse kept actually lifting off its base, and keys on the keyboard kept sticking. How difficult could it be to buy a keyboard and mouse combo? I thought. Well, let me tell you.

First of all, it's been over three years since I've needed either a new keyboard or a new mouse, so I was completely unprepared for the way too much choice you're given at a store. And none of the choices are actually any good. I finally settled on a slightly shaped Microsoft optical keyboard and mouse combo.

Secondly, I really want to meet the moron who decided to rearrange the standard keyboard layout; I feel the overwhelming urge to slap him(or her) upside the head in protest. What was the point of rearranging the cursor control block on the keyboard? Can anyone explain that to me?

Thirdly, I miss the long-gone-by days when Keytronic keyboards, even those made in China rather than in the US, were basically indestructible and would last damn near forever. The first thing I noticed about this new keyboard is how flexible it is, and that's just bad. In fact, it's so flexible, I have to bend it every few minutes just to keep the right side of it on the desktop. Great workmanship you have there, Microsoft! Congrats! You ought to feel good about yourself. The damn thing wobbles like a bad table in a cheap restaurant; I have to put a wad of paper under one of the legs to just keep it steady.

Fourthly, the damn thing misses keystrokes. I hate that. When you blind touch-type, that really, really sucks!

Well, tomorrow this thing goes back for replacement, if the second one's going to be just as bad, it's going to get its Made-in-China ass returned. Damn, I hate getting crap in the box. And I have to learn a new keyboard layout. I double-hate hate that!

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Keyboard / Mouse / Optical / Microsoft / China / Rant

Things you never want to hear

2005-11-18T16:36:00.000-04:00

Overheard something in the mall today, something I didn't really want to hear: “That's my cousin's wife, but she's my cousin, too.”

Do you want to know more?
Inbred Mutants

It should be illegal, but it's not!

2005-11-17T14:41:00.000-04:00

In October of this year, I finally gave up the wait and got a Rogers PVR(Personal Video Recorder). The damn thing is only a single-tuner(meaning you can't watch one channel while a program on another channel is recording) and is ridiculously expensive($20 per month), but dear Lord! how did I ever get along without it?

True, you can only record one program at a time, which puts a bit of a crimp on recording The Oblongs and porn at the same time, but you can watch previously-made recordings while something new is recording. You can pause your live tv feed to go to the bathroom. You can wind the current program back to catch something you just missed because some moron outside gunned his engine at the wrong time. You set future recordings directly off of the digital guide. You can tell it to delete recorded programs automatically when it needs more space. You can watch late-run movies and sick, disgusting(though much-loved) cartoons on a weeknight without being late for work next morning.

Is there anything you can't do?

I can now not worry about missing new episodes of Stargate: SG1 and Atlantis. I can wind past commercials. Dear Middle-of-the-road-Deity! I can watch TV the way I want to! I sacrificed a domain name to pay for it!

All hail PVR! Bow down before its greatness! Eliminate time-shifting!

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Cable / Digital / PVR / Rogers / The Oblongs / Stargate / SG1 / Atlantis

China, the Internet and eBay

2005-11-17T11:58:00.000-04:00

I discovered something a while ago while browsing eBay for various things: the Chinese list a lot of crap on it. Which is kinda odd, because those people can't even read this blog. So, the question arises: should a country that floods the world with cheap crap but doesn't allow their own people to read a blogging site available worldwide be allowed to further flood the world with cheap crap on eBay?

For a long time, I thought maybe it's the language difference. I don't, after all, write in Chinese. Nor do I have such a swelled head as to think that the Chinese must read my blog. But the fact remains that since February of this year, this blog has received hits from places on this cwazy planet that not only did I not know had Internet access, but ones that I didn't even know existed. And not all of them are natively English speakers, nor do they all use a Latin-based alphabet. And in all that time that I've received hits from Taiwan, I've received none from China.

For a country that doesn't like the words 'freedom' and 'Taiwan' on an MSN-based blog, it sure is in a hurry to sell us more crap.

Do you want to know more?
eBay / Internet / Freedom / Taiwan

What have I been up to?

2005-11-15T15:15:00.000-04:00

After all these months, you may be wondering what I have been up to. Well, first of all, I rewired my home network to simplify it, and it was a stunning success. It seems that it is now more stable than before, there's a price to pay. Before I touched it, it looked something like this:
Every PC had two network cards in it, one was for the local network that interconnected all my machines for print and file sharing. The other network card eventually plugged into my router for Internet access. Thus all machines had Internet and local network access, but it was a clumsy, cumbersome affair. When I first moved into my apartment, I had to drill three holes from the computer room to the living room. One was for telephone TV, since become extinct. The other two were for LAN and Internet access from the living room. This was before I had a wireless router. Once I got one of those, I simply stopped using one of the cables.

