I really like non-sweetened cereals now. To keep my sugar intake low I look for cereal with no sugar. This eliminates nearly everything you’ll find on the shelves of most grocery stores, but there are a few brands out there, most of them of the puffed wheat variety (you know, the cereal that came in those gigantic plastic bags you could stuff the pet dog into). The one I prefer most is Grape-Nuts. I quite like its crunchy texture and nutty flavor — and I mean nutty in the sense of “it tastes like nuts” rather than “the flavor is clinically insane”. I have an occasional bowl with unsweetened soy milk when I get that breakfast cereal craving. The fact that it satisfies me, that I actually look forward to the bowl is somewhat remarkable considering I grew up on Cap’n Crunch (the shredder of mouths), Count Chocula and Lucky Charms (I always saved the marshmallows for last, so I’d have a bowl half-filled with pastel-colored milk and spongy yet still strangely kind of crunchy marshmallow bits at the end).
Kids really are amazing. How did I eat all that crap and not balloon up to 300 pounds? Oh yeah, metabolism, that thing that left me in a huff around the time I turned 20.
As someone who has lived his whole life in the southwest corner of BC, I am used to rain and I really don’t mind it.
Come June, one expects mild to warm temperatures, more sun, some clouds and occasional showers. So far we have been seeing mostly the latter. If I was still running the Locarno concession I’d be in full panic mode now.
Dear Mother Nature: cut it out! Make with the sun. (Please!)
Recently I recounted how I had dreamed that I was thrust back into working at the Locarno Beach concession, something I last did 12 years ago. My brain or more specifically, the subconscious part of it, has apparently decided to use sleep time to revisit all of my previous jobs in chronological order.
Last night I found my dream-self back at the store I used to work at. At one point I asked about the schedule, to which the assistant manager of the computer department gave a coy, non-commital answer I did not care for. I had visions of barely getting enough hours to make ends meet. And Ramen noodles. I suddenly found myself outside, in a gravel parking lot, looking toward the ocean, except blocking the view was the Locarno Beach concession, with the stand opened up facing toward the road and not the beach as one would expect. It was clear that I was still working there, too. The joy of 11 hour days covered in grease and the happiness of working a low-paying retail job, together at last!
I woke up shortly afterward. If things keep on track my next dream job will take me back to my days of telephone technical support. I can’t wait!*
* yes, in fact, I can wait. More to the point, I would like sexy dreams of daring adventure and not the dregs of my past jobs. Dear Brain, please comply. Thanks.
How can you look at an image like this and not get goosebumps over the simple, raw fury of nature? As a kid, there were a few things I could never get enough of — fire trucks, sharks (thanks, Jaws!), dinosaurs (original, I know) and then volcanoes.
This is the Tungurahua volcano, which has begun erupting in Ecuador. Story and image in this cbc.ca article.
Today the iPad went on sale in Canada, the base unit going for $549, $49 more than south of the border, as is the way with Apple’s pricing.
Apple describes the iPad as “a magical and revolutionary product at an unbelievable price.” I believe this is the first time Apple has referred to one of its products as magical.
magic:
The art that purports to control or forecast natural events, effects, or forces by invoking the supernatural.
The practice of using charms, spells, or rituals to attempt to produce supernatural effects or control events in nature.
The charms, spells, and rituals so used.
The exercise of sleight of hand or conjuring for entertainment.
A mysterious quality of enchantment: “For me the names of those men breathed the magic of the past” (Max Beerbohm).
I’m going to assume they’re going with #4 here, though who knows, perhaps the iPad runs on pixie dust and mystic rituals. Of course, it’s all too easy to bash Apple these days, as they have become a big, juicy target with the popularity of the iPod, iPhone and Macbook. Wait, Macbook? How’d that one slip through? There’s no ‘i’ in there anywhere! (Ironically, the Macbook replaced the iBook.) I’ve walked by local cafes that appear to have an ‘Apple notebook only’ policy in effect, where you may be forbidden entry should you enter without some flavor of Macbook tucked under your arm. When I ride the bus, a good number of people plugged in to portable music players are wearing the telltale white Apple earphones. The company’s products are everywhere.
Popular companies are popular targets and people love tearing down the big guys, perhaps to allow the little guys to rise up so the process can start all over. A circle of life thing for the petty and jealous, if you will.
I own two iPods (the classic and nano) and they work well enough as music players. iTunes isn’t as horrible for me as it apparently is for others and it’s nice that Apple finally abandoned that horrible brushed metal look on its interface. I was worried they would be adding wood paneling in a future version. I do not hate Apple, even if I don’t embrace their vision of a closed-off, proprietary future where all content is vetted by Apple on your behalf but the iPad is a pretty big meh. For me it fills a niche I don’t need filled. I simply have no pressing need to check my mail, view photos or surf the web in a portable format, especially for $549. I’ll admit if it had supported a pressure-sensitive stylus for input I’d have been mightily tempted, though. Having a portable electronic sketchpad is probably too sexy for me to resist, so I should thank Apple for saving me an “unbelievable” amount of money.
There are a few glitches with the Canadian rollout. One of the selling features of the iPad, shown in the image above, is iBooks, Apple’s answer to the Kindle and other ebook readers — except the iBook store in Canada doesn’t have anything you can actually buy on it yet. Oops. I’m also not sure if I’d want to read a book on an LCD screen, even a really nice one, but if someone wants to loan me an iPad, I’d be willing to run some tests, though. In the interest of science, of course.
