from an email i just sent to an old friend:

i've been more or less spinning my wheels against a brick wall in my time here. little or no progress has been made in my attempt to help build a greener toronto. i've met up with zero help and minimal encouragement from the people here. toronto's a strange place. back home you could see the maze, and you knew the cheese was there... you knew you were supposed to run the maze, and most of us did... but we all saw it for what it was. out here, people don't seem to get that. they're so wrapped up in climbing the ladder and working 48hour weeks for shit pay, that they don't know how to just "fuck it and relax for a day". and disinterest in the rat's maze is taken for lack of aspiration... it's eerie and i'm not a fan.

well sort of. natasha took me to meet her extended family yesterday. they're sorta the equivalent of ruth and jeanie i suppose. the advice given me before the meeting? don't talk about politics. they're right-wingers and they'll crush you.

now if you know me at all, you should know that "crushing" me is damn near impossible when it comes to political discussion, but i wasn't going to make waves here. if i were bringing my girl to meet ruth or ella, i'd want them to get along too, so i promised i'd behave.

"behave"... that's a very complex word with a lot of weight behind it. you see, natasha forgot one very important element in the list of stuff not to discuss: micros~1. you see, "roy" her surrogate father worked for microsoft for about 5years and he thinks they're "a very good corporate citizen" and wanted to discuss this topic at length with me.

i've never been in a more socially difficult position in my life. how do you look at the father of a girl you really like and try to convince him that you're a man of principle without discussing your principles? the man was completely disrespectful to me, and i could do nothing but take it and play nice, because if i took the gloves off, he'd hate me forever and i'd still lose. i felt like a rabid dog on a leash while the man did nothing more than lecture me on the mountains of FUD he'd adopted during his years in redmond.

it wouldn't have been so bad, had he not insisted on citing his "age and wisdom" as support for his argument... it wasn't much of an argument anyway, i got to say very little. i mean, where the hell does he get off? i'm sure he's very intelligent and knows his way around writing a lot of different kinds of software, but that doesn't even begin to give him the right to lecture me on a software development model that he's never even experimented with and knows nothing about. the whole experience was so very aggravating, and he was so very smug about the whole thing, i'm afraid that i'll not be able to be as civilised if we ever meet again.

to say anything more would be overkill. "had a good day".

sad news today. the actor who played "doctor stephen franklin" on babylon 5 died yesterday. this marks the second occasion in which the actor playing the doctor on a large-scale sci-fi series has been the first of the cast to die. the other case of course, was deforest kelly, who played "our man bones" or "doctor leonard mcoy" on the original star trek series.

according to toronto's metro newspaper, "parameditcs who treated biggs suggested 'the cause of death was "either an aneurysm or massive stroke'". biggs was 44.

it's nearly 6am now and i have to try to get some sleep before i get on a bus to guelph tomorrow, but i wanted to blog something before i went to bed. pavel introduced me to a girl some time ago, but these past few days with her have been exceptional. since thursday, i've spent nearly every waking hour with her (and some not so waking) ...and for the hours not spent with her, i've been thinking about her a great deal. the details of who she is aren't really the kind of thing you discuss on a blog i don't think, but i do what to say that she makes me happy ...and at times, i'm absolutely taken with her. more to come... i hope.

well it's over. angel is finished. i don't think i liked the ending though. it didn't feel like an end -- probably because it was never intended to be. they killed off my favourite character and the whole thing ended in a hopeless battle... normally you'd think that that sounds like a cool ending, but in joss' world, you just know something really freakin' cool woulda happened next. what could joss have topped "well personally, i kinda wanna slay the dragon" with? i'm sad...

really sad to see it go. not only because it was an excellent show, but because it was good storytelling... storytelling that's being replaced with absolute garbage. sigh. o well. i guess i'll just have to buy the dvds and pretend there's still something good on. i'll be cancelling my cable in the morning.

some interesting quotes from the finale:

• illyria: "i'll make trophies from their spines"
• connor: "how do ya like that 'dress for less'?"
• illyria: "would you like me to lie to you now?"
• spike: "ephulgant"
• gun: "what would you do if i said that nothing you do here mattered?"
• angel: "can you guess which word in there you should have left out?"

all of the above paraphrased of course. joss is really quite brilliant -- i only hope that one day he'll find backers who are really interested in telling good stories as opposed to whatever the hell the wb is interested in.

i've run across the following links lately and thought i'd include them in one shot:

• the federal ndp are hosting a big party with music etc in the toronto area to raise cash for the upcoming election and help gather the youth vote. lefties in the area and even those who don't necessarily lean left but would dig a good show should jack it up. i know, lame name -- but what can you do. his name is jack
  
