ich bin Zwanzig neun, der gute Schaumgummiringgeschmack

today is my birthday, and so far i have celebrated it with breakfast at Cora's (best breakfast place EVER by the way), a couple of cups of coffee, wonderful amazing birthday presents (cindy rules) and being unproductive at work.

and since i feel like being unproductive, i will do only what NEEDs to be done in order to make the work day worth attending, and then leave early.  i came in late, so why shouldn't i, eh?

sometimes it's nice to know that environmental activists eventually get their way - mcdonald's restaurants are now reducing the size of the opening on their McFlurry lids so that hedgehogs don't get their heads stuck inside ( yahoo odd news for the full story...).

speaking of which, did you hear about the waittress that got a ten thousand dollar tip?  my mistake when i was working in restaurants was that i always either washed dishes or was a cook, so i only got 5%.  i love that in reading the story the woman's having trouble trying to decide about wether to pay for an operation for her father or buy a jeep.  personally, i would never buy a jeep.

unless i had a mullett.

i will also use this birthday opportunity to remind everyone that i will be running 10 km (about 6.5 miles) in support of cancer research in the Terry Fox run next month, so sponsor me by clicking here.  no donation is too big or too small, and about 90% of each dollar donated goes directly into cancer research - there's very little administrative junk or overhead nonsense, just pure charity.

now the Reverend Horton Heat is telling me he's the baddest of the bad, so i should probably go back to being unproductive at work.

i need to know what kind of dog it was

from yahoo news:

"A woman ... crashed her car while giving her dog a driving lesson ... [authorities] did not say what kind of dog or vehicles were involved ..."

and this is why some people should just NEVER drive.  sometimes i think there should be a second written test issued.  you know how the current written test has questions that test your knowledge of the laws of the road and recognition of signs - there should be a test that has questions like:

"do you think it's a good idea for your dog to drive?"
"if you're eating an egg mcmuffin and putting on your lipstick while driving, is it a good idea to make a cell phone call?"
"if all four of your tires are completely bald (aka have no tread left), is it a good idea to drive in excess of the speed limit on a snowy day while passing dangerously close to mmat's new Toyota Yaris?"

i think that getting the right responses to questions like that would GREATLY reduce the number of retard accidents - not just in the GTA, but in the entire world.

and you all just remember where you saw that first eh.

smart can be such an ambiguous word

sometimes when you're trying to do something at work, and you think that you're going to try to be smart and experiment with some technique or something that you are sure will work - it almost never does.

so now i'm playing the repair game.  nothing on my computer seems to work properly right now so i'm going to have to spend a good chunk of the morning/early afternoon trying to figure out what the hell went wrong and how the hell am i going to fix it.

i've been reading Overheard in the Office a bit lately, and i'm beginning to wonder how much of it actually happens and how much of it is just recycled bad jokes that people pretend are real.  like this one about a guy who supposedly did some jail time and decides it's just fine to bring it up in a job-interview type position.  my mind keeps telling me that it's impossible for anyone to be that stupid.  but then again, people prove me wrong about that idea every day on my drive to work. 

like the guy in the beige SUV yesterday who tried really hard to drive through the back of my car, passed me with two wheels in my lane and promptly gave me the finger on his way past.  if there was a blog called "overheard in mmat's car" the entry for the afternoon would have read "what in the FUCK was that?!?!?!"

as i sat there in disbelief, trying to decide in my mind whether or not that actually happened, i watched it happen to four other cars before the SUV drove out of sight.  okay, so it DID actually happen and i'm not entirely insane.

well, maybe i am.  i do take my chances on the Don Valley Parkway pretty much every day.

jumpin on the google train

so, in my ongoing search to find the right RSS reader so's i can read my regular blog reads at work and at home i noticed t'other day that Google has a pretty decent reader y'all may want to check out.  it lets you label, tag, organize and share your feeds.  you can even get a code snippet to put your public feeds right on your website, which i thought was kind of nifty.  i'm gonna give it a try for a while.  i started using the Sage plugin for Firefox a while back which is easy to use, but the only downside is that there's no recognition betweeen what i've read at home and what i've read at work.  people have been recommending Bloglines and Blogrolling, but i'm a sucker for Google products because of their lack of obnoxious colours and flamboyant advertising.

