Category: HT archives

The Food Fair starts the day after tomorrow. Hence the tiny update today.

I did manage to pick up a new Fire Wire hard drive today though. The new hard drive cost the same as the very first drive I ever bought, except this one is external, with a serial bus that’s somehow faster than the old internal controller, and, oh, yeah, this one is 2,000 times bigger in capacity. Should I feel old or just happy? The old drive was so big (at the time) that I could put everything I had on it and still had more than half the space free. I wonder how long before I’m crying about a lack of free space again… All I know is, backups are a bigger pain in the ass than ever. What the hell do people use to back up huge drives, aside from other drives?

I was up at 4:30 this morning.

I knew exactly what seitan was.

I ironed a shirt.

I was good to go.

And the bastards cancelled the TV segment.

I’m referring to City TV’s Breakfast Television, where a bunch of us were going to have a mini vegetarian fashion show, a precursor to the big event at the 18th annual Toronto Vegetarian Food Fair. Yes, it’s finally almost here! Anyway, we got there, and they told us that they’d been speaking with our “co-ordinator”, and the segment was cancelled a few days ago. I’ve no idea who they thought they were talking to, and Incognita has a relatively accurate account of the story. All I’m gonna say is that they had someone from the freaking rodeo there the day before. That’s right, in a monumental example of poor planning, TVA has scheduled their fair in direct conflict with a rodeo. S’gonna cut our audience in half.

If this map is at all accurate, there are four unprotected wireless access points in my building, plus my WEP-enabled one. Does that make me more or less vulnerable? The unprotected ones might be easier to get at, but there’s got to be people wondering what I’m trying to hide…

Oh, before I forget, Slashdot‘s running a poll on “Are you a (vegan / vegetarian / carnivore / etc)”, and I’ve got mod privileges right now if anyone wants to add to the discussion…

For people that care about my Sharepoint woes, it turns out that the server we’re running on is still in “pilot” mode. Today’s pilot crashed into a tree, deleting all the users we’d set up. Thankfully, the rest of the data was still there. Today.

In other news, there probably isn’t any other news. I’m keeping my porn searches to a minimum these days, just to avoid the media holiday that’s also known as wartime propaganda. As Zed pointed out, Project Censored has released their latest list of the top 25 stories that didn’t make the mainstream news. Well worth reading.

Dammit Shawn, you’ve got me linking to a Dave Barry column. I don’t know why that’s a problem, but it’s bugging me something fierce. It’s for a good cause though: Thursday September 19 is Talk Like a Pirate Day, and you know you want to take part in that.

I don’t watch tennis, so it’s hard for me not to strongly dislike Andre Agassi. Just try to search for vegan news whenever a big tennis match (meet? tournament? group hug?) is going on. “The Las Vegan did something” is all you find. Is this a good or a bad time to wear a vegan shirt?

“Yes, I will teach you to play tennis as a (las) vegan. First we must eat.”
“Master, we’ve been eating tofu for days. When will you teach me to be as the Las Vegan?”
“Ha ha ha. I already have.”

Or something.

Do you think it’s possible to deep fry alcohol? All Google’s telling me is that it might be bad for my acne.

“never ever ask me to write something for you. and don’t pay me. i’d rather take £400 quid for assassinating a crack whore’s only child in a revenge killing for a busted drug deal – my integrity would be less compromised.” Damn, I want to be an editor now! That poorly capitalized blurb was part of a much larger rant over at The Guardian. Another great link hand stolen from the Fimoculous library. I really should have a direct link on my sidebar, but then why would you come here?

Gotta run – somehow I have to look pretty in about 10 hours.

My split personality/dual identity thing is getting out of hand. For the sake of maintaining my pseudo-anonymity, I will be referring to my non-HT persona as “Oscar”, which is also not a real identity, but it’s just for this post, so I’m hoping it won’t take.

“Herman Thrust” was born as a joke among a few friends. The domain followed, because hey, $50 brought a lot of laughs. Later, when I was starting Vegan Porn, it was a convenient name to use to hide my identity. The name was obviously fake, so I wasn’t deceiving anyone, and there are some people whose judgement of my work would have been more clouded by knowledge that I ran a vegan info site than if I had 12 channels of streaming porn action. All was well.

The trouble seems to be that I’ve linked various personality traits to Herman and Oscar. There are some things that Herman is better at than Oscar, and vice versa. Most of this comes up when I have to deal with people that I don’t know (Herman), unless it involved calming someone down when they’re mad about something (Oscar).

I’m finding Oscar getting asked to do things that Herman would be better at, and vice versa. Oscar was in a situation today that was tailor made for Herman, but instead Oscar managed to blunder through it with an absolute lack of social skills, and he felt like crap for hours afterwards, something else Herman would have been less likely to do. Later this week, Oscar and Herman may have to completely switch roles in order to maintain the privacy that the setup promised back when I was just playing around with a few friends. These are the things that break my brain.

