(1:20)
I was out with some friends last night and one of them was a student of East Asian culture. We got to talking about all the crazy advanced civilization stuff going on in Japan about a thousand years ago, and it struck me that the only reason we know any of this is because they told us it was so. Isn’t it possible that as soon as the first traders from another country came calling the Japanese got together and formed a plan? “Yeah, hi, you should have been here last week. 100 story buildings, nuclear power, you name it, but yeah, big lizard, we call him Godzilla, he shows up every once in awhile, and, um, that’s why the huts. But don’t mess with us, we’re much more advanced than you are.”

We need to form a similar plan for the day the UFOs land. Yeah, they’ll have flying saucers, but they’ll be no match for our… COLD FUSION POWERED SALT AND PEPPER SHAKERS! They’re just not here right now. Terrorists. Zombie terrorists. Yeah, we could make more shakers, but then the zombie terrorists will have won. You understand. We’ve got even better stuff coming out soon anyway. So don’t mess with us. We’re very advanced.

Argh, I’m so behind on stuff… I’m starting to come to terms with it though, and sadly, I’m coming to the conclusion that I’m just getting old. I went to see a doctor yesterday and he didn’t just suggest that at my age everything starts to go downhill, he actually said it.

The problem of the day was my legs, and more specifically the fact that I can’t run for more than a week (with rest periods, not for a whole week at a time) without getting hurt. I have answers now. I am a supinator. I have medial tibial stress syndrome. I have a big Visa bill that I don’t know if my insurance will cover. Them big words ain’t cheap. Luckily, we didn’t get to talking about how my opposable thumbs are opposing me.

On the bright side, I get to try neat gadgets. Orthapedic inserts. Ultrasound (they’re tired of hearing the “but I’m not pregnant” joke). Hell, with a physiotherapist, I’ve got the start of an entourage. I’ve got new exercises and best of all, an excuse to get out of work. “Sorry boss, I’ve got therapy today”. I wish I was going mad instead of lame. With a deteriorating body, you get to watch it all happen. With a deteriorating mind, I figure I could make my own fun for a while, and I probably wouldn’t notice the decline as much. Ah well.

The design-o-thon went ok yesterday, but it was a late night followed by an early morning, so I was a bit foggy. I saw someone I knew as I went to work this morning. We’re both men, so we don’t know how to wave. I nodded, and he did that anti-nod where you raise your chin. Mathematically, did the two greetings cancel each other out? A few minutes later I got on the elevator and pressed the wrong button. Before I could resort to plan B and just get off on that floor like it was my plan all along, I’d hit the proper button. Stupid brain! Did anyone see me? Could I just look around when we got to the wrong floor, looking like I’m searching for the dumbass who pressed the button but didn’t get off? It turned out to be a non-issue: someone else got off there. He didn’t have to press the button. He owes me.

Morning elevator confusion was rampant all around this morning. Someone asked if our car was going up. We were on the ground floor (there is no basement). I didn’t get to chuckle until I’d been cleared of wrongdoing in the button incident. Heh heh heh. Ahhh.

To any vegans in the Grand Theft Auto: did’ja know there’s vegan soft serve in Yorkville? Did’ja? Now you do. I can’t believe I missed the headache. So good.

This morning we were discussing the fact that people in my department only seem to take vacation days to catch up on our day to day life stuff. Sure enough, by the end of the day I’m booking tomorrow off to get some stuff done. This kinda sucks, because I have a doctor’s appointment in the morning, which I would normally just get to take off for free, but now it’s on my vacation day. Anyway, when I’m not getting my legs checked out I will be engaging in the time honoured tradition of the last minute crunch. AngelA and I need to pretend we’re part of a massive design team that’s been working for months on merchandise planning for the TVA Food Fair. I use “pretend” loosely, because of course there are tens, no hundreds of people on the team, and we’ve been working for months (I never know who will be reading…) on the many incredible styles and products. No matter, the end result will of course be speechless amazement on behalf of the purchasing folks, I have no doubt of it. This will be the springboard to a new business, wherein we will focus on looking like a big company with padded schedules that will in fact fund our drinking junkets. I think it becomes a junket when you wear a fez. Experience is truly the best teacher.

In other news, did I mention that I’m seeing a doctor tomorrow? Yes I did. It’s not a rash, that’s all I’m saying. Someday I’m going to get a tattoo of a rash, but I’ve probably already used that joke.

Oh, I forgot to include this in an email to someone tonight, so in the event that you’re reading: last night I dreamt that I was going to see a concert in your basement. You were the star, but you spent most of the time tuning your guitar. While waiting I spoke at length with your sister (whose existance is as tentative as the brown and yellow couch she was sitting on), and in the course of the small talk I realized that I had promised to rent a room several months earlier, but I never showed up. I still wanted the room, but it was a bit awkward, and I was starting to wonder how many, if any, of the people in the basement knew that I had booked a room and never payed or showed. I don’t know how it turned out, because I left the concert soon after to buy Mac stuff. Just thought you should know, in case you were dreaming of tuning a guitar that in all likelihood you don’t know how to play.

