General

Technology bad!

The area I live in has been without a large grocery store for many years. Long ago there was a Safeway at the corner of Knight and Kingsway but it closed down and the building there was turned into a flea market. The kindly folks at Safeway put a covenant on the property to insure that no other pesky grocery stores could be built there, to keep people in the neighborhood loyal to the not-very-convenient Safeways 20 blocks or more away. A curious strategy, one might think, but retail is a curious business sometimes!

Fast-forward to last year when, after years of planning and construction, the shiny new King Edward Village opened up on the site. A deal was arranged whereby the covenant was lifted in favor of granting an extra floor on the main residential tower, increasing it from 16 to 17 stories. The area now has a PriceSmart Foods, which appears to be a Save-On Foods with shorter hours and the pharmacy surgically removed (by the way, I’d like to offer a hearty hello to any HR people who are using Google Alerts to flag stories on the web containing the names of the businesses they work for, such as Safeway or PriceSmart Foods). Another difference I noticed is that each of the two entrances/exits to the store only have a total of two regular checkouts. They have many more of the self-serve variety, however, a not-so-subtle hint to maybe not bother those pesky cashiers who must be paid for their work when you could be having fun bagging your own groceries.

I have conspicuously avoided using the self-serve checkouts because if some nice young person is going to bag my stuff for me, who am I to stop them? Today, though, as I stood behind a man slowly lifting a watermelon out from under the baby stroller he was pushing (which appeared to be baby-free) and then eyeing the person in front of him puttering about trying to find money or courage or something and then finally glancing at that gleaming and line-free self-serve checkout stand just a few feet away, I gave in and figured I would give it a shot.

The first thing it does is ask me to scan my Save-On card. I do so and the machine chirpily acknowledges this. I take out my cloth bag and place it on the spot where a plastic bag has been stretched out, awaiting the scanned items. I use a cloth bag because I’m environmental and all that jazz. Plus the handles on plastic bags dig into your hands if you are carrying something heavy like potatoes or a Steven Erikson novel. The machine asks me to scan my first item. I do so and it reads back the amount it costs then tells me to place it in the bag. I do so. This is easy. And faster than waiting behind watermelon guy.

It then asks me to scan the second item. I again do so but this time when I put it in the bag, it reports that there is something invalid on the scale (which is what the plastic bag is stretched over) and it asks me to remove this object, whatever it may be. You see, the scale calculates the weight of every item scanned to make sure you aren’t scanning one box of brownies and then stuffing 10 of them into your shopping bag. Keeps people honest or forces them to eat the other nine boxes of brownies while they stand there. I remove my ‘invalid’ cloth bag with the two scanned items. A girl comes over to help me and advises that I put my bag on the floor. This allows me to continue, but now I have nothing to put my items in. The cloth bag is on the floor, which is invalid and putting it on the scale is also invalid. I look over to the wall near me. They are selling cloth shopping bags for $1.38. Bags that will not work with their self-serve checkout.

I could just use a plastic bag but who knows what would happen if I place the previously scanned items back on the scale. The system might think I’m trying to steal brownies. A manager magically appears. I mean this almost literally. I have no idea where he came from, he was just there. Maybe the girl pushed an unseen button that sends a priority “Someone can’t figure the self-serve checkout” signal. The manager enables some sort of override on the system, he scans the last two items (I only had four in total) and I’m able to complete the transaction. By this time watermelon guy is long gone.

To recap, using the self-serve checkout:

1. Took longer than the regular checkout.
2. Required the help of two store personnel instead of none.
3. Got terribly confused by me ‘going green’ with a cloth bag — which the store itself sells mere feet away from the checkout.

Maybe there is a way this sleek and modern machine can be made to understand you are using a cloth bag and to take that into account but it didn’t seem like it. I can’t say I’ll be trying the self-serve checkout again anytime soon to find out, either!

Technology bad.

Technology good!

I have been buying Writer’s Digest on and off for over 20 years, sometimes faithfully every month, sometimes only when a particular article caught my eye. I’m more in the latter mode now than the former. Recently the magazine underwent another design facelift and it’s frankly pretty impressive. I usually find most magazine makeovers to be a fairly mixed bag, but this new design is extremely clean, elegant and modern. They have found a really nice balance between white space, copy and overall layout.

