random stuff

Cost of renting Close Encounters of the Third Kind: $97.96

A short time ago I lamented that in the bounty of our digital age where there’s no need to keep pesky physical inventory sitting on store shelves or in a dusty warehouse I could not find anywhere online to rent Close Encounters of the Third Kind and the only place selling it was iTunes for $17.99. At that price you’d think it was an ebook, ho ho.

In the end I found a Blu-ray version for purchase at Best Buy for a mere $9.99, not much more than a rental.

I just needed a Blu-ray player, an HDMI cable and an HDTV to watch it. Luckily I already had the TV.

The rest, once taxes and the you’re-killing-the-earth fees were added brought the total to $97.96. A little more than a rental.

But it looked very nice and the Sony Blu-ray player adds to the growing list of devices we can use to watch Netflix on. I’d make a joke about how you’ll be able to watch Netflix on your toaster soon except some company is probably prototyping that as I write this.

Oh, and the movie holds up nicely, too. I’ll write more on it later but I love the way Spielberg portrays kids as insane, monsters or insane monsters.

The ties, though. You could have picnics on those things.

Book review + Twitter generation = bubble wrap

Here is a review of a hardcover book from a user on amazon.com:

The cover is pretty scratched up and it was late arriving. However, the packaging was geat, lots of bubble wrap to keep it safe.

I think “geat” might be Scottish for “pretty all right”. I shouldn’t blame Twitter and its billions of users for this sort of review as it could have just as easily appeared forty years ago as today. I’m also not sure if this is a troll or something from a very literal-minded person, but I kind of like that this is a succinct review of the actual physical object and not the words contained within.

And hey, if you need lots of bubble wrap, this could be the perfect gift for you or someone you love.

Welcome to Hat Francisco, April 1906

Via a link on digg I was shown this 11-minute film shot on April 14, 1906 in San Francisco, four days before the major earthquake that devastated the city.

While there is a certain tragic quality in seeing these people going about their ordinary lives not knowing the great destruction that was imminent, I was struck by several things. First, the roadway seen in the video–Market Street– is remarkably wide given that much of the traffic was still horse-drawn. Second, I love the utter casualness of the people dashing across and in-between the automobiles, streetcars, bicycles and horse-drawn carriages. Even as they come within inches of being run down, they maintain an air of perfect nonchalance.

Mostly, though, I notice the hats. I watched the entire 11 minutes and did not see a single person, whether man, woman or child, who was not wearing some kind of hat or cap. People loved hats back then. They probably slept while wearing them. Judging from the size of some, I have no doubt that they may have even protected certain people from debris raining down on them during the quake. Seriously, a few women in the film are wearing hats that are about two feet high. By the time a brick got through that it’d probably only muss the hair.

I was also surprised by how many cars there were. Looking it up, the Model T didn’t come out until 1908, so this appears to be the transition period where cars were still too expensive for most but affordable enough for many to no longer be rare. It must have sucked to be a horse back then, having to share the road with a bunch of noisy tin buckets full of yahoos. Fancy yahoos wearing hats.

What does my blog needs? “Ads!”

I asked one of my online friends (they are the best because they can never give me an actual wedgie) what else I could put on my blog, to which he responded “Ads!”

So I went searching for some good ads and found this one from the 1950s or as we call it now, The Age of Enlightenment:

Crazy girl likes jam

I call this “Crazy girl likes jam”. My friend suggested she is thinking about chomping on the fingers and relishing the thought. I think he may be right.

Speaking of The Age of Enlightenment:

Colorful cancer

Lord a-mercy, am I right?

The real question here is how she is keeping that cigarette in her mouth.

Feeling thirsty after your cigarette and jam sandwich? How about some orange juice?

Orange juice creepy

Crazy kids love orange juice. Gives ’em energy for doing all sorts of things. Like MURDER THE FAMILY IN THEIR SLEEP.

Apologies to the sites I appropriated the images from. I just used Google and did a search. You can find the originals easily enough, especially if you read to the next three lines where I link them:

Jam girl from slashfoods.com
Happy smoker of color from Vintage Ad Browser
Crazy orange juice kid from Photoree

And to prove that questionable ads are timeless, here’s an Ars Technica story on AT&T using the September 11th terrorist attacks for a smartphone ad. The AT&T CEO issued an apology which basically amounted to, “Boy, that was pretty dumb, huh?”

The new theme has landed

After using Blocks2 for a good long while I felt it was time for a new coat of paint on the website and have replaced Blocks2 with the Rembrandt theme by Tomasz Mazur. In terms of layout I’ve kept the site pretty much as it was before, right down to using the same header image (which will eventually change) but the body font is now the warmer but still very readable Georgia and the header font is Oswald, one of Google’s web fonts which has a classy modern look to it.

