I finally fixed the header image for the current (Techmania) theme, as the original was not sized correctly for my desired page width. Exciting stuff, to be sure. For now I have chosen a creepy forest road that was included as part of Vista’s sample picture collection. I will probably replace it with a badly tiled picture of my cat at some point. Enjoy!
General
And now, an obligatory picture of my cat
Fulfilling the mandate as decreed necessary for all personal websites going back to 1995, here is another picture of my cat.
A drinking game
Here’s a fun drinking game you can play.
First, get in your car or whatever vehicle you happen to have and get on the highway. Start driving the speed limit.
Every time a vehicle passes you, take a drink. NOTE: You will get VERY drunk and CRASH your car. I TAKE NO RESPONSIBILITY.
If you’d like an alternate version of this game, try this:
Take a drink every time a vehicle passes you that is going more than 30 km/h (20 mph) over the speed limit. NOTE: you will still get VERY drunk and CRASH your car, but it will take a bit longer and there is a chance you may arrive at your destination before this happens. See previous disclaimer.
April 1st and it’s snowing
No, this is not an April Fool’s joke, it really was snowing earlier today.
Damn snow.
But spring is officially here, so t-shirts and shorts here I come!
Whoopsie
Yeah, so much for National “Write something every day on your blog” Month. Good thing I made that up because I can now say there was a typo and “month” should read “week” (darn my clumsy fingers) and I exceeded the minimum by a fair margin.
I will have more to write shortly. In the meantime I have added a very exciting “Currently” listing so you can see what stupid forms of entertainment I have chosen at the moment. Enjoy!
I am officially a statistic, hooray!
February jobless rate rises to 7.7%.
Canada’s unemployment rate rose to 7.7 per cent in February, when 82,600 jobs were lost, the fourth consecutive month of declines.
The February drop pushed the national unemployment rate up half a percentage point, from 7.2 per cent in January, Statistics Canada reported Friday. The jobless rate has not been this high since it was eight per cent back in August 2003.
Economists had been expecting February jobs losses to come in around 55,000, and for the overall unemployment to rise to 7.4 per cent.
Good times.
Wolves, lower
I have nothing interesting to contribute today, so here’s a 1985 video of R.E.M. featuring a blond Michael Stipe singing “So. Central Rain” in Germany.
It’s nearly spring. You know what that means.
Yes, more snow. It’s March 9th but Vancouver has somehow been stealthily moved to Siberia where it snows all the time.
You can almost see the guy at the door across the alley saying, “WTF?” as he looks around at all the white stuff on the ground.
Damn snow.
How to prove you are dumb on the Internet
A year ago CBC decided it would be nifty to give the public a voice on its news website by allowing user comments. As shocking as it may seem, a lot of the comments are belligerent, ignorant and dumb. I know, I know, it is hard to believe that people with extreme (or Xtreme!!) opinions would leap at the chance to share their idiotic views with a large if anonymous audience.
Let’s take a random sample.
In today’s news, there is a story titled Federal New Democrats want complete overhaul of EI system. There are 247 comments as I post this. The first and last paragraphs of the story read as so:
The federal NDP says it’s time the Conservative government made it easier for people to get employment insurance benefits.
***
The federal NDP is asking the government to eliminate the waiting period for EI, reduce the number of work hours needed to qualify, expand eligibility to include self-employed workers and encourage retraining.
Here is the first comment:
can’t come quick enough !
Okay, a little weak on the whole capitalization thing and in his or her excitement there is an errant space before the exclamation point but this person has expressed a viewpoint in a concise and non-controversial manner. But this is the first post, so pretty much a fluke. Let’s dig a little further…
By the fifth post we have KooteneyForestryGirl saying:
Its already such an abused system, you don’t need to make it even easier.
Personally I’d rather just keep my own money and be able to invest as I see fit for tough times. I hate being “babysat,” I think the whole program should be scraped. If people don’t have the foresight to plan ahead then tough luck..
Without saying why, she claims the system is abused, but hey, no need to back up an opinion, right? She perhaps doesn’t quite understand how EI actually works, but if we just scrape the program then, I dunno, maybe scientists can gather a sample to examine and figure out how to make it work better! Now here’s the important thing — KFG has staked out a position that EI is bad and thinks it should go away. She has 43 agreeing but 146 disagreeing. No surprises there. The groundwork has been laid for a nice fight.
Bi Polar Bear uses breathless hyperbole to make his case in support:
I’ve known dozens of people who don’t like their jobs – so they quit … then expect to get EI. It doesn’t work that way folks. If you don’t like your job – get another job.