Why am I writing about Writer’s Digest in a post titled “Technology good”? Because yesterday I bought, for the first time, a digital copy of the magazine. The current issue has their annual 101 Best Websites for Writers feature and I figured the digital edition would have clickable links to all of the various sites, which would be far more convenient for a relative butterfingers like me than having to type them in myself. And lo, the links are indeed clickable! On my 24″ monitor I can view the magazine at 100% without having to scroll all over to see the pages, which is nice. Plus I only paid the $5.99 US instead of the $8.99 CDN newsstand price. With the Canadian dollar near par, it’s a much better deal.

I approve of this magazine-as-PDF technology, even if it makes curling up in bed with the magazine a lot trickier.

And yeah, I know I’m way behind on the whole digital magazine thing. I didn’t learn to ride a bicycle until I was nine years old, either.

Technology good.

It’s random weird animated gif time!

Here it is.

I’ll have more substantive things to say soon.

I have seen this image where it is used to indicate a NSFW post. To tie into that, just imagine the eloquence of the typical Canucks fan after watching Game 6 earlier this evening. I expect the language used would be very much NSFW. (The Canucks lost the series 4-2 and game six by a score of 5-1.)

The face of nostalgia is…Simon Le Bon

Duran Duran is one of those bands that I always made fun of but secretly liked. Sure, they were very pretty and had ultimate 80s hair, but their music was catchy and the videos were fun, even if they eventually turned into bloated spectacles (hello, Wild Boys).

Today I spent $7.99 to pick up the one album of theirs that I owned again, so I now have a digital copy of Seven and the Ragged Tiger. Listening to it, I finally realize those pops I thought were a bad copy of the cassette version I bought in the olden days of 1983 are actually in the recordings themselves, preserved with remarkable clarity in Apple’s shiny AAC format. I don’t find it annoying, though. It’s actually kind of quaint.

The album doesn’t sound as dated as I had expected, which is probably just another sign of getting old. I promise the next music I buy will be from this century.

This is not the May weather I ordered

A few weeks ago I read a news story about Environment Canada’s “spring forecast”. They predicted that the entire country — yes, the whole dang thing — would experience warmer, drier conditions this spring. What they didn’t mention was the rain and wind, the endless high wind. From The Weather Network website earlier today:


Wind Warning : Greater Vancouver
Issued at 3:51 PM PDT Sunday 2 May 2010

Summary

West to northwest winds up to 80 km/h will develop overnight. This is a warning that potentially damaging winds are expected or occurring in these regions. Monitor weather conditions..Listen for updated statements.

Details

An unseasonably strong cold front will move southward across the British Columbia south coast tonight. High pressure building rapidly behind the front will cause strong westerly winds up to 80 km/h to develop over much of Vancouver Island and the inner coast overnight and early Monday morning. Winds will gradually ease beginning late Monday morning or Monday afternoon.

***

Nothing says spring like potentially damaging winds! So yeah, patiently waiting for real spring to arrive and this silly faux wintry stuff to take a hike.

May day! May day!

May 1st, to be precise.

Continuing with the theme of “embarrassing pictures from my youth” here is a blurry photo of me taken from one of our summer trips to Lake Osoyoos back in the late 60s/early 70s. I’m probably about 5 here, so that would place this shot around 1969. I really can’t recall why I was aiming water at my crotch but it’s one of those things that’s perfectly logical to the mind of a five year old. I’m going to at least state that the sizable puddle at my feet was already there before I arrived. Yep.

I have no good explanation

Hair (not the musical)

As I mentioned in the previous post, as a teenager I became concerned that my ears were big. Too big. So big, in fact, that they must be hidden from the world, lest their bigness lead to certain catastrophe. This is evidence of my ear paranoia.

The photo below is undated but I believe I was 14 at the time, which would place it around 1978 or ’79. Note the glasses aren’t even close to being on straight but who cares? I had tinted aviators and was stylin’ big time. But really, your eye is drawn to the Hair, which appears to be reluctantly avoiding swallowing up my entire head. That is serious girlie hair. I mean, it’s almost pretty and really, it shouldn’t be. There’s also an admirable synergy between the crooked glasses and that immense mess of golden locks in the way the hair grows down to the top of the glasses and then seemingly along them in order that I may still have an unobstructed view of things.

I sometimes harbor a fantasy of growing my hair long again. Pictures like this tend to cure that.

(click to enlarge — if you dare!)