So far I haven’t messed with any CSS directly so I’m still using the parent theme but I expect to be mucking about in it soon enough so I’ll create a child theme to do that. While I never had to worry about changes overwriting the custom work I did to Blocks2 (since it was never updated) that could potentially be a problem with Rembrandt.

For comparison and archival purposes, here is a shot of the modified Blocks2 theme I was using previously:

Blocks2 blog look
Blocks2 blog look

Now I am back to the usual problem of generating worthwhile content.

Six things I like

It’s time for another list!

I am trying to accentuate the positive of late, so here’s a list of six things I like:

  • apple fritters
  • being able to post to the Internet from the comfort of my bed
  • the comfort of my bed
  • new tech toys
  • writing an especially good turn of phrase in a story
  • compliments on accomplishments I’m pleased with
  • the Jonathan Coulton song “Shop Vac”

(I included seven things since I mentioned my bed twice.)

Combating your posting inner demon

Actually it may not even be an inner demon at all but one who hangs around, possibly on your shoulder if small or casually leaning nearby if not, like a shifty friend you can never quite trust.

I am speaking about the urge to post things on message forums that go against both your natural inclination and also your reputation, such as it may be, on the forum in question.

I was once cynical as all get-out and prone to sarcasm that was as thick as maple syrup on a wintry day. The cynicism has faded over time but the sarcastic impulse remains. I indulge myself from time to time, often making myself the primary target.

The difficult moments are when I see someone post something blatantly dumb, redundant or whiny and I fight this hill giant-sized urge to say something sarcastic. I stop myself by thinking about the irony in making a negative comment about something I see as a negative comment.

So instead I keep quiet and soothe myself by tooling around in GTA3 for a bit. As noted in my previous post on GTA3 this inevitably ends with me flipping the vehicle and blowing it up. It would be cathartic if it was intentional but I’m just a really lousy virtual driver.

And a nice guy. So instead of saying it elsewhere I’ll just say it here:

Some people sure complain a lot.

A walk on the windy side

Yesterday I walked around Burnaby Lake in anticipation of actually running it again (hopefully sometime in March–once I resume jogging I’ll have to ramp up slowly before I can tackle the lake’s 11+ km circumference). There was a wind warning in effect that I was unaware of–until my cap whipped off as I strolled around the athletic field. These are the only conditions under which it’s okay to wear my cap in dork mode (backward) because that’s often the only way to keep it on my head.

The walk went quickly (two hours for 14.5 km) and apart from the wind it was decent, with mild temperatures and sun for about half the way. Most encouraging, though, was the first tentative appearance of buds on tree branches. I am calling this the first confirmation that spring is on the way. I approve.

That is all.

The zombie apocalypse is upon us

You see them everyday, their numbers slowly and steadily increasing. They are identified by the familiar gait, the shambling and mindless shuffle of the unthinking, the unfeeling, the unknowing.

“Must text…must post status update…rarrr…”

I am, of course, referring to cell phone users. At first I thought the novelty of the smartphone would wear off–the iPhone is six years old, after all, a veritable lifetime for a tech product–and people would treat the devices like a tool, a convenience.

Instead I see more and more doing the zombie shuffle as they step off trains or walk down sidewalks ever-so-slowly, their heads tilted down, their eyes focused on the tiny screen clutched in their hands, their world compressed into a glossy four to five inch display, their lives inescapably linked to the information conveyed from those tiny screens.

Most of that information being Facebook updates and other miscellany that they somehow survived without just fine for all the years before the smartphone existed.

I have a smartphone and it’s nice. It can be handy, entertaining and as my only actual phone it serves a very practical purpose in keeping me in communication with family, friends and co-workers. But I do not do the zombie shuffle. The Internet offers a smorgasbord of information–much of it dross or more generously, not particularly necessary or enriching. But instead of being discerning, instead of picking and choosing it seems many are gorging instead, filling up on the information equivalent of fast food.

And even that is not all so bad. I can be a slave to pop culture and fads if I want to be (I managed to duck acid wash jeans, though). Mostly I just hate that these slowly shuffling zombies always seem to end up in front of me.

So I guess what I’m saying is, if you’re going to be a brainless zombie checking Twitter for your entire six block stroll, can you at least not shamble down the center of the sidewalk when you do it so I can more easily get by you? Thanks!

P.S. I like the stock photo I found not only because it shows people doing the ‘zombie cell phone walk’ but also because the guy appears to be some sort of hill giant.