Now my network looks like this. Each machine has only one network card, and the laptop has a just a wireless one. Only one hub is now active and it connects two machines that line that far wall. My main computer is sitting right beside the router, so it connects directly in, the other two are connected through their hub, and the laptop has a wireless connection directly to the router. The two file servers are Linux boxes and they connect no problem to both the Windows LAN and the Internet, the laptop can access the Internet and the file servers wirelessly, and more importantly, I'm much happier now that when I unplug the power cord from the laptop, I can still access all the files.Of course, there is a price to pay for all these benefits. My hub and network cards are all 10/100, meaning I can get up to 100Mbps on the wire. The wireless part of this network is now the bottleneck. Before, the file transfers from the laptop to the file servers(say, after I come back home and want to upload my pictures from the laptop) were at 100Mbps. Now, because the only connection is the wireless one, it is limited to 54Mbps. This means that if I want to get double the speed, I have to connect the laptop to the network with a wire. I guess it's not really such a big problem since I still have a wire in the living room. It's the principle of the thing, however.

One of the reasons I did all this was because I installed that 2^nd server, a dual Athlon MP 1200Mhz system with 512MB RAM and 200GB of disk space. I really didn't feel like installing two network cards and pulling one more wire(the 1^st wire was already in place). So, after a day of work and much swearing, I finally got it to work. Hurray!

I also got back into personal programming by writing a game called Defend. It's something of a homage to the old Trek games, but really, I only did it as a brain exercise. Currently, it is only available on Windows, but I'm planning on releasing a Linux version soon. You may download a working beta version by following the link above, but a more complete version is coming soon.

I also started cooking again, and have so far completely failed to poison myself.

On the work front, I got laid off from my job and was then immediately rehired without stepping foot outside the office.

That's been my life so far. Hope you enjoyed it.

Do you want to know more?
Network / Athlon / Linux / Server

Resurrected

2005-11-15T13:32:00.000-04:00

After much soul-searching, I've decided to resurrect this blog, but will post under a different User ID. Yu the Great is my new moniker, how long it lasts is anyone's guess. LOL! Welcome back, my darlings, welcome back.

Do you want to know more?
Yu the Great

BlogInSpace

2005-08-14T03:08:00.000-03:00

No, I have not returned to regular posting, but just had to add this to the blog.

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BlogInSpace

All good things...

2005-08-10T16:17:00.000-03:00

must come to an end!

And so it is with The Mad Perseid blog. In the past seven months(good Lord, has it really been seven months? Wow!), I've met quite a few very interesting people, read a lot of good blogs and also had a great deal of fun, and with regret I must now put blogging on hold.

In the end, I simply can't afford the amount of time I have to put into this to make it worthwhile. There're things out there that I've been neglecting, and not so unfortunately I must now turn my attention to them. I don't know for how long I'll be able to stay away, blogging is a powerful, though fun, addiction, after all, so I may post something new every once in a while. Eventually I hope to be back with a new template, one that gives direct access to my photography and artwork.

So, to all my friends, thank for reading my blog and linking to it, and I hope to see you 'round the blogosphere. Keep up the good writing and keep a light on for me.

Farewell for now!

Pirates of the Caribbean Sequels

2005-08-10T10:23:00.000-03:00

Well, for those who didn't get enough of the original Pirates of the Caribbean, there are two(count 'em, two!) sequels being filmed right now, slated for 2006 and 2007 releases.

Pirates of the Caribbean 2: Dead Man's Chest
Pirates of the Carribean 3

Do you want to know more?
Pirates of the Caribbean / The Curse of the Black Pearl / Dead Man's Chest

They made her into a scab

2005-08-09T22:29:00.000-03:00

So, the Runaway Bride™ has been made into a public grounds keeper. I wonder how long they'll make her keep it up before somebody'll feel sorry for her. All see this.

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Runaway Bride

More SG1 Quotes

2005-08-09T22:08:00.000-03:00

Goa'uld Spy: “How did you come by the mothership?”
Jack O'Neil: “We made a deal with Cronus.”
Spy: “What kind of deal?”
O'Neill: “He gave us the mothership.”
Spy: “And what did Cronus get?”
O'Neill: “Cronus got... what was coming to him.”

Sam Carter: “This is the sun that Vorash is orbiting.”
Jacob Carter/Selmak: “We want to blow it up.”

O'Neill and Jacob are having an argument about saying they're doomed prematurely
O'Neill: “I distinctly remember you saying we weren't going to make it.”
Jacob: “I over-reacted.”
O'Neill: “Well, we made it. So maybe next time you could reserve judgement.”
Jacob: “What, and miss my last chance of being right?” Walks away.
O'Neill: “What?”
Sam: “Welcome to my world.”
O'Neill: “What?”

