why do i do this to myself?

yesterday i thought "hey, i haven't been to my local bike shop* in a while. i should totally go check it out"

why do i keep doing this to myself? i have no idea. it's like going to a candy store and having no money. they had one of the bikes that i've drooled over in the past marked down to just $1100. when this bike was new i think it was in the area of $1500-$1700, but thanks to it being a previous-year model and the devalued american dollar, i get a gooder price.

even though right now i should NOT be spending a thousand dollars on anything but my credit card.

the sales guys, knowing that i'm a regular and buy all my goodies there, said to me that i could put it on layaway if i wanted to and pay off chunks at a time. i'll have to thinks aboot it i says. damn, would be nice though. tons of their other stuff was marked down too. i asked about why and they told me that when they originally priced stuff, they were going off the msrp, but because the dollar is so high they can knock it down some more. lucky me.

maybe if the weather gets to be less sticky, i'll head out for some test riding.

and don't forget to hop on your bike next week instead of drive. and tell me aboot it. i haven't determined what the prize will be for any of the categories. maybe the winner will be allowed to feed my frog his crickets. or maybe it'll be awesomer. we'll see.


* this is not the shop that i frequent while at work, but the shop where i actually buy stuff

no iPhone for me

i'm glad i didn't stand in line for hours, or days, or months even.

 

or even a few minutes.

 

i just got off the phone with Fido, my cell phone provider, because i wanted to buy an iPhone.  unfortunately because i renewed my contract last year i am NOT eligible for renewal at this point, so i'll have to wait until 2009 if i want one.  fuckin fuckers.

 

on a brighter note, there are at least two people in my office singing brutally butchered versions of songs that i enjoy from their original artists.

 

in the meantime, make sure you join me in my challenge.  Hänni's taking part, and if she's taking part then everyone else should too.  i'm giving up on my car for the week and doing everything by bicycle that week.  i figure it'll save me about $30-$40 in gas based on the cost at the pump this morning.

does anyone out there collect hockey cards?

hockey or baseball for that matter, but mostly hockey and mostly from the 80's and early 90's. what i've realized over the last couple of years is that i have a pile of debt that i need to pay off, and although the having 2 jobs thing does help with the bills, it hasn't exactly alleviated all of the burden of my debt.

what i aim to do is start selling my hockey and baseball card collection. i do have lots of valuable collector's items, but probably not anything in excess of a couple hundred dollars each. most of the stuff is in mint or near-mint condition and although i'm not going to go to the extent of having them professionally graded i will provide high-resolution scans so that you can see the true condition of what you'd be buying.

i tried pitching this to the blogging world once before, but nobody seemed to catch on at the time. spread the word to sports collectors all around. please.

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Visit my sponsorship page to see my progress!!

bamboo wednesday! part 21! and a Pontiac Grand Prix review!

although i do have a picture from what should have been last week's bamboo wednesday post, i uploaded it to my laptop rather than my work PC, which is where it's waiting right now.


i've been on holidays for the better part of the last week. thanks to Dalton McGuinty, many ontario residents got to have a holiday on monday, so i extended that holiday all the way to wednesday the week before. why not eh?

i rented a car to go on a road trip this past weekend, and inspired by Martini's review of his Acura CSX loaner, here's my review of the Pontiac Grand Prix that i rented.

to start off, the car was much larger than anything i've driven in recent years. and although a larger car does not necessarily make a more comfortable car, it certainly seemed to help in the case of the Grand Prix.

it took me a few minutes to figure out how to adjust the seat settings. the driver's seat is all automatic and mechanical, a luxury that i am most definitely not used to. other interesting luxury features were the inclusion of steering wheel mounted audio controls, cruise control, headlights that would automatically turn on based on how light or dark it is outside and a stereo whose volume automatically adjusts based on how fast the car is driving.

and fast i drove. the 200 hp 3.8 liter v6 engine made for some quick and responsive acceleration. hopping from 110 km/h to 150 km/h to pass old ladies on the highway was no problem at all.

although the volume and sound quality from the 6 speaker CD stereo were quite admirable, i was disappointed by the fact that an MP3 CD player or auxiliary audio jack (for my iPod) were not included).

fuel consumption was mediocre at best though. although i didn't track the exact amount of mileage, i would estimate that i drove in the area of about 750 km and spent $67 in gas at $1.05 per liter, a guestimate of about 11-12 liters per 100 km. with a Toyota Yaris as my regular car, i think i'm a little spoiled since even on the worst of days it barely breaks past 7.5 liters per 100 km (with the air conditioner running). from what i've been told, my gas consumption compared to other similarly sized cars is on par.