1971: The Year of the Stare

I have nearly all of my class photos, which in a way is kind of amazing. I’m scanning them in over time and the one below will eventually get added to the proper photo gallery with the rest. For now, here’s a look at my grade 2 class photo or “What I looked like 39 years ago”. Yikes! I am the last one on the right in the middle row, wearing a fashionably striped shirt. Our teacher was Mrs. Buckingham and we sometimes (out on the playground, never in class) called her Buckingham cigarettes because it was a popular brand at the time. How did a bunch of seven year old kids know about brands of cigarettes? Advertising! It amazes me how many of my elementary school teachers look exactly like the classic school marm stereotype. She was a pretty good lady, though. The kid with the ears two over from my right was not only the only kid in class who could always color inside the lines, he was freakishly good at drawing in general. It was because of him that I learned early on in life that there’s always someone who can do something better than you. I wonder if he kept pursuing art.

(click to see full-size)

On the right, middle row, glassy-eyed

Here’s a close-up:

Sail away

Stylin’ spectacles and a blank stare that suggests no current brain activity. I later became famously concerned that my ears stuck out too much. This becomes evident based on the hair “styles” I adopted in my senior school years. You’ll also understand why I put that word in quotes, too.

Angry Carrot in 3D (special glasses not required)

Do you ever get the urge to go back and finish some project you started years ago? I do from time to time but the reality is even if I decide to, I rarely complete a once-abandoned project, probably because I had a good reason for abandoning it.

A few years ago I began making a model of my cartoon character Angry Carrot out of plasticine. I only had green and orange plasticine, so I couldn’t do the black bits (face, arms, legs). Instead of going to a store to get the missing black, I just put what I had started in a cupboard and let it sit there for a couple of years.

Today I suddenly got it into my head to check the art supply store DeSerres while I was out. I figure if any place would have black plasticine, it would be an art store.

And lo, they did!

It was a brand they are not carrying anymore, so it was on clearance for, as you can see, $1.95. The clerk told me there would be no refunds or exchanges because of this. I’m thinking, “Dude, it’s modeling clay and it’s less than two dollars. Who would bring it back for a refund? Someone who thought it was licorice?” I then realized this is exactly what would happen, so I simply smiled politely at the clerk.

For reference, here is a panel from an Angry Carrot comic:

I realized a couple of things as I slapped on Angry Carrot’s limbs:

  1. He would fall down and not get up in real life. If real life featured man-sized sentient carrots with anger management issues, that is. As it was I had to insert a bit from a screwdriver and lean him against a wall to keep him from tipping over.
  2. I need a better workspace than the tiny spot I can clear next to my keyboard.
  3. I need better tools for the actual sculpting.
  4. I need better lighting.
  5. I need more practice! He’s not the right shape and his stalk is too small.

Still, for a ‘proof of concept’ it’s not too bad. It is recognizably Angry Carrot.

Close-up:

Scary perspective shot from below!

And one more from above:

It was fun exercising my fingers without using a keyboard for a change. I’ll probably start another model of Angry Carrot from scratch with some sculpting tools and a better workspace and see how that goes. My ultimate plan would be to use actual modeling clay, probably the self-drying kind as I don’t have a kiln handy.

Ol’ four eyes

With the prescription for my glasses recently updated I have started perusing various optical shops, casting about for a new look for the eventuality of getting new frames. Today I visited the optical department of Sears as I was passing through Pacific Centre. These are about the boldest pair I tried on and apart from being too big for my narrow face, I rather like the way they look. They’re a fair bit different than what I have now and I’m kind of in the mood for different.

Am I a scanner?

An acquaintance recently suggested a book to me that I am reading now called Refuse to Choose, written by Barbara Sher, a career counselor. As the Amazon description says, “Sher identifies someone she calls The Scanner who frequently has a multiplicity of interests, but finds it hard to create a successful life he or she loves because their passions and abilities are taking them in so many different directions.”

As I read the introductory chapters I admit to feeling a bit of recognition in the descriptions of these so-called “scanners”. If I tried to pursue everything I took an interest in I’d end up barely touching on most of them. In the past year or so I’ve taken swimming lessons, started teaching myself C#, begun learning to touch-type (again), written a novel, gone on about a million dates, bought a new sketchbook with a bunch of pens and pencils, and a new graphics tablet for drawing and probably a bunch of other things I’m forgetting. All of this on top of a job search since being laid off, and even that has taken a twist or two as I re-evaluate what truly interests me as far as work goes.

I’m definitely interested in seeing what the book offers beyond “you’re not a freak for having so many interests”. I feel I’m at a bit of a crossroads right now, so the timing is especially appropriate.