In the midst of all this, it occurs to me that I should just collapse the whole thing into one concrete and (hopefully) saner identity, but I just got my HT business cards, and they’re really cool, so Herman’s here to stay for a while. I’ve had nicknames in the past, and there were times when it turned out that relatively close acquaintances didn’t realize that my name wasn’t my name, but the Internet has accelerated things to the point that there are more people in the world who know me as HT than as me.

Incidentally, it was really hard to pick “Oscar” for this post, and I’m not sure what that means. I was going to go with something like “Jennifer”, which would have been funnier, but then some people would have discovered some completely new neuroses, and I’m plenty full right now, if you haven’t guessed.

And no, you shouldn’t worry. I’m just at a point where I’m getting ready to turn VP up a notch, and it’s going to take the full skills of both sides of me to get it done effectively, so I’m more aware than usual of the dichotomy.

I spilled raspberry juice on myself this morning at work. The good news is, I was wearing a red shirt. The bad news is, only one drop hit the shirt, and the rest landed on my favourite pants, the pants above all other pants. The good news is, my pants now match my red shirt more than ever before.

A good chunk of this afternoon was spent playing with SharePoint Team Services making what amounts to a development blog. That’s what happens in a Microsoft shop. I think it would have been really funny if we’d gotten Moveable Type in and accidentally set it to ping weblogs.com every time someone coded something… Ok, it wouldn’t have actually worked, but I would have found it funny. Altogether, it seems a whole lot simpler than creating our own system, but I need to see how much it can be extended. Has anyone messed with SharePoint much?

AngelA and I were talking briefly about the chances of Rain Man II being made. I, of course, can’t see it happening without a liberal application of ninjas, or at least an application of liberal ninjas. “Yeah, definietely have to increase spending on social services. Definitely have to work on crane technique. Yeah.” With the way Hollywood is going, I wonder if we’ll see a sequel or a remake first. The remake would be cool if they got Jet Li and Adam Sandler to play brothers.

I’m having a really hard time with this shopping thing. The sales guy helped me out a lot, and I want him to get the commission, but he’s either busy or not there when I show up, and I need to make the purchase soon. This is why online shopping is a good thing – no sense of loyalty required. I can’t talk about what the purchase is going to be, because that would give away all my secret plans that will end up sucking anyway, so for now, pretend it’s bananas. Bananas that require the skilled guidance of a trained sales professional.

Anyway, it’s Friday night and I need to go put on my drinking shoes. Seeya tomorrow.

Oh: if I make a bad dinner, should I put it in the freezer until the technology develops that can save it?

I don’t know if it’s just because we go to a lot of different web sites, but that “auto complete URLs” feature in my browser really isn’t doing its job lately. If I don’t visit a site twice a day, I end up having to type in the whole damned thing. Meanwhile, if I visit one clown porn site, it stays for weeks and weeks. No good.

The thing I like best about debugging code that has modules submitted by a lot of people is that the error is never the work of just one person. Usually there are two or three problems lurking like a bad game of Jenga, and one of them just happens to topple the tower, but any of the others could have just as easily triggered the same problem. One of these days I’m going to walk through a set of modules that work and see if they actually consist of equal and opposite bugs that cancel each other out. Do open source projects have this same problem?

Had a bunch of broccoli for lunch today. Just a whole whack of the florets in a bowl. Everybody who saw it said it looked really good. I usually get “that smells good” comments when I bring a lunch, but folks usually recoil at the sight of my food. I think everyone just felt better seeing the vegan graze. The thought that I could work simple machines to prepare a meatless meal made it seem like too much like something they could do themselves, and hey, people can’t eat like that!

Amusing anecdote about that last paragraph: I was so proud that I knew how to spell broccoli that I couldn’t get my fingers to type it out until the fifth or sixth try. Just to make sure I wasn’t getting ahead of myself, I went to a dictionary site to double check, and it’s not “borccoli” either. See, I can spell it, I just can’t type it.

In other news, I graduated from physiotherapy today. Well, it’s kind of like I entered the work/study program, because I still have to do a whole bunch of exercises and stuff, but they’ve taught me all they can. I wonder what it would cost if I systematically injured every part of my body, piece by piece and had them fix it? Would it be cheaper than a university degree? I figure I’d come out of it knowing more anyway.

I should have plugged The Golden Dogs‘ show tonight at the Reverb, but I feel so darned self conscious about it… Plus I won’t be there. You’ll have to settle for my upcoming personal appearance at the Legendary Horseshoe Tavern on the 19th, where I believe the Golden Dogs will also be playing.

Ok, I’m moving from TV shows to product design. I’m envisioning a roll of underwear that will work like a roll of toilet paper. I could just have an underwear dispenser instead of the top drawer of my dresser (socks would probably work too). More ideas will surely follow, but just not tonight.

Today I felt too strong to safely carry my collection of lead lined pants to work. I was worried that I’d take a step that was too powerful, and they’d fly into the sun, blocking some crucial gamma ray that prevents us all from becoming as powerful as I am. We couldn’t have that! No sir! Anyway, after my leisurely five hour lunch, I signed up for dancing lessons. It turns out that I am too graceful, and the instructor wept for hours after witnessing me bend my supple frame to pick up a pack of genuine guacamole cookies.