at some point this weekend i managed to burn large parts of my tongue on something hot.  i don't actually remember doing it (maybe it was at the barbeque?) but now nothing tastes right.  my second attempt at drinking coffee this morning leads to the same "tastes like dirt" conclusion that i came to earlier today.

and no, i don't eat dirt.  how do i know what it tastes like then?  ummmm....

so how about that local sports team!

this morning i was stopped at a stop light while driving my car and the guy next to me was listening to Billy Ocean.

really REALLY loud.

some people have problems.

it was a mattress, you know

today, as with most days, i got into my car for the hour + drive to work.  as i was making my way down highway 427 i noticed something odd, rectangular and blue in the middle of the road.

a mattress.

being that mattresses can't keep up with the speed limit, i quickly changed lanes.  seriously, who drives a mattress to work?  sure it would be good on gas, but extraordinarily slow and inefficient.  i mean seriously, it has no wheels.

i'm guessing that despite the thousands of other drivers that flock down the 427 onto the Gardiner Expressway that i must be the only one with eyes and common sense so i decided to call the radio station to let them know so that the other people listening to traffic and weather on the 1's would be able to share in the joy that is a mattress on the highway.

i made the toll-free call to *680, was connected to a real person within moments and gladly reported that there was a blue mattress in the center of the 427 express lanes approaching the gardiner.

after hanging up, i quickly tuned into the radio station, noticing that it was now 6:41 am and waited patiently to hear what they had to say...

... 401 westbound sucks... 400 southbound sucks donkey ... northbound DVP blows goats for quarters ... then "and we've JUST gotten reports from a Traffic-Spotter that there's a mattress in the middle of the 427 express lanes approaching the Gardiner"

i'm SO important.  numerous people could be attempting to sleep soundly on that mattress, only to learn that it was in a highway.  the noise would have kept them up forever.

two years may in fact be the threshold

it's been almost exactly two years now since the big switch to gmail from hotmail.  i originally switched over because i got really tired of trying to log into my email and getting the message "This server is too busy."  i stayed on gmail for several reasons - the fact that at the time the storage space was 1 GB vs. 2 MB, the way it organizes conversations, the clean and simple interface and most of all - no junk mail.  it's been a rather lovely experience checking my email on a regular basis to find that there's been very little in the way of "enlarging my penis" or "82% off viagra" being sent as incredible offers to my inbox.

it seems though that after 2 solid years it has finally come around.  now i don't get a lot - maybe 3 or 4 messages a day, and all of them go straight to the Spam section, but there they are at last.  all of the offers for free software, reduced viagra and opportunities to have a lucrative business deal with someone who just can't seem to get their $20 million USD into a valid bank account unless i give them my information.  but considering that my old hotmail account gets about 100-150 messages a day, i don't think i'm ready to switch back.  not to mention that the new "Live" interface leaves much to be desired.  microsoft just can't seem to do enough to encourage me that their "Live" experience or their Windows Vista OS is going to cut it for me.  heck, the only reason i keep on with windows at all is because Mac OSX isn't compatible with the Intel hardware in my 4 year old PC.

are you in the mood for a good horror movie?  go out and rent (or buy) Silent Hill.  especially if you were a fan of the game at any point in your life.  the movie turned out just as freaky, creepy and brutal in its violence and imagry as the video game series.  the acting from some of the main characters could be easily classified as mediocre, but then again when was the last time you expected an Oscar winning (or any award nominations for that matter) performance from a horror movie?  in short - it's a fun movie to watch with the lights out.  sufficiently creepy and an ending that's not 100% hollywood (maybe about 80%, but that's not bad).