AngelA’s out shooting people tonight. She’s a photographer, so I give her the benefit of the doubt, but you never know what crazy turns an “art project” might take. I’m just assuming that she’s shooting with a camera, and by doing so I might be making an ass out of u and ming, as the saying goes. What follows is an account of “how I spent my evening of illusory freedom”.

But wait! Is it wrong to use my website to avoid talking to my girlfriend? I’m not avoiding talking to her, honest! Still, she’s bound to question things a bit when she asks me how my night was and I mutter something about “check the site; it’s all properly documented”. I pay attention, I am attentive, I attend to things, it’s true, it’s verifiable, provable, known to the world, unquestioned. It’s all good, I’m just passing the time until she comes home, is all. Would it be better if I joined a game of pick-up volleyball? Street volleyball? Aussie rules volleyball? I think not. It’s all ok.

Further caution! What if that “shoot” was altogether more sinister than I first thought? What if she arrives home, panting, gasping, “when they come, remember – I was here the whole time”. This entry wouldn’t help things. The alibi’s all but blown. Of course, there’s the pseudonym thing, and the lack of an archive means the whole judicial process would have to take place in 10 days or less. It’s all ok.

So, how I spent my evening, or at least, the important bits.

I consumed alcohol. Duh.

To be more accurate, I’ve just started on a glass of wine, so my horrible grammatical structures and elongated words are just there for effect. I’m just writing this way in an effort to move away from 4 years of lab reports worded in the passive voice. “The alcohol was consumed” and whatnot. Humour me.

See, I just discovered that I have a case of Merlot in my closet. I knew there was a case of wine in there, I just didn’t know what it was. I’m a bit embarrassed about it actually. Merlot strikes me as a really fake wine. It was the first kind of wine that I learned the name of, and I don’t drink enough wine to recognize the different kinds by taste, so it just became the wine I ask for to sound like I know something about wine. “Burgundy”? Duh, that’s a step above asking for “red” if you ask me. “Shiraz”, now that’s a name for a wine. The trouble with shiraz is that by the end of the night it becomes “Shazam”, and your cover’s blown. “Merlot” gets you through the night without looking too dumb.

Of course, I’m drinking alone, so I don’t know who I’m trying to fool exactly. It’s just as well, because the glass is large enough to accommodate several small fish, if one were the type to keep fish in a wine glass, which I am not. The glasses were part of a housewarming gift for the housewarming party that I never had, so one day the box was simply thrust upon me with a grunt. I felt pretty bad about it after opening the box, because with glasses this big you know it’d have been a good party. There could have been llamas pissing on the carpet and it wouldn’t really have mattered.

I really don’t drink that much anymore. I’ve past the point where the now-rare-but-once-common work-party-with-free-drinks was considered a good thing. Free drinks don’t really exist. Plus, I get up at 6 am, and time’s one of those units where there isn’t a metric equivalent, so when I say 6 am you know it’s too early to get up regularly and still drink a whole lot the night before. Some people do it I guess, but they’re probably not as tall as I am. I’m not obscenely tall, by the way. I still buy pants off the rack and stuff. I’m just saying, is all.

So what else did I do tonight? I got a haircut. I once dated a girl who went to those expensive stylist places to get her hair cut. I didn’t really understand the concept, but they’d bring me a coffee and a paper while I was waiting, so it was ok. I don’t go to places like that for my hair – it’s not like I can drink the coffee and read the paper while my own hair is getting cut, so what’s the point? A consistent hairstyle would be one benefit I guess, but my hair’s typically marginal, so each haircut is like buying a lottery ticket for me. It’s different every time, but sometimes it’s like I win, like, 10 bucks. Today wasn’t one of those times. I go to one of those places where you wait your turn and you get whoever’s available. Some people are very good, and sometimes I’ll luck out and have them cut my hair 3 or 4 times in a row. Today was someone new, and I could tell pretty quickly that there would be no beauty created today. Oh well, I own gel. Copious amounts of gel.

The last time I went to buy gel I was shocked to see that the store was out of my brand. I had to walk three whole blocks to the next store, and by then I was in a panic that my gel had been discontinued and I’d have to pick a new container style and colour, so I bought as many as I could. It’s not like it goes bad. It turns out that AngelA had been shopping earlier in the day, and she had bought all the gel from the first store for me. We don’t have to go gel shopping for a while. At least, not for three or four more bad haircuts.

