General

Me vs. Mavis Beacon, part 1

I have written before about my battles with Mavis Beacon on the Martian Cartel forum. Mavis is the composite identity used as the face of a typing program published by Broderbund. I regard her as an arch-nemesis.

A few months ago I picked up the current version of Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing — the third time I’ve bought the insidious program. I was sure this time would be different. This time she wouldn’t crush my dreams like a sparrow in the hand of a hill giant. This time I would progress beyond my usual three-fingers-is-plenty typing style.

She looks so friendly and helpful on the cover. She wouldn’t be mean this time.

The first thing you do in the program is create a profile. Then you get presented with the screen below. Why is Mavis talking about herself in the third person? Does she think she is royalty? Has she gone mad? She won’t say, so I just start a-typin’.

mavis3rdperson

As expected, my speed puts me in the “special needs” category. I’m staying positive, though! Mostly I stay positive by closing the program at this point. I’ll have further results Soon®!

Shifty weather people – update!

As of right now, this is the forecast for Sunday, January 18th (tomorrow):

weatherforecast2

As you can see, it is only slightly different than before. “Mainly sunny” instead of “sunny”, a high of 6 instead of 8. But you watch, overnight, the forecast will change to “blizzard with angry polar bears”.

Seriously serious (seriously)

Flashpoint is a CTV-produced police drama starring Hugh Dillon, former lead singer of The Headstones. Hugh Dillon is a great name. It oozes macho. Really, if that wasn’t his actual name I’m pretty sure the producers of the show would have had him change it to that. Here’s Hugh in a promo shot for the show:

serious!

“Look serious. No, more serious. More. Turn it up about 20 notches. No, 100 notches. There’s this guy and he’s hurting kittens. A terrorist hurting kittens. And grannies. The grannies are saving the kittens from a fire. Serious, come on. More serious. MORE. You are grim and determined. You have steely eyes. Seriously steely-eyes and the musky stench of determined grimness. Very very serious. You are a man. A serious man. You have a gun. You have no hair because men don’t need hair. Hair is not serious but good god man, YOU ARE SERIOUS. And…that’s a wrap. Brie with bagels for lunch, let’s go!”

Curse of the extra arrow

There is a glitch with the code for the otherwise spiffy Techmania theme I am using for this blog. It manifests itself as a duplicate arrow on the headlines for each post. It looks like this:

arrowglitch

Curiously, the glitch shows in Firefox 3 and Google Chrome but not in Internet Explorer 7. I have looked over the code but have been unable to figure out what is causing this. After three weeks and no response at the forum that hosts this (and other) themes, I am putting it out here in the billion to one chance some CSS expert sees this and has  solution.

Also, I’m officially requesting a pony here, too.

Those shifty weather people

When I operated the Locarno Beach concession back in 1996-98 I checked weather updates with a near-relifgious fervor as business rested entirely on the weather being sunny and pleasant. Today, thanks to the vast richness that is the world wide web, I can check weather forecasts 24 hours a day. For example, there is The Weather Network (that should show the forecast for Vancouver). The Weather Network is about as accurate as one might expect.

Or is it? <ominous piano chord>

I have noticed of late a typical pattern. The last day of the forecast is always really nice. Then when that day actually arrives, it’s snowing or flooding or something. I’m thinking they have some standing order to make the end of the forecast look nice to fill people with hope and to have them keep coming back to see if it’s changed. When that day actually arrives it is, of course, snowing or flooding. I’m going to test this crackpot theory by linking a copy of their little graphic for the last day of the forecast then following up with updated images as we get closer to the actual date in question — January 18th. As you can see, there is no snow or flooding predicted:

sunny forecast

The 0% is the chance for precipitation. The 18th is six days hence. How wrong could they end up being in just six little days? Let’s find out!

Christmas in January

Snow in Horseshoe Bay
Snowing in Horseshoe Bay. Damn snow.

I made it over to the island for a late Christmas the weekend after New Year’s. The reason for the delay, of course, was the weather. If someone had told me back in the fall I wouldn’t be able to ride my bike to work for nearly a month due to snow I would have chuckled quietly and called them insane. Today I would call them Kreskin.

I get up on the morning of Saturday January 3rd and look out the window. It’s snowing. Again.

Undeterred, I head out and once downtown I catch the #153 bus to Horseshoe Bay. It is snowing harder in West Vancouver, nestled as it is at the base of the North Shore mountains. The bus driver advises the passengers that all West Van buses are on “snow routes”  without explaining precisely what that means. Someone on the dispatch also relays this information. We eventually learn it means all buses are sticking to the lower roads and avoiding the upper levels highway until the plows get through.

