who is this imposter Oscar, and why is he not making bologna?

i've never really been one to watch and/or enjoy the acadamy awards. it seems to me that for the longest time it was Billy Crystal or Whoopi Goldberg hosting, and i've never really found either one of them that funny. i mean, each of them have had their moments: Billy Crystal was decent in City Slickers, and it was really funny when Whoopi Goldberg ... um ... i'm sorry, i just can't seem to finish that sentence. nothing seems to really flow after that.

Buddy Cole (aka Scott Thompson) has some great things to say about the oscars though - point number 7 made me laugh out loud.

i suppose though i've never been one to spend a lot of effort watching movies that would be considered for the big awards. my dvd shelves at home are stocked full of cheesy horror films, cartoons and plenty of inappropriate humour. cuz that's what makes the world go round eh.

the penis nebula

more information aboot the penis nebula

it's 11am and my day's almost over

here i sit at job number two. job number one started at around 2 this morning and thankfully, job number two ends in a few hours.

but because my capacity for rational thought is dwindling, today i will spend time laughing at the news:

• for example, two clowns were shot at a circus. now i know it's somewhat morbid and disrespectful to point fun at other people dying, but you gotta at least think that the only better way for a clown to go is if the headline read "volkswagen beetle hits lamp post, 35 clowns died"
• or a thief that got stuck in the snow trying to escape from a burglary. the place he tried to rob: the building next to a police dog training facility. an f+ for planning, but a b- in doing stupid things.
• and finally, a town in New Jersey will be enforcing a time limit on barking dogs. perhaps if the dogs bark too long, the owner will be spayed or neutered?

i have to work in 6 hrs

what was it about the IT field that made me want to get involved with it? certainly couldn't have been the idea of waking up at 2 am on a sunday to test our application for the upcoming release. i think maybe someone must have forgotten to mention that type of thing when i first started. never really came up in the question and answer period i think. all of those "what do you like most" questions always get asked but regrettably i always seemed to forget "how's aboot keeping weird hours, do you do that?"

well, at least i'm not doing overnight maintenance at an out-of-the-way mall or something.

and this is a big hole.

do the mario!

i'm sure we all thought we could do this when we were five, but thanks to YouTube! someone proved they could do it in adulthood.

it means you use 50% of your brain power

today i witnessed the true definition of insanity. not even the pope on one of his alcohol and coffee fueled binges could stir up the kind of insanity i witnessed today



it was the 50% off everything sale at Value Village.

to mark the occasion, all of the stores opened an hour early, including my local store. shortly before eight o'clock this morning, we arrived and noticed that a line up of old ladies and pregnant bargain hunters was already forming in the cold morning air.

when the doors opened, the old people flooded in like a bucket of soaking wet kleenex. people were grabbing carts two and three at a time. sheer madness.

i always head to the junk section first - you know, the section with all the old coffee mugs, useless appliances, board games and clocks that nobody could ever want in their house, but many will be happy to purchase for 50% off. the above clock was one of the featured items - a bargain at any price, i'm sure. i was tempted to get it in order to grace the top of my computer at work, or perhaps to ward off the evil spells of the underpants gnomes.

but alas, i left it. surrounded by old ladies, i knew that grabbing hold of such a treasure would be depriving some unsuspecting child of a humiliating birthday present, and likely would result in my losing a limb. you know how seniors get - they hide razor blades to cut you under their dentures.

a comic-to-film actually going right?

i think i'd have to say that after some atrocious decisions in the Marvel Comics headquarters, that their movie making decisions seem to be getting things back on the right path. Iron Man certainly seems to be on the path to making a decent comic book based movie after making some solid casting decisions and avoiding actors who make too much money for stereotyping themselves.

i almost wonder if Marvel may try yet another attempt at reviving the Captain America franchise with some competent writers and actors once the Iron Man project is complete in order to combine these with Spider-man for a Civil War movie. it would be a pretty tough project to combine all of the story lines properly, and could likely be turned into a multi-movie franchise of its own. it would have to either have an enormous special effects budget, or be done in CG animation i think in order to completely encompass everything.

not so helpful

the captain decided he'd help me work today...

the mostest

i was in guelph today, and caught a glimpse of this here - quite possibly the tackiest lamp made in the history of the universe...

one fine day at the pet store

I thought this little fishy was kinda cute.