I just poured another half glass. I’m not drinking the whole bottle tonight, but the past two bottles I’ve started-but-not-finished ended up getting poured down the sink, because I never got back to them. Like I said, I don’t drink very often. My goal is to leave enough in the bottle to have a nice big glass with a meal in the near future. It’s a gift to my future self. Time travel in a very small way.

Ok, I’m back. I just posted the evening porn. I swear, if I ever win 304 billion dollars, it’ll become the Evening Porn (yep, capitalized!) and it’ll be delivered to everyone’s doorstep, whether they like it or not. I’ve considered doing a random direct mailing of some kind. I wouldn’t start out with vegan stuff. That would wait until I’d gotten the technique down. Sweet crap, I was just making up a direct mail campaign for a service that doesn’t exist, and it was getting scary, and then it started to turn into a business plan. My brain is trying to subvert me. Still, I deleted the plan. Was I trying to stop the seed from planting in someone’s mind and becoming reality, or was I just protecting my newfound intellectual property? I worry sometimes.

Yeah, the trip. AngelA and I went on a mad 36 hour tour of Eastern Ontario, breaking the laws of, well, law as merrily as we pleased. We thought that the Belleville Waterfront Festival would be a rollicking good time, especially since they boasted an ethnic food festival, and hey, we vegans are wacky about the ethnic food. I’ve got to admit, I was a bit skeptical about the deal, because I used to live in Belleville, and I don’t remember much ethnicity going on. Maybe they rent some culture each year, I don’t know. Someday I’ll write stories of the great cultural diversity of my childhood, but not today, because I am writing non-fiction.

Yeah, ethnic festival, lots o’ booths, yeeha, um, ok. Greasy samosas. From Bangladesh, apparently. That was it. The rest of the show was dedicated to uniting people from many lands through a common consumption of animal products. Very sad. On the bright side, the beer selection included Hoegaarden. Alas, I did not partake, as I knew I’d need my wits about me when the cops decided I was driving like a person who does not in fact know how to drive but does anyway.

I just took a break to bid on something on eBay. I just go in, look for something cheap and bid a few bucks. Usually I get outbid, so it’s totally safe, and there’s always the off chance that I’ll actually get something fun. I wish I could do this in stores. I could just walk in and announce loudly, “I’ll give you three American dollars for that gold hat”, and then either someone would say “I’ll pay five American dollars!” and I’d walk away, or I’d get a gold hat! Then when I went to the mall, I’d be known as they guy who got the gold hat for three American dollars. This time it wasn’t a gold hat, but it was a signed Nordiques puck, because I like the Nordiques. The bidding has soared to $3.25, so I had to withdraw and bid instead on something else, which I can’t tell you about because I’m the number one bidder! Number one! Nobody’s taking my gold hat from me!

Reviewing this entry, it’s become clear that I’m not particularly adept at the art of the segue. I thought that separate paragraphs would help matters, but now I’m thinking one big blob of text, perhaps with the columns set to about 3.8 pixels. I’m not too worried about any of this; it’ll all be fixed when we release the director’s cut.

Is it wrong to drive a (rented) PT Criuser listening to Propagandhi? I figure it’s ok as long as you drive as poorly as I did. I drove on a pedestrian trail, I drove the wrong way on a one way, and I drove through a park. Hey, I saw no “keep off the grass” sign. It was great fun.

I seem to attract busy traffic patterns. It’s my turn to drive, I hit the on ramp, get up to speed to merge with the flow, and all that happens just in time for me to hit the brakes and coast at 10-15 for a while. Even when things are flowing ok, I find ways to entertain myself. I actually tried to maintain a safe following distance. Thanks to some painted symbols on the road, I found out that a safe distance is something like 5 or 6 car lengths, which means you’re creating a playground for people who drive by their instruments. You know, the people who figure if they’re in their car, they’re doing 140, regardless of weather, traffic, and possibly even hemmorhoids. Anyway, I put the alpha instinct aside, and if someone invaded that wondrous personal space in front of me, I just made a new one. The interesting part? The car behind me started to do the same thing. I don’t know if my fantastic driving skills caused inspiration and hope to emit from the vehicle, or if the poor fool following me was just scared I’d hit the brakes again. Speaking of which, I used to ride with someone who would lock his brakes if he felt someone was too close to his rear bumper. Much fun.

Back to the show, I got to a point of stop and go where I started driving like a drummer, if that drummer was that guy from Def Leppard, only instead of losing his arm he lost a leg and had to play the bass drum and that cymbal thing that has a pedal, so he’d have two pedals but just one leg. Yeah, I drove just like that guy who doesn’t exist. That was me. I’d drive according to whatever song was playing. It became clear after some time that I am still rhythm impaired. I don’t know what I’d do if I had to win a battle of the bands or a car race to stay alive. With any luck I’d wake up before the start of either event and say “wow, what a crappy dream”.