my main complaint other than the stereo was that actually entering the car seemed a little cramped. once you were sitting in the car, there was ample space, but it seemed that actually getting into the car could present an issue to someone with back or knee problems. all in all, it was a fun car to drive, give one a try.

more details to follow on what actually happened on my holiday later.

your windows, they cannot have handles

technically i don't write code. i type it.

apparently there's a problem with putting handles on windows. just in case you wanted to know.

bamboo wednesday! part 5!

a little bit more growth on the bamboo front, but more crappy RAZR pictures. One of these days i'll bring a real camera to take pictures, but you'll have to look at camera phone pictures instead.

and what's the deal with Globalscape shutting down CuteHTML? and how come nobody told me? now i have to download the whole CuteFTP package to get their html editor. bugger. now i'm gonna have to use notepad.

what to do when your conferene call gets cancelled

i originally had a conference call scheduled for this morning with one of our high-maintenance clients, but that got cancelled. i'm glad too because scheduled half-hour meetings with these people always turn into hour-and-a-half meetings that drive me nuts.

so in lieu of working on something important, i offer the public the following time-wasting items:

• a family caught a burglar in their home and force him to clean up the mess at gunpoint
• a guy created an Optimus Prime transformers Halloween costume with supplies he got from the local hardware store that actually looks like Optimus Prime and not just one of those cardbord "i'm a transformer" crap costumes.
• next year should be good for comic book movies. looks like we'll be getting Wolverine, Iron Man (let's hope they get Black Sabbath back together for the title track eh?), and possibly even Thor.
• Guitar Hero III is coming out this month.
• generally most rabbits do not approve of your actions. disapproving rabbits has the facts.
  

when you work two jobs, your time is not your own

yesterday my douchebag landlord finally returned my call to fix the dryer.

oh, did i mention that i also called her on monday, then again on thursday this week before i got the call back from her? oh, i s'pose not. i even stated on my last voicemail to her that if she wasn't going to call me back that i'd call someone else. i think she remembers the last time i made that threat because her call came later that afternoon. it wouldn't be the first time i've had to call her boss and ask if there was a different landlord i could deal with. three weeks and three phone calls to get one problem addressed. thankfully i'll be moving out of this building in november to a bigger and better place.

in somewhat less annoying news... apparently god has responded to the guy that is trying to sue him somewhere in the states - Yahoo news for that one eh.

also this weekend i'll be in the Kitchener and Waterloo area attending the Stitch n' Kitsch show. it's a great collection of artsy and crafty people who make and sell some really cool things. the last time i went i scored some kick ass hand made coffee mugs and a hand made notebook.

oh yeah, i mentioned before that i was getting rid of windows on my home computer, using Ubuntu Linux instead. my target is to find the easiest method for the average home user to be able to do this and still undertake certain tasks so i'm chronicling my dorky adventure here. essentially the reason for doing this is that 1) i don't feel like paying for the next version of windows and 2) even if i did want to pay for it, my computer's too old to run it. have a look at the the dork-osity if you dare.

no really, it was the best i could do

being that it's been weeks since i called my douchebag landlord to fix my sink, i've decided that if she can't be bothered to call me back, i can't be bothered to care. it's been a couple of days since i emptied the bucket that's catching the leaking water from my kitchen sink and i expect it could be to the point of overflowing. good, let the neighbours call the condo's board of directors again. there's nothing that i can do about the sweaty ass crack that is my landlord. i suppose in theory i could fix the sink myself, but i'd much prefer to be an asshole here.

today i have my performance review at job number one. it will be the first time in ... shit, i don't even know how long... that i've had a performance review. and being that i report directly to the CEO of my company, i have absolutely no knowledge of his expectations of me. if it wasn't for the fact that my job is so easy to do and i KNOW that i do it well, i might almost be worried.

as easy as job number one is, it's been oddly busy for the last couple of weeks. i've noticed that my goal of doing nothing and getting paid for it seems to be in the "not happening" stages - everybody wants a piece of me lately. just can't get enough mundane reports i suppose.

at my home, i've been taking some baby steps in switching my home computer from running Windows XP to running Ubuntu Linux as my home operating system. a friend of mine told me that i should create a blog to tell the world about my story, so i am going to do that. just not here in the land of welfare. i'll post some links for anyone who considers themselves dorky.. er.. curious enough about it. so far, things are moving along pretty well.