  
• diesel sweeties has a particularly blasphemous comic today. makes me laugh out loud every time i read it. better than jesus helps me trick people, behold god's chihuahua named "peanut"
  
  
• lastly, if you're feeling sadistic, techtv has a short article on how to turn a $5 camera into a mini-tazer to shock your friends.

well some of you may have noticed but i uploaded the new blogger code changes a couple days ago. i just didn't want to mix this post in with mention of iraqi prisoner torture or my trip to ottawa. but it's here now. new features include:

• fixt the anti-spammer code in the comments. now only specific code is allowed in there including basic stuff like: <div>, <span>, and <a>. yes, i'm aware that with some creative coding you can do some rather fun stuff with even those tags, but it'll prevent dumb shit like javascript auto-redirects and intentional breaking of the layout to some degree
  
  
• blogger links are now highlighted: wyrdsister, jeanie, lavendarglass, anna, smyli. see? isn't it nifty?
  
  
• the search engine has been modified to let you limit the number of days you want to search. this is handy if you only want stuff from the last 10days or so. i've also set it up so that an administrator can search for '' (nothing) and bring up everything... handy if you want a list of comments posted in the last x days.
  
  
• i added two new modules to the sidebar: "tv that doesn't suck" -- 'cause it occured to me that there's so very little, and a content licence handled by the creative commons. the gist of the licence is that you can copy and distribute anything you see here, but not for profit.

...and that's about it. small update this time through i suppose. i'm working on a better way to handle the stylesheets lately, so that'll likely be the next big change.

i just got back from ottawa. possibly my last trip up there... ever. can you feel the tears? the sorrow? the loss? ...didn't think so. the trip up was interesting though. after getting a very late start out of the city (i got lost... go figure) i ended up in the middle of a horrendous thunderstorm complete with torrents of golf ball-sized raindrops and sheets of water coming up off the road.... at 100km/hr. the visibility was uhhh "soupy" hence the tile of this posting.

but when i finally got to the little hamlet of ottawa (did you care that it's tulip festival week there? neither did i) i dropped in on the elgin street diner and had yet another bowl of their vegetarian vegetable soup. i swear, if i ever go back there, it'll be entirely for the soup. it's fantastic. i stayed the night @chrystal's and spent the better part of saturday walking and napping as "hellboy" wasn't playing anywhere in town and in ottawa, even with something as amazing as the tulip festival brewing, there's still really nothing to do unless you're a tourist. we did however meet angela and her friend matt for breakfast at eggspectation so i could say "hi" and get my babylon5 dvds back (yay!)

after breakfast, some walking and desperate looking for something to do, we gave up and headed to blockbuster (apparently, chrystal doesn't like independent video stores... big american chains are apparently "better" somehow). we rented the final instalment of the matrix trilogy (chrystal had yet to see it) and "big fish" and watched them both on her tiny, mono, 19 tv... there's something seriously wrong with that thought, but she refuses to get a better setup. big fish however was really quite good. i recommend a rental or a download. since it's tim burton, i'll likely be buying it once i cancel my cable and have nothing to watch.

next day came too soon and we packed up syntax for her big trip down to the big smoke. i stuffed her in that box she hates so much and started out on my drive, this time in daylight and for the first time, ontario appeared pretty to me. it's actually quite nice outside the smog when the landscape isn't frozen and you're in an air-conditioned rental car... not mountains though... i miss my mountains.

so syntax is with me now. and she'll be here for about 3months while chrystal makes the transition to living with the americans in raleigh. apparently, the security folks on the american side insist on holding her stuff for near a month while they look it over, but won't even hold syntax in quarantine for an hour, so when she gets settled down south, i can just put syntax on a plane and chrystal can pick her up on the other side.

it's a bit hard on me though. tough to explain without sounding ridiculous. but when i left ottawa, i left a girl i loved and a cat i loved to come to a smoggy city alone. it made sense then, and it still does now, but that doesn't mean that i don't miss waking up next to the both of them on my sundays. and now they're both moving so far away. far enough that i'll not likely see them for years unless some coincidence brings us together for a day or two. i'm going to miss them both terribly.

today was my first real encounter with smog. for those of you who don't really know, smog is not just that yellow-orange haze that rests on the horizon at twilight. no, real smog is the stuff that is so ever-present that glancing down the block requires a full minute-long stare... just to make out whether or not you see the streetcar coming.... less than a block away. the air is no longer even pretending to be clear -- a thick, suffocating gray rests on everything... it's downright scary.

but in spite of it all, i managed to go out and take some nice photos. full sized versions will be on the imager soon, but not yet: