General

My five favorite things about Christmas

It is Christmas Eve and as I enjoy some tea on this cool, crisp evening, here are my five favorite things about Christmas, in no particular order:

  • Eggnog. It’s actually kind of gross, like imbibing sickly sweet cream, but drinking it feels exactly like it is–a rich indulgence perfect for partaking of once a year
  • Presents. I don’t really care about getting presents but it would seem wrong to oppose them, unless they were mean reverse-presents like boxes of poop or something
  • Snow (provisional). I like snow on Christmas but only on two conditions: 1) I am not traveling 2) it doesn’t rain immediately (or not-so-immediately) afterward, turning the slow into slush
  • We’ve already passed the shortest day of the year, automatically making Christmas and every day up to the next winter solstice better
  • A Charlie Brown Christmas. It rails against the commercialism of the holiday, has a terrific jazzy score, uses actual children for the voices of children and delivers its message without feeling heavy-handed. It’s also a little weird in a way that’s hard to describe.

Bonus favorite thing: peace on Earth, if it ever actually happened.

Never start a post with weather

Or so Elmore Leonard might advise if he was talking about blogs instead of books. Because weather is generally boring. Observe:

Today it rained a lot and was cold. We didn’t experience catastrophic flooding and it didn’t actually drop below freezing, but things got wet and the buses were crowded, damp and unpleasant.

Was that interesting? No, it was not. This is a little better:

Today a series of mega-tornadoes swept through the city, blowing apart skyscrapers, flattening dozens of blocks and leaving behind nothing but smoking ruins. It also rained a lot and was cold.

Although this is more exciting it also has the small issue of being untrue in regards to the mega-tornadoes. Astute readers are likely to know that mega-tornadoes hardly ever sweep through Metro Vancouver, putting them in a negative and non-receptive state of mind for the rest of your post. They may even decide to not read further at all, knowing full well that millions of amusing cat images are just a few clicks away in another tab.

So I’m not going to talk about the weather. Instead I’m going to talk about the seasons. Most people associate seasons with weather but technically you can talk about one without discussing the other. As I am about to do in the next paragraph.

The winter solstice was yesterday, December 22, and as such this means the shortest day of the year has passed and now the days will get longer and before you know it the glory of summer will have returned. Hooray summer!

That is all.

P.S. It better not snow before then. Damn snow.

I’m dreaming of a partly cloudy Christmas

With three days to go, Weather Underground is forecasting partly cloudy conditions, a 0% chance precipitation and a chilly high of 2ºC for Christmas Day.

Good: no rain
Good: no snow
Meh: 2ºC isn’t exactly summer weather but it’s still above freezing

I can live with–nay, embrace–this yuletide forecast. A crisp, cold day is roughly a billion times better than a torrent of rain or a bunch of snow that turns to rain and creates rivers of slush and when you come back from a walk you find your pants are somehow soaked all the way to your waist.

So here’s hoping.

Also, I am still sore from my run on Sunday. This is not weather-related but didn’t seem worthy of its own post (I write after devoting yet another post to a cat gif).

Ghost bluster

By coincidence, a bunch of paranormal investigation shows have started airing around dinner time and because I love UFOS, ghosts,  and Bigfoot the way a kid loves candy, I have been watching a few of them. Sadly, the experience has been underwhelming.

The main problem is the shows are not scary. Most of them are kind of dull, the paranormal equivalent of having to watch your aunt and uncle’s vacation slides (think how blessed we are now–your aunt and uncle post their vacation pictures on Facebook and you can easily–and without repercussion–ignore them, no painful, awkward visits necessary).

The formula is roughly the same for each:

  • a group of people (sometimes an “official” ghost investigation unit, sometimes not) finds an allegedly haunted asylum/hospital/prison/hotel, etc to investigate. Usually the place is abandoned or closed, but not always.
  • the investigators get a tour of the location by the owner.
  • the investigation takes place. It happens almost exclusively at night, typically using night vision cameras, motion detectors, and other fancy electronic equipment to find and record spooky shenanigans.
  • the investigators meet again in the day to examine the results and tell the owner that yep, their place is haunted, thanks for letting us check it out!