stupid sunny weather on stupid sunday

it's a beautiful day outside for a bike ride. i'm stuck at the office working today though. at least it's one of those lazy days at job number 2 where i don't actually have to do much of anything. maybe it'll give me a chance to finish off my book.

i've been mucking around with various ideas for my new untastic website, but stumbled across a minor issue with my computer at home - FTP doesn't seem to work. i know, that sounds like your generic end-user type complaint and I should know better than that, but how is it that not a single FTP client works on my computer. i've set up exceptions in the windows firewall settings - not to mention the fact that the firewall is actually OFF. the only way I can upload files via FTP is through the windows command-line FTP client, and that is hit and miss at best. i've been debating making the switch from Windows to Ubuntu as a permanent desktop replacement, but have been having trouble coming up with a suitable iTunes replacement. i've been told that Amarok is a good alternative but i'm not 100% sure if it would work on the Gnome interface (default for Ubuntu) or if i'd have to use the KDE interface which is totally lame.

sorry, that got a little bit dorky there didn't it.

the temptation to buy a Mac Book Pro is overwhelming. the idea of having a computer that just plain works AND looks cool too is very tempting. the $3000 price tag, however, is not.

the great shoe hunt part two

so who'd a thunk that the shoe hunt would have ended as quickly as it did? I'd have to say that it's been many years since i've been able to decide within two days to buy a pair of shoes. has it even ever happened? or was the last time something similar to that occurred when my ma bought shoes for me last.

i managed to score a pair of Nike shoes and a pair of Vans. both are skate-board style shoes and oddly both are size 13's. i was certain that i was going to need 14's this time around, but i lucked out.

on a somewhat less awesome note, my Motorola V3 RAZR phone battery seems to be sucking donkey more and more every day. I charged the battery first thing monday morning, and between monday morning and yesterday afternoon had logged exactly 1 minute and 1 second of call time, requiring me to charge it yesterday afternoon. i noticed this morning that after 9 more minutes of call time between yesterday's charge and noticed the battery is currently at 2/3 capacity. this is pretty much the deciding factor in that i will never again buy another Motorola product. now i'm pretty much trying to decide if i'm going to get a different phone directly from Fido or if i should just get an unlocked phone from Ebay. the Nokia 5300 seems pretty cool.

daylight butthole time

working on the day of the time change always sucks. i hate when the alarm goes off in the morning and you have to sit there in that tired, dazed just-woke-up state and try to do the math to figure out if you should have got up an hour ago or if you can sleep in for another hour.

<>

or in my case, try to decide if i had already set the clock so that it would go off at the right time last night.

< /nerd >

sometimes i love the news, and other times i hate it. most news agencies let out a major spoiler in the comic world in the last few days (don't worry, if there are any comic fans reading this, i won't spoil it for you yet). it's kind of like if the news said "yeah, harry potter dies in this book" the day it was released. fuckers. though i do think Nick Fury's going to get Bucky to fill in coming soon, but that's my theory.



that being said, sometimes the news can redeem itself. one instance of this would be that it has advised me that a man decided that since his divorce settlement entitled half of the property to his wife, that it would be a good idea to make sure that she got half.

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.

more geek phone shit

so i've decided that i'd call Fido to have my v3 RAZR replaced. after roughly 10 days of terrible battery life, i figured i'd raise my voice rather than live with a crappy product.

how terrible is the battery life? well, over 10 days i've logged roughly 4 hrs of call time. my Nokia 6030 would have had to be charged once, and that phone was free. this phone has been charged 4 times now. certainly not the 7 hrs of talk time and 12 days of standby promised by Motorola and Fido.

i figure if the next one i get is a dud too, i'll probably pay out the $200 to cancel my contract and tell them to stick it up their hole. this will not be the first time that i've had problems with them.

a pocket-friendly week

it's been a week since i got my Motorola v3 RAZR phone from fido and i have things to say aboot it.

what i like:
the call clarity is definitely outstanding. seriously, a phone call generally sounds about as clear as it possibly could. there are times when i speak with other people who use quality land-lines when the call quality is so good that it sounds as if the person on the other end of the line could be in the room with me.

it has tons of great features - a VGA camera (meaning it can take pics at a resolution up to 640x480) that takes excellent quality pictures, a wide variety of built-in ring tones - 40+ i would think though i haven't counted them, Bluetooth wireless connectivity for devices and file transfer, Email and Calendar capabilities and more.