one fine afternoon on the 23rd floor

i stayed home today because i have a cold. as a result of my being sick for the first time in a couple of years, i tasked myself with eating this:



and this is what it looks like in real-time action:

what, are you stupid or somethin' boy?

this morning i was in a state of shock and awe shortly after logging into my computer at work. you see, i have been tasked with running several dozen extraordinarily mundane and time consuming reports. these reports require only time and patience to run, and require little to know intelligence.

which is exactly how i handled this situation this morning.

you see, since my coworker is on holidays, i am making use of her computer to take care of half of this workload in an effort to double my productivity. half of the reports will be stored on her computer. the other half, having been run on my computer, would be stored in a shared folder on my computer where I would be able to then copy these to her computer so the entire list could be sent.

running these reports in tandem carried on for much of the morning and afternoon yesterday to bring me roughly to the half-way point in my completion. this morning i found that all of the reports stored exclusively on my shared folder had been deleted. gone. no trace at all.

"fuck," i says as i starts to get mad. "time for a coffee break."

the acquisition of coffee and consumption of pop-tarts did not return the missing reports to my shared folder, so i emailed the IT guys thinking that it must have been something they did. "perhaps," i thought, "the sharing of folders is forbidden. perhaps this is some rule about which i am not aware."

files had disappeared mysteriously before, but they were music files and images copied from other folders - so no big deal about the loss of those. my email was polite, but with a very concerned tone asking if there was some policy in effect, and if my reports had fallen victim to its wrath.

about 5 minutes after sending the email i realized something. i checked the date on the files that still remained in the folder - all from the previous day at 7:15 pm. coincidence? a curious one if it were that, because i left the office at 2:30 in the afternoon.

you see, i created a backup application that takes all of my code files and documentation and puts them into a shared folder on my computer so that in my absence, anyone could easily have access to any of my work-related files. the backup job deletes all of the files in the shared folder and replaces them with the most up-to-date files.

what did i just say? deleteds ALL of the files in my SHARED folder?

i quickly recalled the email message i sent and replaced it with an apology citing my own stupidity. were it not for the existence of pop-tarts and coffee i probably could have gotten myself fired, but you know how pop-tarts give you that sudden jolt of common sense.

the morning during which mmat complains

the stretch of consecutive work days is drawing to an end. this weekend will consist of the first two days out of many that i will not be responsible for showing up to either of my jobs. this is a good thing.

i learned a valuable lesson in grocery shopping last night. never EVER trust that your grocery store will be proactive enough to verify that the expiry date on the products that you want to buy has not yet passed. last night's trip to the Dominion (where else can you go grocery shopping at 10:30 pm) resulted in a package of expired mini-donuts. expired by EIGHT DAYS. why didn't i notice this when i bought them? well, i s'pose i assumed that a grocery store would have enough common sense to periodically check the expiry dates of the products it sells, and remove the old and very stale donuts from its shelves.

once the pope bought a box of donuts at the grocery store that he thought was expired. the wrath and fury that followed was documented closely in the Hellraiser movie series. if there was one way to stay on the pope's good list, it would be to not mess with his coffee. if there were two ways to stay on the pope's good list, that second way would to serve only the freshest donuts. but in reality - the only person who could possibly be on the pope's good list is Chuck Norris.

after the pope's stale-donut fueled massacre, he noticed after the fact that he had actually picked up a bag of multi-grain bagels. he rejoiced and invented both christmas and the mandarin buffet on the same day.

did anyone see tron?

i remember when i was a kid thinking "those motorcycle things that make the walls are SO awesome, i can't wait until i get zapped into a video game so i can drive them."

i think i was pretty convinced that by the time i reached thirty they'd have these out on the road. maybe they'd be police cycles or something. it'd be pretty handy to have in a high speed chase...

"just send the blue bike up front to cut him off - but make sure he turns left because we're all gonna turn right!"

the best we seem to be able to do though is all-wheel drive. and not even on motorcycles. i guess nintendo's made the first real step into getting people to be able to be zapped into the computer grid with the Wii.

i bet the Wii's had a pretty hard impact on the bowling industry you know. there weren't too many people out there who would have been willing to play a bowling video game before this system came out, but now it seems everyone i know who has one of these consoles is nuts about the bowling game. maybe that's what gamers really wanted - a good bowling game. it wasn't first-person shooters and driving simulations - bowling would have done the trick all along and nobody knew.