Author: Jason Doucette

Here’s the kind of fun that I get to deal with: we just sat down to watch some Simpsons and enjoy some of AngelA’s sloppy joes when the phone rings. Here’s an approximate transcript:

me: Hello?
some guy: Hi, can I speak to [Herman]?
It doesn’t sound like a telemarketer…
me: Speaking…
some guy: Hi, this is Brandon.
I don’t know any Brandons…do I?
*Pause*
Brandon: I was just visiting your adult website.
Cold chill down spine. Someone I don’t know is calling me at home about VP. I can’t think of a single scenario where this could go well.
me: ok…
Brandon: I sell a brand of penis enlarging pills and run ads on over a hundred websites. If you run one of them, you’ll find you get a lot more hits.
Ok, this is some strange phone spam. Way strange phone spam. How can running an ad give ME more traffic? And more importantly, why would the guy want to run the ads on a vegan site?
me: You’re actually serious?
Brandon: Oh yeah, you’ll get hundreds more hits.
me: No, I mean you actually want me to run an ad for penis enlarging pills?
Brandon: Yeah, they’re really great.
me: So you’ve been to my site, eh?
Brandon: yep.
me: How’d you like all the naked women?
Brandon: Great stuff.
me: Which site are we talking about?
Brandon: Um…[checking]…VegasPorn.com. No, I mean VeganPorn.com.
While he was checking I asked AngelA if we needed any penis enlarging pills. She said no.
me: There aren’t any naked women on that site.
Brandon: Errr… Let me check… “This is not an actual porn site” [likely from the Google description]. Ah. Um. What is this anyway?
me: It’s a news and information site for vegans. Vegans don’t eat meat eggs or dairy, and they have big dicks, so they don’t need your pills. You know, because they eat healthy and stuff and they get so much sex.
Brandon: Ok, yeah, I guess you, um…
me: Bye…

I normally try to keep telemarketers on the line for as long as I can, but this situation caught me a bit off balance. I’ve got his number from caller ID, and I’m kinda tempted to post it, but I think it’d be better if I just left things as they are. All in all, it’s an interesting life, being a vegan pornographer…

Complete left turn ahead: you may have overstepped your marketing campaign when you take a soccer action figure, put Spiderman’s head on it, and try to sell it as a “Spider Man Adventure Hero“. There’s a whole series of these, and if they weren’t $25 bucks a pop up here, I’d seriously consider getting some just because it’s so bizarre. It’s like putting a Darth Vader head on a My Little Pony and…hmmm…gotta go, there’s cash to be made!

Damn, what a crazy weekend. I caught Ian’s show Friday, which had a lot of great stuff, then went to Brampton, caught the end of Gremlins, and went to a bunch of garage sales the next morning. I bought three telephones for $6 total. I won’t get into why I bought three telephones, but the funny part is that the cheapest phone was from Nortel, and I could see the company’s worldwide headquarters from where I got the phone for a whole dollar. No wonder their stock’s so low. I also saw Spiderman, which is worth seeing, I guess. $13.50 for a movie seems steep, but then I decide that it’s $6.75 an hour, which isn’t even enough to hire someone to entertain me at minimum wage. All in all, the weekend was packed enough that I almost didn’t notice the part where I spent all Sunday in the damned office…

The fun site of the day is What’s Better?, where you get to pick what’s better. I closed the browser when they pitted Alyson Hannigan against Coleco Mania, because that’s a game where the only way to win is not to play.

Last bit: I actually thought I could be the guy that swoops in near the end of an eBay auction and gets the great deal, but no such luck… I did place a bid two days ago too, so I think I was well within my rights to rebid with two hours left. Maybe I should’ve waited a little longer. Of course, then I would have had to pay for something, which is less fun than bidding…

I’m heading down the escalator on the way to work today, and some people were nice enough to move to the right so I can keep walking. These were security guards of some sort. With guns. Who got out of my way. Yeah, I’m pretty badass.