it's got a huge, bright display that can easily be read in the sun and a nifty colour screen on the outside of the phone that is multi-functional. the phone is incredibly thin which makes it quite pocket-friendly, but it's also wide enough to allow for a decently sized keypad that doesn't leave your thumbs cramped after tapping away at a detailed text message or playing a few rounds of golf.

did i say playing golf? indeed i did. mine came with 5 preloaded games, but other games are very easy to track down and load onto your phone due to its popularity and relatively easy (and plentiful) connectivity options - Bluetooth, USB, wireless internet.

what i do not like:
the keypad and screens are made of very shiny and reflective materials (aluminum and glass respectively). this results in screens and keypads that are VERY easily smudged up with finger and thumb prints.

it does have a vibrate function, which is handy at work, but this vibrate function seems rather week and borderline useless if you leave your phone on your desk (even right beside you) or you are wearing baggy clothes. since i have a habit of leaving my phone on my desk AND wearing baggy clothes the vibrate function is definitely sub-standard for me.

my final and perhaps most important complaint is the battery life. in the seven days that i've owned this phone, i've now charged it three times. the first was the "just bought the phone and need to charge before using" charge - understandable. the second charge came monday night before bed. i attributed this requirement to very heavy use of the camera and games. charge number three came last night. i had reset the call timers after charge #2 to see how efficient it could be and noticed that from tuesday morning through to this morning i had only used the phone for approximately 2.25 hrs. this is well below the advertised 7hrs of talk time and/or 12 days of standby time. i would think that if Motorola's battery life advertisements were true that i should be able to get at least three more days of regular usage before a charge is required. there was some minor picture-taking and game playing, but that's mostly after i noticed the low battery signal last night and figured i'd just kill the battery so it could charge overnight.

another experiment will begin today. since i unfortunately can't just set the phone down and let the battery drain for (a highly unlikely) 12 days, i've reset the call timers again and will restrict my use to general phone usage until the battery needs to be charged again. depending on the results of the next two charge-cycles, i may be making a "give me free stuff for lying" customer service call to my provider.

overall
with potential battery issues aside, i'm very very impressed with this phone. it's sturdy aluminum construction, bright readable screen and call clarity more than make up for it's slightly negative attributes. and the really great thing about it is that most wireless providers will be marketing the v3 RAZR at a very low price with a contract due to high volume sales and newer improved models (including the v3i, v3t and KRZR) so this will give you a phone that once retailed for between $200-$400 at a budget-phone cost. i'd have to say that it's probably about 80% awesome and 20% mediocre.

even though i rarely use them

today will be a day revolving around the purchase of phones. i think that i am perhaps a little to keen on having neat-o electronic gadgets or something because i barely even use the phones that i already have, but maybe having new ones will give me the incentive to use them more.

first i will go to BestBuy and get myself a new cordless phone. i know that one of the reasons i don't use my home phone more often is that i have this crap-hole $10 phone from walmart that has a really short cord and horrendous sound quality. it's kind of like trying to speak to someone who's in another room - perhaps a little like shouting to your neighbour in the next apartment over...

"Hey Peter man, check out channel 9"

after that, I will be picking up yet another new cell phone. the Nokia 6030 is still working just fine, i'm just not a fan of the candy-bar style phone. i wanted a flip phone, and i wanted something with easier buttons to press. the Motorola RAZR will now grace my pockets and be occasionally dropped in my clumsiness starting this afternoon. from what i understand, i will be able to download and play Pacman on this phone which will rule thoroughly.

and take pictures of myself picking my nose.

now i'm going to go kick whoever is whistling in the nuts.

whose side are you on?

okay, i'm finally caught up completely on my Civil War reading and am anxiously anticipating the next installment. i've even read all the tie-in issues too (marion, let me know if you're missing any - i can email them to you). i'm surprised at just how addicted to it i have become - addicted to the point where i've hunted down downloads of comics that i read when i was a kid just so i have more comic books to read (remember how awesome the Secret Wars were?).

you know what else is awesome? is the fact that a good percentage of gas stations in Ontario (probably all of Canada for that matter) have a Tim Horton's inside waiting for you. that makes donut-eating so incredibly convenient. and you know how i love convenience. and donuts. so convenience + donuts = good math skilld.