The meat of each show is the investigation. Here you watch grainy monochrome footage of the investigators walking around in the dark and sometimes you’ll hear a noise off in the background or an unintelligible voice. Sometimes their equipment will light up to indicate something, though nothing is visible or otherwise apparent. Occasionally there might be a little blip of light or something that only shows up on the video replays done in the post-investigation analysis. Does this sound exciting? It could be, if the voices were intelligible and shouted things like, “GET OUT OR I’LL BEHEAD ALL OF YOU WITH MY SPIRIT SWORD!” or if you saw translucent figures float up to dudes with their FLIR cameras and giving them the finger before dematerializing.

But these things do not happen. In fact, the best evidence that the shows are not faked is in how little actually happens. You don’t need to fake a non-event. Which makes me sad. I kind of wish they were faked because they’d be more interesting. Instead, I watch because the alternative is one of the approximately billion reality shows based in Alaska, or something about cars. Americans (all of this programming hails from south of the border) seem to love ghosts, cars, and Alaska. It’s only a matter of time before someone cleverly combines all of these into the ultimate reality show.

Here is how I rank the shows I’ve seen:

  1. Ghost Hunters. One of the oldest shows. It’s low key and a couple of the guys are cute. Nothing much happens. The science angle is there but not pushed much.
  2. Ghost Stalkers. This one is weird. It’s two guys who have had near death experiences and believe there are portals that let the dead come through. One of them seems to be genuinely afraid of everything and jumps and cries out a lot. I don’t think it’s supposed to be funny, but it sort of is. He also seems to get minor scratches or marks on his body because the ghosts won’t stop touching him. As I said, weird.
  3. Ghost Asylum. A bunch of southern boys investigate, and play up the science angle a good bit, but then there’s always a segment where they go to a local store to buy material for ghost traps because they want to catch the ghosts and then free them from the place they are haunting because what ghost wouldn’t appreciate a change of scenery? Usually they return to their home base, use some gizmo to get a reading on the trap, get nothing and shrug, figuring the ghost never got trapped or it got away. Good job releasing tormented spirits into the neighborhood, guys! Each episode ends with someone putting up a framed picture of the group posing in front of the asylum/scary place. I think more people should do that, put up framed pictures of themselves after visiting some place. It doesn’t have to be a haunted asylum. It could be McDonald’s.
  4. Um, I can’t remember the fourth one. Ghost Adventures, maybe? Anyway, people investigated haunted places and stuff and nothing much happened.

How writing late at night compares to pictures of cats

Sometimes when I sit down to write something on this ol’ blog, I do it early in the evening, when I’m just arrived home from work or shortly after dinner, when I am full, content and still reasonably alert. Occasionally I will post during lunch, if I’m feeling especially zany. I do not very often feel especially zany.

More often than I would like I post later in the evening. For example, right now it is 10:47 p.m. and after writing this post I will be off to bed and a night stuffed full of weird dreams, as has been the case of late. The reason I say more often than I would like is if I put off my blog entry until the end of the evening I find my mind has gone mushy and I sometimes stare at the blinking cursor and the only thought that comes to me is, “That cursor sure is blinking there.” And so I post an amusing cat image, because there are about 640 million of them to he had on the web. Cat images easy, writing a semi-intelligent blog post late at night hard.

I should soon have more to say regarding my writing, however, and who knows, eventually I may even resume running and have updates on that. There’s probably a spambot out there somewhere just itching for me to mention running shoes by brand name again, hoping to get in a helpful comment (and link) to some amazingly affordable knockoffs and/or male enhancement pills.

Black Friday, Cyber Monday and Cranky Sunday

My inbox is now filling up with notifications of great Cyber Monday deals, which, by coincidence, are pretty much exactly the same as the Black Friday deals. This and another four weeks of Christmas music everywhere you turn.

It’s not that I hate the holidays or anything…but I kind of do. Christmas in particular–you know, that nutty holiday originally celebrated as the birth of Christ–is now like U.S. elections, seemingly never-ending. And there is no subtle context here, no need to dig to find the reasons, it’s simply because the retail sector wants us to buy their junk and if they can convince you to start Christmas shopping in September, I guess they figure you’ll buy more stuff rather than just get your shopping done three months early and spend the rest of the time annoyed by the millionth playing of “Jingle Bells” on any store’s music system.