Tom & Jerry used to be cool, you know

parents that suck are part of the reason i can't watch good cartoons on television anymore.  seriously, suck it up and explain to your kid that smoking and chopping people's heads off with axes isn't an appropriate thing to do.  i figured it out when i was a kid.  so did many millions of others.  i think it had something to do with figuring out that i wasn't an axe-wielding cat chasing a maniacal mouse.

i remember watching cartoons when i was a kid and knowing quite well that frying pans, large wooden mallets, anvils and pianos were not appropriate instruments of destruction, although i'm sure the world would be a much funnier place if they were.  i learned from cartoons that it was alright to laugh at things that were represented as silly and not to take life too seriously.

THIS, however, is a HORRIBLE example to be displaying to children.  the same parents that will scream at the television studios to tone down the violence, smoking and unnecessary wise-cracks will rush out in droves to buy dolls for their elementary school children that teach them that it's alright to dress like a crack whore and then wonder why their children grow up to be assholes and pedophilia seems to be increasing in popularity (in case you wondered, i've never been a big fan of smoking or pedophiles). 

i've always believed strongly that you should be able to watch whatever on television, but the parents are responsible for teaching their child what is right and what is wrong.  so to the parents who complain about Tom and Jerry cartoons:  fuck off.  mind your child and leave my fucking cartoons alone.

i'm an animal communicator

i've discovered the fact that despite two perfectly functional sinks in my kitchen with an overly functional faucet (aka the faucet that has dripped almost continuously for 2 years despite numerous calls to my landlord) that i will most likely NOT wash the dishes by a means other than my dishwasher - even if i don't have dishwasher soap. i will actually wait two to three days until i have purchased this dishwasher soap, letting several loads of dishes pile up in the aforementioned sinks in the meantime.

i've also discovered that rather than pay $17 dollars for a real rubik's cube in a toy store, that i'd much rather pay $2 for two of them at the local Value Village.

i keep hoping that one of these times when i go there that i'm going to find some incredibly priced item that will gain me my own place on the Antiques Roadshow, but that never seems to happen. apart from the rubik's cubes, i have managed to score several good coffee mugs, a couple of shirts and an egg poacher. i bought a copy of Where in the World is Carmen San Diego once, but it didn't work on my unfortunately new computers.

earlier this evening i watched Broken Flowers. it seems to me that Bill Murray is doing a good job of redeeming himself after that little Garfield mistake. it was a very odd, but interesting film. a little slower paced than a traditional american film, but very enjoyable indeed. very well written and not particularly predictable. it's on Movie Network on Demand this week if you're thinking aboot watching.

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Sponsor me for the Terry Fox Run and help me reach my goal of $1000 for cancer research!

you know they have grape flavour too?

... and now for the mmat's new cellphone awards ...

first text message sent to mmat's new phone - cindy !
first phone call AND voicemail sent to mmat's new phone - the Original Gangsta!

i'm so glad that the weekend has come.  work hasn't been bad or anything, i just don't feel like working.  i've been itching to get out of the office all week this week.  i think it's the ridiculously good weather we've been having here.

i've convinced another person i know to buy a Toyota Yaris.  oddly, she ended up buying almost the exact same one I did (i got some extra features she didn't want).  she even got the same colour.

why should you buy one?  how about fuel efficiency.  my real world gas mileage averages just under 6 L per 100 km if i'm not using the A/C, and about 6.5 with the A/C (that's about 40 miles per gallon in american).  and that's REAL WORLD fuel economy.  done by checking the amount of gas i've put into the gar and dividing by the amount that i've driven between tanks.  very not bad.  i think i'd have to pay about 18 grand more for a hybrid to beat that kind of mileage.

and it's got loads of room.  it can comfortably sit 5 normal sized adults, and for the mafia readers - you can easily get two bodies in the trunk.  three or four if you chop them up and stuff them in garbage bags first.

and i can outrun just about any pre-2006 Honda Civic* on the road.

enough aboot my car.  so far all i have to talk aboot this morning other than that is poptarts though.

mmmm... poptarts.

i'm not sure why, but one of my coworkers bought a huge box of boxes of poptarts (i think they call them cases in the shipping industry) and has been offering them out to everyone like crazy.  so now everyone in the office is addicted to Frosted Chocolate Fudge poptarts.  and when the case runs out we'll probably all start twitching and shaking with sugary poptart withdrawl.