Are all of these game shows like Survivor and Dog Eat Dog (haven’t seen either) and whatever just the new style of American Gladiator? Instead of celebrating physical ability we’ve just gone to a “mental” (choose the context) game where people at home can maybe identify with the contestants a bit more. Next up we’ll have something even more identifiable like “who can go longest without showering” or, crap, I don’t even know, but I bet whatever I write has either been done or will be soon. Actually, I think the showering thing was a MASH episode. What if all future game shows are just based on MASH? They could perform surgery on each other. “Bob, to stay in this round, you have to let Sherrie remove your appendix”. Or something.

Tomorrow I’ll write something about the weekend, both because I haven’t actually talked about the weekend except for the journey part (which I hear is the reward), and because I don’t want to make up some story about something fun. Tomorrow will most likely not be fun, what with the whole “hey, thought you were taking today off” “yeah, well, bite me” conversations I look forward to. By morning I’ll find a way to make a game out of it. A game, mind you, not a game show. Co-workers, your appendices are safe. If you still have them.

Ok, at long last, I have seen Evil Dead. I kept waiting for weird hand things and bubblegum comments, but I guess the technology of the day was limited to, say, horny trees. Great fun.

I read a Steve Jobs interview a few years back when he commented on the notion that TV treats people like idiots. He said that was wrong – they’re giving us exactly what we’re asking for. With that in mind, should I even care anymore about stupid marketing?

“Your over-confidence is your weakness”
“Your faith in your pants is yours”

(9:35)
I didn’t get around to registering for Comdex. oh well.

I didn’t have a fancy videogame system when I was a kid, and sure, I had to make my own fun, but to the best of my recollection, that fun never included such games as “getting hit in the groin with a lemon”. Judging from a conversation I had last night, it’s all the rage these days. I don’t know whether to feel old or lucky. Still, some credit where credit is due, that’s gonna make for a great cranky old person story: “we didn’t have 3D holographic whatzit-o-trons in our day, all we could do for fun was hit each other in the groin with a lemon”. I’m told the parties involved in this new sport are investigating the possibilities of limes now.

Incidentally, I haven’t tried any of the results from the Google search “hit in the groin with a lemon, and I don’t recommend you do either. It’s an interesting assortment though.

(19:17)
David Hasselhoff has gone into rehab at Betty Ford for alcoholism. How this affects the production of Super Knight Rider 3000, I cannot say. The title alone evokes feelings of bad video game franchise, doesn’t it? Speaking of which, those feelings got me to Googling, and check this out… My PS2 is about to become more than a DVD player once again.

(8:18)
Am I still allowed to call myself Canadian? Molson owns the trademark for Canadian, which supposedly only applies to “brewed alcoholic beverages”, but they’re trying (fairly successfully, so far) to yank the Canadian.biz domain away from some guy. “Once you get a trademark so universally known and associated with your company and your product, you have a certain responsibility to take action and clear up any confusion that exists between your brand name and someone else’s brand name“. Anyone in favour of banning brand names that can be found in the dictionary? We’d better do this quickly before, say, GM decides to wipe out the eagle population to reduce confusion.

Ok, copyright issues are on my mind. Specifically, exactly what rights do I have when I purchase a software product? I checked out Adobe’s 10 facts abut piracy, and it’s confusing stuff! Rule two is that you can’t burn a copy onto a CD, but rule three says that you can’t use a backup copy unless the original is destroyed, which is tricky, since you couldn’t make the backup in the first place. I’ve got this vision of lawyers piled upon lawyers, and they’re all gnawing on legs, but they don’t even know if it’s their own legs. It’s just like that.

The question that started all of this was whether or not it was legal for me to load software on two machines if I’m the only one who would be using it, even if there’s only one license. Taking it further, I was wondering if it was legal to do this if I only ran a single instance of the software at any time. Taking it further than that, I wondered if I had to uninstall and reinstall the software every time I wanted to stare at a different wall. Taking it further than that, I wondered if I really had to uninstall the software, because according to Heisenberg or Schroedinger or someone if I don’t access the software, there’s a 50% chance it’s not really there. Taking it further than that, I wanted to see if I could get called into court just so I could spend days deriving physics formulas from my not so distant youth. Nothing spurs an education like a skull crushing lawsuit, I always say.

Incidentally, you’re all granted a license to read this, print it out, and tape it to your boss’ back when he/she’s not looking.

In case you missed the comment a few posts ago, congratulations to Joseph for figuring out the secret puzzle letters. In case anyone else figured it out but was too polite to say so, congratulations to you too.

Why do credit card companies ever worry about how much things cost? They could have the hugest advertising campaigns and make their cards out of real gold, it’s not like they have to pay cash for anything. Then they could do that trick where they pay the balance of one card with another card, but it’d never stop, because they could just keep making new cards. Apparently, this is why I’m not a vice president, or possibly why I’m bitter about missing the dot com boat. You choose.