and hey, if'n you were going to be in the Kitchener/Waterloo area on Saturday you need to go to the Stitch N' Kitsch show to do your christmas shopping. Cindy of Studioloo is going to be there with her awesome display of fun stuff as well as over 30 local artists and craftpeople so you can do all of your christmas work in one spot. more gooder, all the time.

setting new records for dork-ness

at one of my jobs we're not supposed to install any messenger-type applications on our computers like MSN, Yahoo, GoogleTalk, etc. at the other job they pretty much encourage it because it means less useless traffic on the email server.

so in the recommendation of one workplace, i came across a neat-o little multi-protocol messenger client called Miranda. essentially, it lets you log into anything and everything - MSN, Yahoo, ICQ (does anyone actually use that any more?), AIM, GoogleTalk and other Jabber networks, IRC... the list goes on. the really cool thing about it is that it doesn't actually require you to install it. you can download the zip file, unzip it to a folder somewhere on your desktop, USB drive or even a floppy disk for that matter and start using it right away. it's all free too, (though they will ask for a donation to help fund the project) and open source so you can download the source code and bugger it all you want.

there are literally hundreds of plugins to choose from which makes the product extremely dynamic and customizable though personally i like the streamlined, smiley-free default version. and for people who's computers run super slow - it uses barely any system resources at all. just a small fraction of running any one of those individual programs use gets occupied by Miranda IM making it perfect for people like me who have a billion things open (MS Visual Studio, MS Query Analyzer, MS Excel, Outlook... damn, does Microsoft make every memory-hog application) and can't waste the resources on crappy ad-laced IM software.

download it and play around with it. it won't even screw up your current IM applications.

it's not just the Marvel Universe, it's my universe too

i've been far too obsessed with reading comic books lately. Marvel Comics has this series going on right now about a super-hero Civil War, putting good guys against good guys. there's a few main-focus type comic books, but plenty of cross-over stuff that's well worth the read. certainly a must-read for anyone who may consider themselves a comic-book geek.

it's coming upon christmas time again. my family generally does a hand-made christmas rather than spending countless hours in the mall hunting down the "perfect" gift. we all sort of figured a couple of years ago that nobody could ever think of what to buy anyone, and since the idea is about the thought behind the gift, how could you get more thought in a gift than to make something with your own two hands? it's lots of fun to do, but this year a non-stop work schedule has run me pretty low on ideas. last year i made t-shirts for everyone, but was trying to think of something more gooder.

any idears?

Ultimate Thumb Pain!

i've never considered myself anywhere close to a hard-core video-gamer. not even remotely close. i do enjoy playing video games quite a bit, but with a couple of jobs and the ridiculous amount of movies i watch eating up most of my time there just isn't enough awake time to dedicate to a life of gaming.

i do, however, own several video game consoles. most of them were bought past their prime on account of me not wanting to spend hundreds of dollars on a console. one of my favourite consoles is my Nintendo GameCube. it's a really brilliant little piece of machinery. about the size of a Mac Mini, the GameCube packs a ton of power and graphics processing abilities into a small package. the mistake that Nintendo made in putting this into the american market is that it uses mini-DVDs for it's games. since mini-DVDs cannot be bought in spindles of 100 for next to nothing, it leaves pirating GC games pretty much out of the question and as much as anyone may want to argue to the contrary, this will hurt sales in north america. pirating of Xbox and PS2 games runs rampant which results in massive console sales for Microsoft and Sony respectively. Nintendo relies solely on the quality of their games - and with Mario on their side quality always abounds.

but my day hasn't been spent playing Mario games. today i bought a copy of Ultimate Spiderman for GameCube. it's been a while since i bought a game, but i have a pretty open weekend this weekend and thought i'd give it a go. i've always been a fan of the various Spiderman comic books, though i have not been a fan of the recent Spiderman movies (i'm sorry, i just couldn't watch it. i promise i will some day). this game is based on the comic book of the same name, and i'd have to say that one of the things i love most about this game is that the entire game is animated to look like the comic book. there are comic book cut-scenes and videos. anyone who comes from the old-school comic book era would appreciate that i think. on top of it, the controls seem reasonably intuitive and the game starts out simply enough that someone who likes to play video games but doesn't get much of a chance can jump right in and get started.

the game isn't anywhere close to new. i *think* it's been around for over a year. long enough to get on most consoles' "Best Seller" type lists. it only cost me $20, and in my opinion was very worth all twenty of those dollars. give it a try. lots of fun. if you're a hardcore gamer it's probably only worth renting and playing through a couple of times, but if you're just a once-in-a-whiler like myself just buy it.