Category: HT archives

We’re at the video store yesterday, and they’ve got part 1 and 2 of the Japanese version of The Ring, you know, the movie about the movie that kills you seven days after you see it, and they’ve got it available for a seven day rental. Both movies were out, and I don’t know if they’re coming back.

Also, one of the many banks that finance my lifestyle sent me a letter offering me a complimentary $1000 accidental death insurance plan. I thought that was nice of them, until I noticed that they would be the beneficiary… Ok, they weren’t, but wouldn’t that be a great scam?

Update: while I did in fact play some Tony Hawk, I did not actually have wine from the bottle. The cork broke, and during the painful and anxious removal process I got cork bits in the wine. Rather than chug it all back, I opted for the glass so I could remove the worst offenders, but I didn’t use a proper wine glass, so advantage Thrust! Sadly, I am now without a bottle topper, so I came precariously close to having to finish the bottle off, which wasn’t really on my list of things to do. I ended up rigging a temporary top for the bottle, which works, but I don’t think it could look dumber if I’d poured the stuff into a Tupperware container. This thought, of course, led me to the Tupperware web site, and their search tool didn’t find anything under “wine”, but the results page did give the following helpful tip: “Use a comma to separate capitalized names or phrases. For example: Bill Clinton, Boris Yeltsin.” Ok, the Tupperware site is suggesting some peculiar search terms… or are they? This is no doubt evidence of the greatest conspiracy ever.

Ok, my referrer logs have the weirdest breakdowns. “I cut my own hair” was in the query report, but the word report listed it as :

cut
i
own
hair
my

I want to write like that. I need to pass all posts to the site via a search engine and then post the referrer results. Surely this can be done. Not right now of course, because I’m going to drink wine from a bottle and play Tony Hawk. It’s not what it sounds like, I just have some wine in the fridge and I don’t want to spill any on the carpet. Maybe that’s what it sounded like, it probably depends if you move your lips when you read.

Song of the second (and source of the title): The Golden Dogs, Bird Song

Work’s slow this week, but I’m still there, because I’m not about burning bridges, I’m about building them. No, really, it turns out it’s a design pattern. Who knew? The sad part is that nobody’s around this week to listen to my bridge jokes, and now that I’ve found a Japanese page explaining them, quite possibly with Engrish in the code (“Imprementor?”), well, it’s a sad start to the new year.

You know you’re happy to be back at work when you start to think about the weekly status meetings that review everything you and your team have done since the last meeting. Even better (better still?), the meetings are no longer scheduled, and they just happen whenever it’s geographically convenient. You know you’re in super fun land when conversations like this happen at the end of the session:

“Ok, anything new for the list?”

“Well, no, I’ve only been back for 3 days.”

“Don’t tell me you were here before New Year’s?”

“Uh, yeah… Did you think I just got back from vacation today?”

“Yeah!”

“So, since you talked to me about this stuff just before I left, you thought you were getting a status report of the last five hours???”

“Well, you did have new stuff for the report!”

This is the same person who spent three days compiling a group vacation schedule. She might actually know who Herman Thrust is, so I’ll just say, yeah, that’s what I’m saying.

Album of the moment (which needs to be flipped, how the hell could music revolutionize the world if people had to get off the couch every 30 minu–ah.): The Get Up Kids On a Wire

I sometimes ramble about the intricacies of keeping Herman Thrust separate from my day job persona, but a recent Google Search for my real name had my head scratching. There’s an entry in an online guestbook complimenting the site from someone with my name. It’s from a city that I was very likely in on the day that it was posted, and it’s for a fishing website. This is all probably a coincidence, but if I start carrying around a double headed coin with one side scratched out, please call the police.

Who knows what the key combination is that clears an input field on a form and makes you swear? I’ve hit it twice this week, and I think it’s near the lower left of the keyboard, but that’s all I know.

As I was saying…

AngelA got me some vegan shaving cream for Christmas. I’ve been dry shaving ever since I found out that most shaving creams contain pig fat, and it doesn’t bug me much, but I guess it was getting to AngelA, because hey, look what’s under the tree. I tried it, and it was pretty good, but the shaving capabilities are nothing compared to an unexpected feature: it makes me look like a robot. Metallic silver. If my camera didn’t suck so bad you’d get a picture, but it does, so you don’t. I think they use robot fat instead of the pig.