The best part about my complaint is that A Charlie Brown Christmas pointed all of this out 50 years ago, and It’s a Wonderful Life did it 19 years before that, in 1946. I’m pretty sure there are cave drawings of carolers being attacked. This is to say that not only is my complaint not new, it’s as old as the universe itself, or pretty close.

Anyway, as part of the Black Friday consumer madness I went out and bought groceries, none of which was holiday-themed.

Then today I went out and bought an Apple Watch. But I did it because my partner also got one and somehow that made it seem logical and proper. Plus today is neither Black Friday nor Cyber Monday. So I’m good.

Yep.

(I’ll have my thoughts on the watch in a few days or so once I’ve gotten used to it. I got the smaller 38 mm model and will say already that it’s lighter and more svelte than I had expected, so that’s a plus. I kind of think Steve Jobs would have hated it, though. More soon™.)

Early holiday thoughts: a correction

A few days ago I posted the following:

The Black Friday nonsense seems to be on the wane, though that may be partly related to the U.S. Thanksgiving coming so late this year. I’ll take what I can get.

I can now verify that this was entirely related to the U.S. Thanksgiving coming so late this year. My inbox is stuffed to the proverbial gills with Black Friday deals. I don’t know if it’s years of Steam sales featuring numerous 75% off deals, but none of these bargains are tempting me in the slightest. I am a bad consumer.

However, if I win $20 million in Saturday’s Lotto 6/49 draw I promise to buy many things and help kickstart the national economy.

But I registered!

The other day I found that my copy of mIRC was showing as unregistered, with the nag screen back in place, something I hadn’t seen for years. I’d just done a Windows update so naturally assumed it was to blame because it was a convenient coincidence.

I had my doubts, though, so when mIRC opened a browser tab that took me to a handy “register your copy of mIRC” page, I looked it over and found this:

Question: Will my registration work with newer versions of mIRC?
Answer: If you are a home user, your registration entitles you to ten years of free updates to new versions of mIRC.

I looked up my original registration email and discovered I had done so in 2004. I actually got a bonus year out of registering, apparently. Strangely, I was still annoyed. On the one hand, getting to use the software for ten years before having to pay again is a pretty good deal when most similar recurring licenses (Office 365, Adobe Creative Cloud, etc.) charge yearly. And yet there was something about the program wiping out my registration as if it never existed–and doing so without warning–that rubbed me the wrong way. I started looking at open source IRC clients but eleven years of using mIRC has made me very comfortable with its interface (and quirks and flaws, of which it has more than a few).

Right now I am running it in “free” mode and putting up with the nag screen while I ponder what to do. I’ll probably pony up the $15 registration fee and be good until 2025. By then I’ll have forgotten all of this and will write this post again.

Why haven’t I won millions of dollars yet?

I have always regarded buying lottery tickets as charity donations, as the odds of winning one of those nice multi-million dollar jackpots is about 1 in 14 million. Those are not good odds. And yet I buy because it’s easy, relatively cheap and the money I spend does go to good things. I’m not one of those unfortunate types who has become addicted to gambling, nor am I one who thinks my odds are improved by buying ten tickets instead of one, I sensibly buy only one per draw.

If I won I wouldn’t spend all my money on hookers and blow. I’d give some to charity, some to friends and family, I’d buy a nice place to live, maybe some new furniture. Nothing fancy or extravagant. Sure, I’d quit my job, but I wouldn’t become the idle rich, I’d work to improve myself. I’d travel and draw and write and help others with their worthy projects. I’d be a swell rich person.

Now I just need a big fat win to demonstrate how wisely I would use my newfound wealth.

This may take awhile.

Two sentence reviews of three tech websites

Here they are:

  • engadget: Consumer-focused tech gear reviews and related stories, with trying-too-hard-to-be-hip writing and just enough typos to make you wince. Every story features a stupidly gigantic image that rarely adds anything but takes up lots of screen real estate.
  • Ars Technica: Sort of a grown-up version of engadget, with more substantive stories and fewer typos. Some of their writers look too young to drive.
  • AnandTech: Anand himself left to join Apple but his site lives on, offering exhaustively detailed reviews of products that includes pages and pages of benchmarks that are probably appreciated by robots or benchmark fan clubs. The layout and design is something a computer might love.