* i mean Honda Civic's that haven't been modified into race cars by fat guys who live in their parents' basements

6030 muthafucka!

after returning to my domicile yesterday evening, i noticed that again there was no UPS tag on my mailbox, indicating to me that my phone had not yet arrived.  I did some mental preparations for the upcoming angry customer service phone call i was about to make, and promptly made the call.

lo and behold, the customer service people were not only friendly, but they also advised me that my phone had in fact been shipped, they had the tracking number and it was at the UPS depot waiting patiently for me.

this morning, a brief detour on my way to work put into my possession one brand spanking new Nokia 6030.  this phone is not full of crazy features.  it has no built-in messenger application, no built in phone, iTunes or bluetooth.  it just works, sounds good and has a wonderful battery life (upwards of 12 days of standby time, 3+ hours of talk time).  it does have a built-in FM radio, but you need to buy headphones for that.  i don't really care about the FM radio though, i care mostly about the fact that i can talk with it and send text messages.

and now i can.

four + weeks of waiting, 5 angry customer service phone calls and some hostile rebate negotiations later and i'm connected to the world once again using todays fandangular wireless technology.

the really funny thing is it will probably be a few days before i even actually get a phone call, but when i get that call i will be answering it happily on my functional new phone.

this is a gang, and i'm in it

so i've been without a cell phone for about 10 days so far.  it's kind of bizarre just how dependant i've become on these little inconevenient pieces of technology.  you wouldn't think that i somehow spent the first 22 years of my life without one.  it's not that i make a lot of calls on my cell phone or anything, but the fact that i'm missing that connection to the rest of the world.  even though i have a brand new car (Toyota Yaris RULEZ), the thought of the car breaking down and leaving me stranded on the side of the highway without a means of communication still crosses into my mind.

the good thing is that *in theory* my new phone should arrive today or tomorrow.  of course, this was after some angry customer phone calls to my cell provider resulting in a couple of free months of service and a free phone.

speaking of which, the fresh-baked cookies i got at the grocery store the other day rule.  i loves me some cookies.

my city needs to stay nukular

for the last few days i've managed to re-addict myself to playing Sim City 3000.  though i've been tempted to upgrade to version 4, i've never quite felt the need.  i like the idea that i know enough about the game now to be able to get success using a variety of different methods - starting a farming town, going industrial, tourism based, whatever.  the most recent city i created i decided to steer away from Nuclear power for a while by going with coal.  coal is the cheapest, but also generates the most pollution.  now my city has some nasty acid rain clouds and the drinking water is polluted.  oh well, i like mutated sims better anyway.

yesterday i started the week with very little to do in the way of workload.  somehow by this afternoon i've managed to dig myself into a pretty hefty workload for a wide variety of places around the office - db work, support work, etc.  it seems to me i've somehow managed to get a sort of "jack of all trades" type reputation that makes everyone in the office think i know everything about everything.  let's just hope they think that at the next wage review eh?

i love mountain music...

the music from this has been stuck in my head for days

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Sponsor me for the Terry Fox Run and help me reach my goal of $1000 for cancer research!

shake and bake

today on my journey of self-discovery - well, actually there was no journey involved, just me sitting at my desk - i learned that the only thing more ridiculous than getting paged because someone else's server login attempt failed is getting paged because your own server login attempt login failed.  it was at this point that the mystery unraveled itself to reveal that i do not have access to the system for which i carry the blackberry.  brief conversations led me to understand that i would not be gaining access to this system which means i am now leading a blackberry-free lifestyle.

and did i mention that rice krispie squares rule the world?  oh, then i should have.  you see, when you have a box of rice krispies and start to thinking "man, i've got 9 boxes of cereal and only one of me.  i need to do something about this" then rice krispie squares are the only logical response to that dilemma.