Speaking of things you do in the bathroom, has anyone else stepped into the shower wearing eyeglasses lately? I did it the other day, and my vision started to blur as the lenses fogged up, and I was like “what the hell?” until I realized what I’d done. I think it’s been years since that last happened. Next I’ll still be wearing my shirt or socks or something.

We’re heading to some New Year’s thing tonight, and I might try something new by not drinking. This has very little to do with the amount of beer that went into me last night, actually. It’s just something new, and I’m all about new things. Or something. Mostly I’m just writing this in case anyone who reads this is there and they can go “hey, I thought you weren’t drinking” and I can go “blargh!”, possibly on their shoes. It’ll be fun. I’ve really gotten into the spirit of New Year’s this year. If resolutions are going to mean anything, they need to make a massive difference in my life. I’ve been tunneling towards the bottom for weeks now with holiday treats and spirits, and it’s not unlike someone going on a shopping spree the night before Buy Nothing Day. Some careful observers might have thought that I was changing the plan with yesterday’s trip to the gym, but that was just so I’d hurt more today. I will be thankful for 2003, if only because the hurt will be less.

Happy New Year, y’all.

Today’s album: Brand New’s Your Favourte Weapon

As I mentioned earlier, most of the gifts AngelA and I got for each other this Christmas were things that we both could use. One of the items exchanged was a record player, or “turntable” for those of you who insist on saying “vinyl”. I’ve never had a record player before, but I now have a way to play the three records I bought in 1992 as part of some weird plan. I’m sitting back with the sounds of Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues, and it’s all good.

Earlier I played half of a George Carlin comedy album from 1975. It’s still very funny, but every once in awhile I get caught with a time zone issue. He was talking about radios, and how large radios show the full frequencies (600, 700 AM etc), but small radios just show 6, 7, 8… He was halfway through the material before I remembered that they didn’t have digital radios back then, and that became funnier than the joke for a bit.

I also saw Rock Star a few days ago, where Mark Wahlberg plays the lead singer in a “tribute band” who gets recruited to be the frontman for the band he’s covering. To tie this back to the last paragraph, why aren’t there any tribute comedians? The performances probably wouldn’t be as funny as the acts that they copy, but the whole idea would be at least a little amusing, or at least it might make musicians rethink covering songs.

Back from music to movies: just saw Die Hard 3: We’re Still Here on TV. As I’m a lousy reviewer (see previous reviews on this site such as “it was good”, “I liked this”, and the ever popular “this was really good”), I’ll just make two comments: 1) “edited for television” can make an action movie a little hard to follow, but it brings new phrases into my vocabulary such as “melon farmer”, and 2) After seeing the previews for Joe Millionaire, I’m really glad I’m cancelling cable in a week or so.

Well, I just had to flip the record (“vinyl”, sorry), which does make it a little less convenient than the 300 disc CD player that the turntable is sitting on, but I’m still suspecting the CD player of scratching all my CDs, so they’re still even. If nothing else, it’s another thing to collect and obsess over, and goodness knows I’m in need of more of those.

Music, as mentioned: All of Talking Heads’ Speaking in Tongues.

I think I’m going to change VP so that instead of user names, people will just have their funniest URL listed on the main page, so I don’t have to link to, say, Stellar’s profile, then her blog, and finally her Japanese Flash commercial that shows what marketing would be like if I ran the world.

Hey, didn’t I say I would be listing songs? Well anyway, right now it’s Radiohead’s Idioteque.

Some personals ads are more direct than others…

Things I have learned on my vacation:

1. This is my mom’s home page.
2. While setting the Airport to use dialup was mostly painless, getting a 5 year old network card to work in a 4 year old computer with a 7 year old operating system was not, and there will be no happy mingling of Macs and PCs in the home this season.
3. Sugar is tasty.
4. You can search all you want in Toronto, but if you drive three hours, you can find four Vanilla Ice CDs in the same store. I went with the live album, because I figured it would provide the best picture of the man. Last Christmas was spent reading his biography (Ice by Ice), so this is really just continuing the trend.
5. Things that make noise are the best presents, but if you’re going to give something that records voice memos, make sure you know how to erase your test messages before wrapping the present, or you risk having your girlfriend’s father ask what “mofo” means.
6. The Vans Rowley XLTs look great, but there’s no way they’ll have your size when they’re half price. This is for your protection.
7. I have two days to go.

Hope everyone’s having a good time wherever they are.