AngelA’s opening went really well, we even had a crazy guy show up, so it had to be seen as a success. If you missed it, the show’s on until the 18th or something. As an added bonus, I’ve been told that there are holograms on display at the OCAD Gallery at Dundas & McCaul. I was going to head up at lunch, but then I realized I work for a living. That reminds me, it’s time for more lottery tickets…

A section of Queen Street was closed off this morning. Since they’re doing construction on the corner (some stupid office tower), I figured that they were just hauling up some big stuff by crane, but then I noticed that there were around six police cars there, which is a bit much for a one block street closure. There seemed to be more construction workers hanging around outside the site than usual too. Whatever, I didn’t pursue the matter, but then I noticed that the street was still closed at 6 tonight. When I got back around 10, the street was open, but there was an unmarked police car across from the site, and by now my curiousity is up enough to ask someone, but I didn’t feel comfortable knocking on the window of an unmarked car, so at this point I have no idea what the deal is. The theme here is something like “I know what’s going on around the world, but I don’t know what’s going on around the corner”.

Update: through the miracle that is “television” I just found out that strong winds caused some trouble for the construction company. A crane was hauling up some steel rods, and they smashed into a window, spraying glass all over the street below. The site’s closed until they install some wind-o-meter gizmos or something. I once saw a big chunk of wood fall 30 stories to the street below (different building). It didn’t hit anything, but it sure makes you think a bit about the construction business…

You know it’s getting busy when it’s been two nights in a row that I’ve had to take advantage of my server being on Pacific time just so I can make the daily deadline for VP. I don’t even know why I have a phone anymore, since it requires someone to be awake on both ends of the wire for it to work effectively…

So, a few quick updates for friends and family who worry, and then we’ll get on with the news of the day. I just got back from helping to hang where the heart is, which looks really good, and I’m not just talking about the meticulous centering of all the frames, the kind of centering that could only be done by someone with training in advanced calculus. The art itself looks cool, so if you’re in Toronto, check it out. Also on the art front, AngelA won the OCAD medal for the printmaking department, which basically means that her work was judged to be at the top of her class for the year. It’s pretty damned cool. The concept, anyway, I haven’t seen the actual medal. She’s in the running for the overall OCAD medal too! Her work had a lot of animal rights themes, hopefully we can get some of it on her as yet undeveloped website soon.

Ok, the real news of the day, the news you can’t live without: some city somewhere is planning on banning backyard wrestling, which is, um, wrestling in your backyard. In a ring. With costumes. Apparently some of the events are broadcast on the internet. I read this somewhere, haven’t verified it, your results may vary. Not my thing. ANYWAY. The fun part is why they’re banning it: it’s not because of injuries or safety or even the town’s reputation as sucky backyard wrestlers. It’s because the poor little suburbanites are offended by the noise. Said one resident: “All we hear is cursing and boom, bam, boom. Where’s the quality of our life?” Poor babies longing for country estates with gated driveways and the closest neighbour 3 miles down the road. Tear down your stupid fences and get to know the people that live near you. Maybe then they’ll invite you to their parties and your lives won’t suck as much. Of course, I’m one to talk, I only know one of my neighbours in my condo. Her name is “Lady with the cats”. I bet if our building had a backyard, and we had a wrestling league, I might actually know her real name — “Unstoppable Lady with the Cats”. She’d lay the smack down, and I’d be all about the training prayers and vitamins.

What a way to start the day – I read this, which is the notice from the Canadian Copyright board of proposed increased tariffs on just about any recordable media. It starts out very optimistically, with a great discussion of the democratic process and all the options you have to make objections. I was feeling pretty good until I got to the bottom of page 5, “limitations on the powers of the board“, where it says that anyone planning on making an objection has to realize the following: there has to be a levy, it can’t be set at the retail level, it has to be applied to all media, regardless of whether it’s used to record music or not, and they can’t give exemptions to anyone except organizations that represent people with perceptual disabilities. Wow, so many options… 59 cents per CD-R, 21 bucks per gig on the iPod, and now they’re even charging on flash memory. How long before FireWire portable hard drives get hit?

