random stuff

I wore shorts today!

Yes, I wore shorts today. Outside, even. I was worrying they would start to moulder in the chest drawer.

Update on the Nike sync issue: Doing a Google search for the Nike sync issue gave me a link to my own blog post complaining about the issue. How circular! Today the iPod successfully synced to the Nike+ website. Yay. But Wednesday’s run still didn’t show up anyway. Boo. My second Twitter message ever has been sent to Nike Support (yes, tech support over Twitter) and I am awaiting a reply but it appears the solution will likely be for me to provide the basics of the run after which they will manually update it for me, hopefully with all of the data intact (splits, etc.) The new Nike+ site is definitely much improved over the old one but it seems they are still having the same old problems with the back end of it. Bleah.

But still, I wore shorts today!

Smartphone: good for inspecting dodgy sour cream

I am far from the first person to do this but I’ve done it a few times now so I am recording it for posterity.

I used to be able to hold things right up to my nose and keep focus on them. Then again, I also used to be in grade 3. Time marches on.

When I couldn’t quite make out the expiry date on a tub of sour cream (and who wants to eat sourer cream?) I took a photo of the tub using my phone, then zoomed the image in to read the date, as seen below.

Sadly it turned out the date really was kind of illegible all along.

The best I could figure was August 28, which at the time would not have been past the expiry. I passed, anyway, just to be safe.

See? With age you may lose focal strength but you gain wisdom.

I’m sorry, blog, I won’t leave you!

Yes, I have been negligent in not updating the blog of late. I don’t have a good excuse, so this serves as notice that I shall post more regularly starting with this post here.

And then another tomorrow!

(Which will hopefully have more content than this one.)

Proto-mastheads

While mulling over a blog site redesign (which I’m leaning more against, though tweaks are possible) I looked at some of the other images I had made to use as a possible masthead/header for the site.

And here they are!

Sims 3 masthead

This Sims 3 masthead I rejected because while it’s cute, it just looks odd visually with the breakaway walls of the house and it’s difficult to see who the other person being hugged is, which lessens the (allegedly) humorous nature of it.

I still like this one. It’s maybe too centered and it’s my partner, not me, strolling along through the woods. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, it just seems odd to feature someone else in the masthead of my own blog. Then again, I ain’t fishing in the one that’s up there now.

Barley is, like most chocolate labs, eminently photogenic. The biggest problem with this image is that I no longer live in the same house as Barley, so the picture isn’t strictly accurate anymore. But he’s so dang cute.

I’ll probably peruse the photos I have to see if anything stands out as a solid replacement for Buntzen Lake. I do really like that shot, I just wonder if sometimes some poor sod might stumble across my blog and expect some kind of nature thing instead of my rambling nonsense.

Goodbye November, and good riddance

This month sucked like a Twilight vampire but without the sparkling. The sparkling would have at least added something.

But it was sunny today, so there was that.

Goodbye November, you stinky old month.

And hello, December! This year you promise to be filled with pleasant weather and nice things, yes? Please say yes!

SkyTrain clown car

Today I decided to buy some groceries out near Lougheed Town Centre late in the afternoon. This was a bad idea because I knew I would be caught in the rush hour traffic coming back. Sure enough, at the Lougheed SkyTrain station the first train pulled in and it was packed not unlike a sardine can. What amazed me, though, is how the car in front of me began disgorging passengers and after a good 10 or 15 seconds was still disgorging passengers. Ten or fifteen seconds may not sound very long but for a SkyTrain car this is a very long time indeed. And yet for as many people that improbably kept streaming out of the car, a good number remained in. The car had barely started to load passengers from th platform when the ‘clear out, this sucker is moving’ chime sounded and the doors tried to close.

My speculation is a wormhole developed in that particular car and it was letting out passengers from other cars all across the three SkyTrain lines in the Lower Mainland. That’s the only reasonable explanation, really.

Now hiring (a limited time offer)

The HMV store at the corner of Burrard and Robson is sporting some new signs lately, as seen in this photo I took the other day. Compare the small sign on the left to the rather large one on the right.

I guess they need someone to help unload those Everybody Loves Raymond DVD sets at 50% off. And if you get fed up with the job, no problem, you won’t have it for very long, anyway!

Unclear on the concept, Parts 26 and 27

Two recent photos captured via my phone.

This first photo was taken from the Sapperton SkyTrain station. As you can see there is also a rail line that travels beside the SkyTrain at ground level. As you can also see there is a car carrier whose driver appears to be unclear on the concept of how gates at railway crossings work. This could have been messy with all that coal.

Unfortunately I could not discretely take the next photo so I had to use the phone camera’s zoom function and accidentally engaged out-of-focus mode. This is a woman standing directly beneath a SMOKING IS PROHIBITED sign outside of Wal-Mart. I say no more.

Why does this ad bother me?

Hopefully I can find a copy of the ad because visual aids always help, but in case I can’t, there is a recent promotion from a mobile phone company for a family bundle package. The slogan used in the ad is this:

The family that saves together, smiles forever.

Any proper Grammar Nazi will immediately get his hackles up over the gratuitous comma, but it’s the actual phrase that rubs me the wrong way. First, linking saving with smiling seems natural — saving makes you happy, being happy results in smiling. Logical. But smiling over savings, no matter how fantastic, is a transitory experience, not one that lasts forever. This brings to mind an image of the family all gathered in the afterlife, still grinning away over their great cellphone bundled savings, even as they no longer need an unlimited plan to reach through the nether to scare surviving relatives. Alternately I picture a pharaoh being buried with his family, sealed away for all time under a great pyramid, each family member clutching a cell phone to his or her hand. If they had cell phones in ancient Egypt, that is. Or maybe I’m projecting because of that ancient Egypt episode of Futurama I saw recently.

In any case, the slogan is creepy.

Mobile post ahoy

This is a test post from the WordPress mobile app. I believe I will do this in the future only if I succumb to total madness, which extended use of this tiny virtual keyboard on my iPhone will surely cause to happen.

New masthead, now with more picture

I finally got off my figurative butt and inserted a graphic as part of the masthead for the blog. As of this writing it is a photo I took at Buntzen Lake during a hike in January. I am planning on rotating through a number of images. I’ll probably jazz up the site a bit more in the coming weeks, though I am undecided on how best to do this. I can’t decide between animated gifs or auto-playing midi files. If only the <BLINK> tag was still supported.

In case the image mentioned above isn’t the current one, here it is below (click for full-size):