We get to the terminal safe and sound thanks to the driver not being a maniac behind the wheel. The ticket booth at Horseshoe Bay is covered but outdoors. It is a bit chilly but the line-up is not too long as I am early. Unfortunately the line-up does not move. At all. A woman up at the wicket is having a problem of some sort. I am too far away to catch any of the conversation so I wait and watch the snow piling up. The line continues to not move. Minutes go by. Then more minutes. The cashier is on the phone now. I gnash my teeth. The woman holding up the line has a dog. It’s a cute dog but if it’s the reason I’m standing here freezing my skinny butt off then screw you, cute dog!

After about ten minutes (which feels like 20 once you add wind chill) I buy my ticket and am astonished that the price is something like five dollars cheaper than it was in October. I take a whiff and sure enough, there is the unmistakable smell of pre-election on the ticket stub. Thanks, Gordon!

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Swimming trunks quest complete!

Today I went looking for swimming trunks again. At Sport Check the answer was basically, “We don’t carry swimwear in the middle of winter” which would make sense if one assumes people in Vancouver never:

a) swim indoors
b) travel to other climes where swimming in the winter is not just possible, but done regularly and with great pleasure

I decided to check The Bay and after a helpful clerk pointed me to their selection, I discovered once again that nearly every pair of swimming trunks they had were for sizes XXL to XXXXXL. Really, I must assume that fat* people simply do not swim. I managed to find a medium pair of trunks and gambled that they would fit well enough to not come off and cause an embarrassing pool incident. The helpful clerk lauded me for taking up a good cardiovascular workout such as swimming, confessing that he did not swim particularly well himself. Then he cheerfully advised me to not drown.

I picked up the Mom Laptop™ from the Puralator store today. It’s a Dell Inspiron and seems pretty nice — 15.4″ widescreen display, fast Core 2 Duo processsor. It also came bundled with a 30-day trial of McAfee and the Google Desktop, already installed. I removed the McAfee stuff and substituted AVG for anti-virus protection, loaded up and made Firefox the default browser, grabbed the nearly 50 MB of Windows updates, deleted the Google desktop and got the line of icons in the bottom right corner of the screen down to a half-mile in length. I’ll be setting up the wireless connection tomorrow and exposing mom to the wilds of the Internet. I’m undecided on whether I am to be commended or condemned for this.

* if you find the term “fat” demeaning or offensive, please substitute the phrase “dimensionally enhanced”

And so endeth 2008

It was the best of times, it was the blurst of times…

Here’s a brief overview of 2008 in handy list form. I love lists. I bought something like 50 of those Book of Lists books.

Personal

  • I was told in April I was pre-diabetic and had to lose weight, exercise more and change my diet
  • I bought a bike in July and ride it to work every day  (when it isn’t snowing all the damn time)
  • I stopped eating junk food and fast food; in June I weighed 187.5 pounds. I now weight 151 pounds.
  • I wrote and completed more fiction than I have in many years (five complete short stories plus assorted fragments)
  • I got new glasses. Hooray for no more scratched lenses!

The World

  • Stephen Harper decided we needed yet another election and he needed one of them fancy majority governments. We got the election, he did not get his majority. He then turned around and gave the opposition parties a big “screw you!”, prompting them to form a coalition that the Bloc said it would support for 18 months. Harper then went to the governor-general and said, “Hey, I’d really like to stay in power. Can I suspend Parliament for two months, even though we are in the middle of the worst economic situation the world has faced in 80 years?” The governor-general gave him the OK, so we are awaiting the budget on January 27th with the proverbial bated breath.
  • Stephane Dion resigned early as Liberal leader, becoming the only Liberal leader to never go on to be Prime Minster. He was replaced in a quick ‘n dirty leadership “review” by a unibrow named Michael Ignatieff. Ignatieff has spent most of the last 20 years living outside of Canada. This surprisingly may work to his benefit.
  • Two byelections in BC result in two NDP wins. No surprise, the governing party almost always loses. The BC Liberals install their carbon tax and everyone pretty much agrees they hate it. Gordon Campbell looks more and more like a cranky old high school teacher.
  • In the U.S. John McCain goes off the rails and incessantly negative in his campaign for president, choosing an airhead governor as his running mate. Sarah Palin proves to be a gold mine (or perhaps more appropriately, a gushing oil well) for comedians as she keeps saying the darndest things. Barack Obama runs a very slick, well-organized campaign and cruises to a fairly easy win, becoming America’s first black president.
  • The year ends with Bush getting shoes thrown at him by an Iraqi journalist. So much for boquets of flowers. Bush nimbly ducks the shoes, earning respect in a way no one could have predicted.
  • Ice shelves continue to collapse. Global warming, a new ice age — clearly Mother Nature has something up her sleeve and I have a feeling we ain’t gonna like it
  • No space shuttles blew up
  • Vancouver gets about 10 feet of snow, I roughly estimate