I’ve talked about this before, and I’m tired of it. The Canadian Private Copying Collective is calling me a thief to justify their bad business practices. This is like McDonald’s winning a tax on paint to offset costs of vandalism during an economic protest, because spray painting a window is the only possible valid use for paint products.

In other news, I can barely walk today… Ow.

It’s time for the other horizontal dance, now known a HT5.0. I hated the old layout, but I was new to CSS and MT and all that, and the plan was to get some form of layout up so I could get on with actual content. That plan sucked.

Vanilla Ice took what he learned on the street, and he improved on it. The Internet’s a damn big street, so I just took what I learned from where the heart is and went from there. All CSS, seems to work in most browsers, and could someone please tell me why Netscape 4.7 ignores the width on every entry other than the first? I had to use inline styles for the stuff on the left too. Very annoying.

Other news, did the Sporting Life 10K today. My first run since the last race a month ago, but it looks like my leg will still work tomorrow, so that’s a nice change. I took a bit of a hit from the month of non-running (kept at the gym though), but I think what I lost the most was my sense of pacing. Results are here, but I didn’t enter as Senor Thrust, so use whois if you really care yet don’t know me.

It looks like my laptop battery is dead, in a non-renewable sense. I’m not sure if the fact that it’s my work laptop makes this fact better or worse, since it’s an older model that’s not supported anymore, and I don’t want to buy a new one. I’d like an iBook or PowerBook, but my budget is strained at the moment. Any comments on how X runs on the older G3 notebooks?

My shopping did include a 128 meg card for the camera. At the lowest resolution, I can store over 800 images. Of course, when I can fit 155 big pictures, why look back? The justification for this was funny. My Minolta doesn’t work with OS X, so I was geared up to buy the $100 LaCie Hexa whatzit reader that can handle a whole whack of card types, even though I only need CompactFlash. For some reason this was preferred over the $40 SanDisk CF reader. Probably the formats, and I seem to have a bunch of LaCie stuff already. I saw Black’s had a deal where the reader was only $20 if you buy a 128 meg card with it. That works out to $150, so I translated this into “I get the card reader and only spend $50 for a 128 meg card”, rather than the more logical “I just spent $110 more than I needed for a memory card when my 64 meg card hasn’t ever been full”. This means I must take many photos.

I was planning on going to work today, but that’s a really dumb idea, so I’ll nap instead.

As mentioned below, today is No Pants Day. Are you enjoying the freedom? I took a survey, and nobody here seems willing to give it a try, so I’m proposing a transitional celebration called “Not Your Pants Day”, where everyone still wears pants, just not their own.

I can’t get to my email to let Shawn know he missed the link, but you’ll still have to go to dB79 to find out about No Pants Day. It’s tomorrow. Or today. You know, the 3rd. My boss isn’t in, so this might be an option, although probably only briefly. It’s a definite consideration if I have to work past 10 again.

Alright…

The newsletter is awaiting final approval to go to the printers.

Where the heart is is finally finished. I wanted to go totally CSS, but I ended up with this mess for the front page. It actually looks good in a few newer browsers, but sadly, not any of the ones I use regularly. Any tips would be appreciated.

Now I just have to do AngelA’s main site in a day, and I can apply all that I’ve learned to this blue monstrosity. Oh, and make Friday’s code drop at work. Code drops require actual code, I hear. Interesting.

Does anyone know why smokers are allowed to feed their habit in public? The packs say right on them that smoking hurts non smokers. How is this not intentionally inflicting harm? If I read somewhere that punching someone in the nose is painful, and then I do it, wouldn’t I go to jail? Class action lawsuits are when a bunch of people sue one party. What’s the opposite of that, ’cause I want to go after a million or so people…