O'Neill and Carter are power-walking through a Goa'uld mothership.
Carter: “This way, sir.”
O'Neill: “Carter, how do you know which way to go in a place like this?”
Carter: “I studied the specs while we've been aboard.”
O'Neill: “You sure know how to have a good time.”
Carter: “Having a good time now, sir.”
O'Neill: “You go, girl.”

And now, my favourite SG1 expression!
Apophis: “Kree, Jaffa!”

Do you want to know more?
Stargate: SG1

My goal

2005-08-09T16:49:00.000-03:00

I have a goal!

No, this isn't the one about wenches and clubs. This one is about this blog, and that goal is to have the content portion longer than the right-hand sidebar, and hopefully of decent, readable material. At the moment, I'm OK, but if I post nothing more today, with the first post tomorrow the sidebar will be longer. This goal is consuming my waking moments, and the sleeping ones, too. Woe, thy name is The Mad Perseid!

Do you want to know more?
Goals

Of D.E.B.S., or how to make silly lesbian movies even sillier

2005-08-09T15:44:00.000-03:00

Of all the silly movies recommended to be lately, one of the sillier ones has to be D.E.B.S.. Basically a send-up of spy movies, it's the live-action version(reimagining???) of Totally Spies with lesbianism thrown in for good measure.

The plot revolves about hot young women in short skirts recruited by a governmental paramilitary origanization(D.E.B.) to fight crime, the evil kind, the kind that wants to take over the world... or blow up Australia, because it has a bad attitude.

Lucy Diamonds: “Australia's toast!”
Scud: “What have you got against Australia?”
Lucy Diamonds: “I don't like their attitude.”

The plot(or something) thickens when one of DEBS falls in love with the evil girl, who apparently is just misunderstood and had a rough childhood. According to viewer comments, the film was shown at a Gay and Lesbian film festival, though it's hard to see why. Is the G&L community so desperate for movies with G&L content that they'll even take one that, sans the lesbian content, would be unwatchable?

Well, maybe that's not entirely true. It's really not a bad movie, all things considered. It's funny, the girls are pretty and are scantily dressed, even the (supposedly) evil ones. They have some cool gadgets and their method of going on a stake-out is hillarious. In the end, I give a 6.5 out of 10.

Do you want to know more?
D.E.B.S. / Totally Spies / Gay / Lesbian / Movie Review

The shuttle has landed safely

2005-08-09T15:04:00.000-03:00

Well, the shuttle Discovery is safely down. Excellent!

Do you want to know more?
Shuttle / Discovery / Space/ NASA

Unbelievable

2005-08-09T09:35:00.000-03:00

The first virus for a Microsoft operating system that hasn't even been released yet has already been published.

Do you want to know more?
Virus / Microsoft / Microsoft Vista

The Island

2005-08-08T15:10:00.000-03:00

Lots of action, but predictable. Basically, it's a combination of the reimagining of Logan's Run(which, by the way, is also being remade) and The 6^th Day.

Warning - possible spoilers ahead!

The Island has one of the more perverted plot lines I've seen a movie in a long time. That's not necessarily a bad thing, and I've got a feeling that, sooner or later, we'll have to deal with real-life implications of it. But, that's a post for another time.

The movie follows one male and one female, who in the course of the movie become a man and a woman, and also far more than they were even inteded to be. It would've been a much better movie, I think, if the commercials on TV didn't give so much of it away beforehand. As I said above, it's basically a rehashed(read, reimagined) Logan's Run, and follows the same basic line. A man learns his more-or-less idylic existence isn't at all what it seems and he rises above his limitations to achieve far more than what he was thought capable of. Throw in a hot babe and some chases, and you've got yourself a plot.

Having said that, it's not actually a bad movie. The acting is passable, the sets are pretty well designed, and the ground/air pursuits were well-made. So, all in all, not a quite watchable movie, though it's not one I'd pay to see again. No, what pissed me off were the blatant product placements.

By my count, there were at least three. Is it necesssary, as part of a plotline about harvesting humans for their organs and fluids to zoom in bottled Aquafina water that a character was about to pick up and drink? Is it a critical aspect of the story to show that people living a lie entertain themselves with an XBox? What is the benefit to the development of the story to have every vehicle in the movie be a G.M. vehicle? Nothing jarred you out of the immersion in the movie more than having corporate logos flashed at you like that.

Despite all that, I'd still recommend for people to see it.

Do you want to know more?
The Island / Movie Reviews / Logan's Run / The 6^th Day / General Motors / Microsoft / XBox / Aquafina / Ewan McGregor / Scarlett Johansson

Brain Cramps

2005-08-08T13:05:00.000-03:00

Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?
Answer: "I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because if we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever,"
--Miss Alabama in the 1994 Miss USA contest.

"Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can't help but cry. I mean I'd love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff." --Mariah Carey

"Smoking kills. If you're killed, you've lost a very important part of your life," --Brooke Shields, during an interview to become Spokesperson for federal anti-smoking campaign.

"I've never had major knee surgery on any other part of my body,"--Winston Bennett, University of Kentucky basketball forward.

"Outside of the killings, Washington has one of the lowest crime rates in the country," --Mayor Marion Barry, Washington, DC.

"I'm not going to have some reporters pawing through our papers. We are the president." --Hillary Clinton commenting on the release of subpoenaed documents.

"That lowdown scoundrel deserves to be kicked to death by a jackass, and I'm just the one to do it," --A congressional candidate in Texas.

"Half this game is ninety percent mental." --Philadelphia Phillies manager, Danny Ozark

"It isn't pollution that's harming the environment. It's the impurities in our air and water that are doing it." --Al Gore, Vice President (DUH !)

"I love California. I practically grew up in Phoenix." --Dan Quayle

"W e've got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need?"--Lee Iacocca

"The word 'genius" isn't applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein." --Joe Theisman, NFL football quarterback &sports analyst.

"We don't necessarily discriminate. We simply exclude certain types of people."
--Colonel Gerald Wellman, ROTC Instrutor.

"If we don't succeed, we run the risk of failure." --Bill Clinton, President

"We are ready for an unforeseen event that may or may not occur."
--Al Gore, VP ( he's smart)

"Traditionally, most of Australia's imports come from overseas."
--Keppel Enderbery

"Your food stamps will be stopped effective March 1992 because we received notice that you passed away. May God bless you. You may reapply if there is a change in your circumstances."
--Department of Social Services, Greenville, South Carolina

"If somebody has a bad heart, they can plug this jack in at night as they go to bed and it will monitor their heart throughout the night. And the next morning, when they wake up dead, there'll be a record." --Mark S. Fowler, FCC Chairman

Do you want to know more?
Humour / Quotes

Sunday Funnies - 2005/08/07

2005-08-07T10:40:00.000-03:00

In accordance with the announcement about creating the “Sunday Funnies”, I present Gone Wrong. Thanks for looking.

Tragedy on the set of Treehugger Weekly magazine

Last updated Saturday, March 12^th, 2005

Boondocks, WV (FN) - Two people are missing, presumed eaten by aligators, on the photo shoot set of Treehugger Weekly magazine, a special-interest publication that glorifies the thoughtless eco-nut culture so prevalent among the bored and the lazy.

The twenty-two year old model, Anika Telinksi, and her forty-five year old photographer, Johhan Lienitz, were out on an "unscheduled and unauthorized shoot" outside the main camp, according to the publication's spokewoman, Angelique Tomaine. The two were last seen just after dinner the day before and a search was started when they failed to appear for the scene set up.

According to Ms. Tomaine, their clothing was found on the bank of the river, "neatly folded, together with all their photo gear". To keep the magazine's other employees from fainting, the police were called.

Sheriff Notting was the first on the scene. "These d*mn hippies, they shoulda known better than to go off on their own like that. The hereabouts are crawling with crocs."

The picture, show here, was the only frame they shot before disappearing. The Magazine will run the picture, Ms Tomaine said, to raise funds for the protection of the rainforest, bears and crocs. "And because it's just too damn cool," she added.

Do you want to know more?
3D / Computer Artwork / Computer Graphics

Driving on fumes

2005-08-05T14:23:00.000-03:00

I have a question for my readers. Short of actually running out, what's the smallest amount of fuel you've ever driven into a gas station with? I once put in 54 liters of gas, and the manual said I have a 53 liter tank.

Do you want to know more?
Fuel / Gasoline

Weird error from Google

2005-08-05T13:25:00.000-03:00

Now this is something I've never seen before from Google. What's up with 'dat?

Do you want to know more?
Google / Errors / Computer Virus

A new feature on this blog

2005-08-05T11:53:00.000-03:00

Starting this Sunday, August 7^th, I'm planning on introducing a new feature on this blog. This feature will be called “Sunday Funnies” and will feature 3D computer artwork made by me. It should be available on Sunday morning, as soon as I can get up.

Do you want to know more?
Sunday Funnies / Computer Artwork / 3D

Template fixed!

2005-08-05T11:08:00.000-03:00

Hooray! I finally fixed the template, it should once again be visible in both Firefox and Internet Exporer. It should now display properly at 1024x768(the vast majority of my visitors), as well as higher resolutions. Enjoy!

If you're using a web browser other than Firefox or Internet Explorer on a platform other than Windows, please let me know how it displays for you. Please provide your browser name, version #, resolution and platform name. Thank you.