Entertainment

  • I score 1 out of 10 on an MSNBC entertainment quiz. I guess I’m a bit out of the loop now.
  • Heath Ledger is really good as The Joker in The Dark Knight. For once the hype matches the reality. Shame about his accidental overdose.
  • iTunes is going DRM-free which is great. Most new songs will now be $1.29 instead of 99 cents. This is not so great. Catalogue songs will be as low as 69 cents, though, so in the end I declare all of this Good.
  • I can’t think of anything else noteworthy. I’m actually blanking on what movie won Best Picture this year.
  • My 27″ Sony Wega is officially obsolete. This gigantic CRT is like a huge paperweight I can’t get rid of. I never watch TV.

Sports

  • The Canucks roar out of the gate until Luongo pulls his groin. Nearly two months later, they have played a little under .500 hockey, but have 98-year old Mats Sundin in the line-up now to shore up offense. Things should improve when Luongo returns. Whenever that is.

I’ll add more as I reflect back on the momentous year that was 2008. Maybe!

Why is my Tupperware dented?

Damage is clearly visible on the modern plastic container I use to safely transport my sandwich to work Monday to Friday:

tupperdent

How did this calamity strike?

I fell on it.

I was walking to work this morning down lovely East 19th Avenue and it was cold, dark and as it turns out, more than a tad icy. I stepped off a section of sidewalk that had been left unshoveled and onto a nice, clear section that had been shoveled. This clean section of sidewalk also has lots of hard-to-see ice on it, runoff that had frozen from Bad Neighbor’s uncleared section. As soon as my foot hit the ice, I knew what was happening. I put out my hands. I fell back, as if taking the Nestea plunge. I went splat. I quickly got back up to my feet, the wind knocked out of me but otherwise unhurt. I was more concerned about missing the bus or worse, someone having witnessed my Funniest Home Videos moment.

I didn’t realize I had landed on and smooshed my sandwich container until I took it out of my shoulder bag (man purse) for lunch. The sandwich, oddly enough, was unhurt, thus proving the effectiveness of meal safety equipment.

After work I bought a pair of boots to replace the amazing treadless sneakers I otherwise normally wear. I know there’s no guarantee the same thing won’t happen even with a pair of boots but since personal jetpacks aren’t fully ready yet, they’ll have to do.

On an unrelated note, I also looked for swim trunks while boot-shopping and Sears had a (not surprisingly) small selection to choose from. The sizes ranged from extra large to hill giant, so I’m wondering if they overstocked or maybe fat people just never swim. Or they make their own swim trunks. Or swim nude. Or buy at The Bay. Or something.

In lieu of…

UPDATE, March 13, 2022: As you can see below, the image that was linked has since moved to other parts of the internet or perhaps just into the abyss.

The name of the image file was evilclownz.jpg and doing a search in your favorite search engine will yield copious nightmare-inducing examples, so feel free to imagine one of those here instead.

An image in lieu of a post (idea by jackrabbit):

Facebook, $12 movies and getting in the swim

First, I missed posting yesterday not for lack of things to say but because I forgot to say them. I could fudge a post with a fake date and no one would be the wiser but I’ll save that kind of chicanery for something more deserving.

So, Facebook. I signed up and now when I check my e-mail I find out I have a new friend or should have this new friend or someone has written on my “wall” or their wall or some other wall and you should see this or check out that or, well, on it goes. On and on and on. I’d say “like the ABBA song” but that ends after four minutes. Facebook is like a giant rug where you start pulling on a loose thread and no matter how much it unravels the thread never runs out because someone is busily knitting away at the other end of the rug. Let this serve as illustration to the axiom that all analogies suck. They really do.

So yeah, Facebook. It’s weird to get messages from people I have not spoken to in more than 20 years. I can’t decide if I like the whole thing yet or not.

I have not seen any movies this festive holiday season. Part of the reason is $12 for a ticket seems fairly outrageous. It’s like the movie theater chains are saying “If you won’t buy our $6 tub of popcorn and $3 small Coke from our bountiful concession, we’ll just add them into the price of the ticket”. The other reason is no new movie interests me, at all. That’s a bit odd, though I mulled over seeing Quantum of Solace, but as much as I like Daniel Craig as James Bond, I’m not coughing up $012 for 007.

On January 6th I start swimming lessons at the Vancouver Aquatic Centre. I may be the only person in town buying swimming trunks who isn’t getting out of town after doing so. Considering my usual swimming style can be described as “thrashing about wildly in the water as if drowning because I am in all probability, actually drowning”, I look forward to the potential improvement!