Author: Jason Doucette

Adding to this morning’s lost entry heartbreak, VP is missing the post from this morning as well. It was also excellent, but it is also gone. I’m pretty sure I hit submit… I don’t mind retyping it, but I could have spent that time napping. Ack.

I just hit the wrong “home” button on my desktop, and my whole blog entry just disappeared.

All of it.

And it was a really good entry!

Needless to say, my rushed entry wasn’t nearly as good.

Sigh… I’ll retype it tonight.

I got some junk mail the other day offering “The Ultimate Gift for Laurier Alumni”. As it’s December, thoughts of “The Ultimate Gift” brings to mind phrases like “He died for our sins” and whatnot. Has some company started offering human sacrifices?

No, they’ve started offering cell phones at a “really special price”.

The holiday season continues to sink.

The men’s washroom in the Arcadian Court has a sign warning me that drinking alcohol while pregnant might hurt my baby. While this isn’t normally a concern for me, given the amount of floaties in everyone’s water glasses at this establishment, I’m going to be extra careful.

The occasion was the annual Christmas lunch, but for reasons that actually had nothing to do with political correctness, we weren’t allowed to call it a Christmas lunch. We still managed to have a present exhange though. We play the version where everyone puts a gift on the table and then people get a chance to either take one from the table or steal a gift from someone else (who then gets to go to the table or steal). Amazingly, I sought out a bottle of wine (the packaging made it pretty obvious) and managed to keep it. Yay for me. My gift submission was a Godzilla action figure with “shatter tail action” and “thunder roar”. It was pretty sweet, although wrapping it in Digimon paper made people automatically think it was a toy, so next year I’ll go for a more serious packaging scheme. The best wrapping was what appeared to be Hannukah paper with a card that said “Merry Christmas”. I normally wouldn’t recommend the Arcadian Court to anyone, but I managed to get a custom vegan meal instead of the buffet, and it was a winter vegetables in phyllo pastry creation that really kicked ass. People said they were jealous, but I’ll believe it when I see them order the same thing next year. I was full at the end, anyway.

In other news, the VP beta is going well. I spent a few hours this evening converting pages to valid XHTML 1.0 Strict, which is a severe pain in the ass. I have a few more forms to complete, but they can wait a bit. Once that’s done, I get to launch, and I can move on to new things, which will likely include sleeping.

Ok, I’m both easily amused and ignorant of the world out there, but this meteorologist program that I found via Waferbaby is the coolest thing ever. I’ve now got the Toronto weather forecast in my system menu. This is a bit more useful than before, because we recently put that heat-shrink plastic wrap on our balcony door to try to keep the cold out, and it actually works pretty well. The computer is right next to the balcony, so some of those -13C days made it a bit uncomfortable at Casa del Thrust… Now if I’m uncomfortable, my brain doesn’t even have to translate “cold”, I can just look at the top right corner of my screen.

Any other cool OS X apps/utilities that I should know about?

Hey, marketing types! Have too many drinks at lunch and have to make the deadline or else? Never fear! Just about everything can have “ninja” added to the product name – even carpet cleaners.

The new Mac (which has yet to be named) is still performing above expectations. See, that’s the best I can say right now, because I spent far too much of last night writing performance reviews for my team at work. They’re like report cards or possibly eulogies. In some bizarre form of “empowerment” gone horribly “wrong”, I even get to write my own! On the bright side, I’m trying to slip “nice pants” in to see if my boss actually reads them. On the down side, I feel a bit guilty using a fast machine for very… slow… typing… Still, I’m beyond happy with the machine and I’m leaving the browser home page on apple.com for the rest of the week in tribute.

I haven’t had time to try it out, but Fimoculous found the Emo Game.

Via Obscure Store: a woman pleaded guilty to a bunch of charges stemming from the embezzelment of more than $525,000 from her company, which she used to buy clothes, including 144 pairs of pants. I mention it because hey, gross pants.

Ok, back to work. I almost wish I was sick again.

The VP public beta is now in session! Check it out at bigbluebeta.veganporn.com!

I’m finally using computers the way I’ve been wanting to. The 19 inch monitor is running at 1600×1024, which means I can have a browser open, two or three terminals with vi (I think of it as ASCII DreamWeaver), and a DVD playing in the corner with no overlap. I’m just amazed that they all fit, let alone that they all work. On the iMac, I couldn’t have a DVD running unless it had focus.

Did I mention that I bought a new Mac? I picked up a Dual G4 this afternoon. It was on sale. It’s going to be painful when I have to use the iMac again. Very, very painful. I could write many things about how cool the new box is, but having finished the beta launch, I really want to go download processor intensive stuff right now.

I don’t enjoy this “sick” thing. Having gone about 3 years without running a fever, I feel a bit like Clark Kent in Superman II when he gets his ass kicked for the first time in his life. You know, except for the whole 3 years vs a lifetime bit and the fact that I don’t get to have my revenge at the end of the movie thing.

The fever was a new addition last night. I thought I was recovering, so I went back to work, and halfway through the day I was having trouble with the whole “sitting upright” fad that’s hot around the office right now, so I went home. At that point I think my body’s mangled defenses took a page from the book of high tech troubleshooting and said “what the hell, let’s burn the bastards out”. Great fun, much collateral damage. I did go to the clinic today, which means that I probably started getting healthier from the moment I entered – not from any actions taken by medical professionals, just from the symbolic breaking of my pride. Ah well, we’ll see.

The clinic is a good place to go when you’re got concerns about your tongue and throat as well – Google isn’t much help there (or is it?)

As I’m too ill to type for long periods of time, rather than correct the spelling on 50 or so photos on AngelA’s site, I hard coded a spelling correction into the code. The down side is that we’ll never be able to use the word “chromagenic” again, but it doesn’t come up often.

That small burst of coding has reminded me that the self-imposed deadline for VP’s big blue beta is Monday. I really need the ability to sit upright for more than half an hour at a time…

Google has brought forth this flash animation. Here’s why I like QuickTime over Flash: there’s that little bar on the bottom that tells you how much more there is to go. At one point, I thought that this animation was looped, and it might as well have been. It had so much potential, but it all drained away after the first 15 seconds or so.

An American academic has deduced that US president Bush is not in fact a moron, but rather a sociopath. Yikes. Oh well, thanks to that stomach virus that’s been attacking Toronto, it’s physically impossible to scare the crap out of me now anyway, so bring it on…