I was downtown today and while I was in Pacific Centre I went upstairs to see if there might be a line-up at the Apple store. This was around 3 p.m. and indeed there was a line-up. And security! They had (velvet?) ropes to keep people orderly and a big sign for one line-up labeled “iPad purchases”. The other line, not worthy of an actual sign, may have been for iPad lookie-loos or people just wanting to grab some ear buds for their iPods. The reports of the thing selling out will be arriving shortly, no doubt, so kudos to Apple for another successful product launch. Who’d have thought the same company that put out the Newton, the Macintosh “Portable” that weighed 17 pounds and the original iMac mouse which was designed for hands that have never appeared on humans would end up so blazingly successful?
I do wish they’d stop with the whole iName thing, though. It’s as outdated now as the brushed metal look.
I knew something was up when Environment Canada issued its national spring forecast that called for warmer and drier conditions across the entirety of the country this spring. You know how those things go. They forecast sun, it rains. They predict overcast skies, it rains. They predict rain and it rains.
This is the forecast for the remainder of the month:
Allow me to translate:
Friday: rain
Saturday: rain
Sunday: rain
Monday: going out on a limb here — rain!
When I worked at Locarno Beach back in 1996-98 I was understandably obsessed with the weather. Even now I occasionally recall the days of yore when I prayed for sun so I could open the concession and earn a few meager dollars, even as I loathed opening the concession and actually having to be there.
The other night I dreamed I was back at Locarno, arriving rather suddenly, it seemed, and the scene was one of barely-contained chaos. A guy at the counter laughed at me while explaining he was the one who always had some difficult order. It seemed to be whatever it was he wanted — one of those energy bars or something like that — was in one of many boxes in the back. I tried to explain that I didn’t know any of this because I wasn’t there the previous year (or ten). A line-up started to form and I went to the till. An order was rung in for something but I didn’t know what. There was a $20 bill on the counter. I asked the guy if it was his, so I could make change. There was also another separate pile of money on the counter, a bunch of 20s and 10s. Things were cooking. My staff was running about, except they weren’t my staff, they were a bunch of strangers, presumably the staff that had worked there the previous summer. All that was missing was for me to look down and see I was only dressed in my underwear. Just before the dream ended I remember thinking to myself, “At least I’m making some money!”
It was awful. Yech. Dear Brain: No more Locarno dreams. Thanks!
I have a Saitek Eclipse keyboard and the main reason I got it was for the backlit keys. They’re cool in a geeky sort of way and practical in low-light conditions. However, I discovered over time that I preferred not working in low-light conditions on the computer, so the backlit keys seemed less necessary. What was worse, though, was the lettering on the keys being obliterated by my apparently acid-spewing fingers. The E, O, P, A, S, H, L and N keys are all smudged to the point of being nearly unreadable. Awhile back I had bought the Microsoft Digital Media Keyboard 3000 which, as the name implies, comes with a hojillion multimedia keys that do everything but iron your clothes and walk the dog. I pulled it out and remembered why I had not taken to it when I first tried it. The keys are ‘low travel’, which is fancy keyboard talk for the keys not sticking up as much and being scrunched a little closer together. The idea is you don’t need to press down as far or stretch as much, thus saving wear and tear on your fingers, whether or not they spew acid.
I find it makes me more prone to make typos because it feels funny. However, this seems as good a time as any to do battle once again with that unforgiving shrew, Mavis Beacon. Stay tuned!
The mascots for the London 2012 Summer Olympics have been unveiled. You can read something about them here. They are unique, all right. Apparently Kang and Kodos were unavailable.
I like this quote from the above link:
“What we’ve got here is two giant, damaged teeth, each with a massive, psychotic eye and razor sharp claws. And the blue one seems to be using bright, friendly colours to draw attention to his genital area.
“So these things – designed specifically for children – are basically lobster-clawed pervert monsters that remind them of the dentist. Bravo.”
When I finally broke down and got a cell phone last year I was aware of all the stories that suggest the devices could cause brain cancer, impotence, itchy skin and other assorted afflictions. I don’t really care about all that since living on this planet appears to be fatal no matter what.
What does annoys me, though, is it only took nine months to get my first spam message. It came from some company calling out of Quebec, peddling their unwanted wares under the guise of me ‘winning’ travel dollars or somesuch. No, I will not press 1 to claim my ‘prize’. Yeesh.
In the Star Wars universe, all telemarketers would be based out of Mos Eisley.
changed the background to a slate blue-gray kinda thing (will probably play with it some more)
made the site name match other links, color-wise
broke lots of stuff while experimenting but fixed everything back up
I will be restoring the writing exercises shortly and continue to fine-tune. To the average person this is about as exciting as watching a pie-eating contest where no pies are delivered for consumption but to me it’s like a pie-eating contest where one of those huge dump trucks from a strip mine shows up with 500 metric tonnes of pie.
added jQuery Colorbox to the photo galleries (this makes the photos pop-up all pretty-like)
removed a bunch of links from the sidebar, moved some to the Books etc. page and re-ordered others
removed the Sections, uh, section. The Sections links are now only at the top of the page. Redundancy is redundant.
killed the ‘jogging’ tag as it is now its own category
The biggest change is the complete removal of all of my writing. I’ve decided to take a different approach for now and will only be making a few selections available on the site, though all of the writing exercises will be back, since they are freely viewable on the Martian Cartel forums. I haven’t modified the theme yet but will be tweaking the colors and perhaps adding a graphic at the top of the site.
My question here is what makes Sunday, Monday and Tuesday nights safe? Note that there are also stops only several blocks away from this one that are still considered safe seven nights a week. This is near the downtown eastside (in Chinatown, to be precise, which borders the DTE), so this kind of alert isn’t surprising, per se, but the chosen nights seem a bit broad and like I said, there are other stops nearby. But maybe this has nothing to do with the people in the neighborhood. Maybe Pender & Main gets hit by lightning strikes or mudslides or something.