Yes, he knows dozens — that is to say, at least 24 or 36 people — who have quit their jobs specifically to collect EI. He must hang around dumb folks to make himself feel smart. I’ve never known anyone who quit their job thinking they could get EI (you can’t). Obligatory slam at the NDP:
The NDP would gladly tax us to 95% if they could.
Because all socialists want to tax people into ruin because that’s what they do, amirite?
Irrelevant potshot at current government that has nothing to do with the actual news story:
It’s time to overhaul the federal government too; that is, give Harper and his neo-clown posse the boot all the way back to Cow Town!
And on it goes. This story is actually a fairly mild one in terms of the user comments but it’s still kind of depressing. The average person who posts just seems kind of ugly and uncaring. These are not people you really feel like sharing a coffee with at Tim Horton’s.
Tonight we spring forward, tomorrow we wake up cranky
Tonight begins Year 3 of the “even earlier daylight savings time” in which PDT stretches from March to November. This means we are on daylight savings for 3/4 of the year now, all the better to help farmers. Farmers who apparently do not have electricity and can only work under the steady glare of the sun. Yeah, I don’t get it, either.
And on that note…
Here’s some of the music I have been listening to lately:
Jon & Vangelis, The Friends of Mr. Cairo — I originally bought this album around 1986 (it came out in ’81) but sold it with a bunch of other CDs back when I was a stupidly poor college student. I just picked it up again for $10 from iTunes. This is a surprisingly good pop album. The weakest track is probably “Back to School” in which the duo try to “rock out” and even that one isn’t really awful. “I’ll Find My Way Home” and “State of Independence” are both catchy as all get-out and the centerpiece title track is a funny pastiche of ’30s and ’40s film noir/gangster films.
Prism, “Armageddon” and “Night to Remember”. Alas, iTunes did not have the album available so I picked two tracks from a “Best of Prism” collection. I first owned this on 8-track. Ah, 8-track, the medium where album integrity was treated with a hearty LOL as tracks got shuffled about, duplicated or split in two. how I miss thee! Anyway, the track “Armageddon” is one I first heard as a piece used in a Remembrance Day ceremony back in grade 8 where we all solemnly read bits about how awful war is, with the orchestral intro/extro of “Armageddon” bookmarking the whole bit. I absolutely lurved the music and bought the album for what amounted to a couple minutes from one song. The album as a whole is perfectly serviceable pop, although I still get a chuckle out of some of the lyrics — “Jerry and Linda in the White House, president sleep in his shoes…” Somehow it seemed plausible that Jerry Brown and Linda Rondstadt could end up being the First Couple. Silly Canadians! “Night to Remember”, by the way, is not about the sinking of the Titanic, but rather a man wanting to bag a woman. It’s rather crass (“Hey, little girl, can I show you the world? Lay down beside me now…”) but all kinds of catchy.
Coldplay, Viva La Vida. Yes, it is and always has been trendy to hate Coldplay because they are fey wannabe rockers or something. I still really like A Rush of Blood to the Head, even if the simplistic lyrics do annoy if I focus on them. I thought the follow-up, X+Y was okay but nothing special. Viva La Vida, though, is their best effort yet. Musically, the band has expanded its sound and Chris Martin’s lyrics aren’t as cringe-inducing. The band is uncharacteristically whimsical on songs like “Strawberry Swing” and the title track, with a bright pop sound that is new. Definitely recommended if you’ve cared for any of their past work.
A couple of albums I picked up based on recommendations from a thread at Quarter to Three:
Zombi, Spirit Animal — This is a duo consisting of keyboard and drums, with some guitar thrown in here and there. They play “space rock” and it’s all instrumental, no vocals. The sound has been described as a cross between Rush and John Carpenter and that’s not a bad description. This is reminiscent of the long tracks favored by prog rock bands of the 70s, with songs divided into movements stretching out over 10 to 17 minutes. It’s great background music and I mean that as a compliment. At times hypnotic or soothing, a great album to mellow out to (man).
Animal Collective, Merriweather Post Pavilion — This is a weird one. The sound is dense and layered, heavy on effects and processing, with vocals that sound submerged. In fact, that’s a good word to describe the sound as a whole — submerged. It really is difficult to accurately describe the songs because there is no standard frame of reference in pop music to compare to. The sound is at times haunting and even creepy but there’s also plenty of layered harmonies that recall the bright sound of The Beach Boys. Definitely something you want to sample before diving into.
Yes, I can play keyboards
Actually, I can’t, but I kind of look like I’m auditioning for a synth-heavy band in this photo from my 1990 college student card. This is probably the last photo I have where I am clean-shaven. Compared to the high school grad photo from 8 years earlier, it’s about 1000% better.