That’s right, these entries are usually designed to make sense to one or two people, tops, and that includes myself. Y’all need to sign up for HT Pro, which includes the live video feed.

Other fun stuff today included grafitti patrol. Someone scrawled “touch her and your [sic] dead” on a bus shelter, and I spent a good part of my day trying to figure out what would happen to my dead if I did figure out who “her” was and decided to perform the act of the touch. It’s too bad the bus came before the vandal could complete the sentence. My dead will rise up as an invincible army? My dead will become cursed souls? It doesn’t matter a whole lot, because I don’t think I have any dead right now.

I do have possession of the souls of several tortured applications at work. Oddly, every “feature” that I’ve personally been involved in correcting this cycle has had to do with time functions. I didn’t invent all of the problems, but it’s like time is my Kryptonite. Maybe not the green one that kills me, but possibly something in a mauve.

Ok, I just found this link to classic videogame commercials over at Fimoculous, and it made me lust badly enough to go over and download the Real player. It’s asking me for an email address, I don’t want to give out a real one, so I make up “bozo@goo.com”. It’s already been used by someone else to get the player. Scary.

Anyway, just a short post tonight, what with me being so strong that the keyboard might shatter at my touch at any time and all. I got the new Giant Robot today, and now it’s competing with bozo@goomba.com’s videos, so yeah, I’ve got stuff to do.

(13:40)

I just bought a CD from HMV (while at lunch. Yes, I do work for a living. Hence the ability to buy CDs), and it was an incredible deal! $13.99 for one or two for $30! I was tempted to get two so I could see if I’d actually get my negative two bucks in savings, but I held off, even though I don’t want to open this one because the packaging amuses me. I have this habit of buying things on the basis of how dumb the package is, which I guess makes the package smart, but I can’t imagine there are a lot of people out there with the same motivations that I have. Actually, I’m scared to think that there might be other people in the world like me, but if there were, could you imagine the kind of store that would pick us as a target market?

(11:40)

Continuing my recent obsession: Men dressed as ninjas shut local freeway. “The two men — ages 20 and 21 — were from Gaylord and told police that they had just bought the ninja gear and were on their way downriver to surprise their family“.

Someone at work mentioned the possibility of constructing tall buildings from the top down. You’d make the top floor, jack it up, and put a floor under that one, and continue until you’re done. Anyone know if this is actually done anywhere? It’d be pretty fun to watch, I reckon. I recall that the CN tower used a bit of that idea when they put the pod in – the base was built on the ground and they used the elevators to hoist it up, if memory serves.

I think I’m just doomed to spend my life jumping from one crisis to the next, but there’s no actual jumping involved, it’s all just activity at one desk or another. AngelA’s art show finished up yesterday, and it went really well, but then there’s the matter of the 6 or 7 items that had to be taken care of today that, for one reason or another, are all due on or about tomorrow. All in all, it makes for boring television, and my production company will have none of that.

No, I’m talking about something grander than Deadlines with Ninjas, there’s got to be a love interest. Ok, I already have a love interest, so it’ll have to be a tool or something. A talking hammer. It’ll be a platonic relationship with a talking hammer that drives this series further into the ground uncharted realms. Yeah, ninjas too, but these ninjas will wear those back support belts that they wear at Home Depot, to keep the hammer thing going. Or something.

What would it be like if your saliva had sparkles in it? Just wondering.

As my memories of the weekend are mostly shot, and I spent most of today working on rewrites of stories I’ve already talked about in one forum or another, I don’t have a lot to say right now. I’m full of potential ideas, but they haven’t had time to evolve into really bad ideas yet. I’ve got domains purchased, shopping lists written up, but no actual time, which is probably all that’s keeping the planet rotating. If I actually was able to implement all my schemes, oh man, would it ever be cool. For me. You’d be wearing plaid sneakers and chewing carrot greens though, so that might not fulfill all your dreams. As soon as I’m perfectly content, you’re next on my list. Honest.

Pop quiz: name a movie where someone came from the future because you’re the greatest thing around in the year 2050 or whatever, but you need a little help in the present. I’m thinking Bill and Ted and the Terminator movies, but I’m looking for an example of a movie in this genre that sucks. Any suggestions?

I think if time travel became a reality, but people could only go back in time to a time where they wouldn’t get old enough to meet themselves, it’d be nice to have a reminder service. People with nothing to live for in the year 2300 could get paid to go back in time and remind me to pay my property tax bill. Actually, I just remembered to do that without any time traveller’s help, so the business would probably go under, but it’d make for an interesting movie of the week if you could work enough ninjas into it.

Ok, even if I was to start talking about some of the things that happened today, I wouldn’t get things posted in time for the midnight deadline, and then it’ll go on as tomorrow’s entry, and I’m sure I could work around that or at least convince myself that it doesn’t matter, but I’m beyond tired, and the show continues tomorrow. Without ninjas. If I don’t make it here on Sunday, Monday’s a full day of writing about other stuff (work and veg and veg more veg), so I’ll need a break. See you when it’s over.