not that there's anything wrong with having 9 boxes of cereal.  last time i visited my brother i think he had 9 boxes of cheerios, not to mention the other brands.

i've noticed that when you're in public places that people tend to gather together in a single place.  for example:  last night we went to the theatre to go see Ricky Bobby and were among the first ones to arrive.  within a few minutes, despite the theatre which seats an estimated 300 people being almost entirely empty, a group of idjits comes in and sits in the seats directly behind us.

and by the way, if you haven't seen Ricky Bobby yet you probably should.  i don't think it will get the Academy Award for best writing but it is laugh-out-loud funny.  i was more than happy to spend money at the theatre to see that one, and will likely shell out more cash when it comes out on DVD.  absolutely golden performances from Will Ferrell, John Reilly, Michael Clarke Duncan and the guy who played Commissioner Gordon in Batman.  i will not ruin any of the film for anyone who hasn't seen it, but i will say that one of the many moments at which i laughed out loud was finding out what Ricky Bobby's children's names were.  go ahead and see it.  it awesomes.

it's been a long day and only Kraft Dinner can calm my nerves

thanks to the goodness of advertising, i've learned that my favourite episode of South Park will be on the Comedy Network tonight - Terrence and Phillip in Not Without My Anus.  i remember the first time i saw it years ago, i was waiting patiently to find out who Cartman's dad was when the creators of South Park decided that they'd keep us all in suspense for yet another week by showing us the Terrence and Phillip special.  thirty minutes of canadian and fart jokes was enough to make me an instant fan.  the only unfortunate thing about the episode is that Canada no longer has two CFL teams called the RoughRiders (damn Ottawa and their loser fan base).

and i have Swiss Cheese crackers to snack on at work today.

i haven't been paged with anything of importance since i started carrying the blackberry yet, but i do have an extensive list of login failures in my blackberry's inbox.  apparantly every time someone tries to login to our database server, i get an email to tell me about that.  from what i can figure, it's to make sure people aren't trying login to compromise the system, but the only people who would even have access to login to the database are people who have access to log directly on to that server, so it's pretty much just a list of people who don't type their passwords in properly the first time.

i want my new phone dammit!

two weeks ago i ordered a new cell phone. my old P.O.S. (and i don't mean point of sale) phone has been teetering on the edge of failure for a couple of months now, so i put my call into fido and ordered a replacement. i was assured my phone would arrive in about 5 business days.

sooOOooo 5 business days later (last monday) i called up fido and said "yo, the phone ain't here yet" ('cept in more gooder words). apparantly, despite the fact that i ordered my phone - they had not. so a new order was placed and a new assurance that the new phone would arrive in about 5 business days.

yesterday wasn't exactly a business day in canada, but i called them again just to make sure. they stated that it was in fact not a business day by their standards so my phone would arrive tomorrow (which is today). today's call yielded the fact that not only had my phone not arrived (which it had not), but also that again it had NOT BEEN ORDERED. today a new order was put in with a note to send it express and that *in theory* it should be in my hands within 2-3 more business days.

needless to say an angry mmat is getting a free week of service (since my old cell phone did in fact die on sunday) and some more credit to be discussed at a later point in time. i think i'm going to argue with them until they refund me the full cost of the phone. in a way i'm kind of hoping that the phone won't get shipped again and i'll angrily argue with them until they send me the higher end model of phone because i feel like being a prick.

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Sponsor me for the Terry Fox Run and help me reach my goal of $1000 for cancer research!

what happens after 10 days of absence

can i get a hell yeah for holidays?

i love holidays. especially that last 10 day stretch i just had. nice, relaxing. got to spend lots of good time just doing whatever. no time restrictions, no deadlines, just holidays.

but now i'm at work, and work is busy. seems as though when you go on holidays that the amount of work you'll have to do when you get back is directly proportional to how much of a good time you had while vacationing.

and now i have to figure out how to use a blackberry. bollocks to that.

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Sponsor me for the Terry Fox Run and help me reach my goal of $1000 for cancer research!