i heart tim burton. that's probably why i liked this movie so much. every time i see one of his flicks, i feel like he's stuck a big long pointy knife into his head, cut out a pie-shaped piece and arranged it into cute little parts on the screen for us all to see. yes, that's the best metaphor i can do for my favourite director. he rocks.

i've never read the story. i never saw the original movie, so i suppose my experience with this version is probably very different from what the rest of you might have, but for me it was like many of his other movies: pretty, fascinating, and just creepy enough to make you shake your head in disbelief every once in a while. there were a few scenes where i just sat there, wide-eyed, trying to suck in the entire experience of the film because what i saw before me was so amazing.

if you're expecting cute and fun, you might be disappointed though. burton's vision of the story was more dark and disturbing than happy and friendly. johnny depp, as always was awesome and as usual, just a little scary too. do see it though. if only just for the boat ride.

ha ha
this looks good ;-)

so as you might have heard, micros~1 has decided to make windows update (not security related stuff, so relax) only available to people who have paid for windows. the "technology" is called "genuine advantage" and it's taken them months to develop.

...and someone cracked it in 24hours ;-)

i have a very vivid memory of a lecture i received from a friend years ago when i visited her in montreal. i was (gasp) attempting to wear socks with my sandals outside... in public. she refused to allow me to leave until i remedied the situation. "that's an incredible fashion faux pas daniel. i can't be seen with you like that". that moment in time has stuck with me for years now, though i still continue to wear socks and sandals whenever and wherever i damn well please.

but the other day, as i was putting them on, hurrying out the door and i thought of that moment again... "i'll have to blog this" i thought. later that day, sure enough, my lack of fashion awareness was once again pointed out to me, though not as rudely as in montreal, so i guess i should say a few things here.

first of all. i strongly believe that "fashion is what you adopt when you don't know who you are." -- quentin crisp. i like wearing socks with my sandals. it suits practicality, keeps my feet clean, i dont' slide all over the place inside, no rocks fall between my toes and my clearly-in-need-of-tlc toenails are neatly covered. why should i bend to the will of the fashionistas for such things? it's not like socks and sandals is unhygenic, no. the issue is that someone with clout decided it was bad (like wearing white after labour day... wtf?) and everyone else just fell in line.

ladies and gentlemen please. stop doing what the tv tells you. better yet, just throw it out.

now i'm not ragging on fashion as an art form. gods know there's some real talent out there and everyone loves looking at pretty people in pretty clothes. my only objection is this blind following of "rules" that make no sense.

i leave you now with a few other quotes i found online that i find rather relevant:

• a fashion is nothing but an induced epidemic
  -- George Bernard Shaw, irish dramatist & socialist (1856 - 1950)
• fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months
  -- Oscar Wilde, irish dramatist, novelist, & poet (1854 - 1900)
• you should aim to be independent of any one vote, of any one fashion, of any one century
  -- gracian
• i base my fashion taste on what doesn't itch
  -- gilda radner

andrea just sent me this interesting article on truth (or rather, the lack thereof) in the media:

I'm going to do my best to make this sound less like an anti-microsoft rant and more like a rational argument. You go ahead and let me know if I manage it.

microsoft has patented the emoticon. You know, this: :-). Their reasons behind this are obvious: if you own the rights to something as basic and commonplace as an emoticon, you can attack your opponents in the legal realm rather than battle it out in a fair fight. They no doubt hope that patents like this can later be leveraged to help corner the market on the more prominent "killer-apps" out there: email, messaging etc.

So what's the big deal? They got smart and patented something that will probably make them a lot of money. Why should you care? What's important here is not the act itself but the precedence. if :-) can be owned, why not whole phrases? A move like this grants a single company power over more than three characters, it's power over communication and more importantly, your use of their property.

The world is getting more connected technologically and we are becoming more and more dependent on this technology in order to communicate. The question has to be asked: where do we draw the line?

Try to think about the far-reaching implications. This kind of culture "ownership" has only one end result. Decades from now, people will, without a doubt be heavily dependent on computers. Thoughts will not only be shared vocally, but very likely by all sorts of yet-to-be-dreamt-of marvels, and it's at this stage where patents become a serious danger. If your communication can be regulated by technology, it can also be controlled.

Here's one sad example: 30years from now, a young girl interested in a young boy passes him a note to his own digital terminal one afternoon while the teacher isn't looking... The note includes, among other things, questions about a show she missed last night, an invite to a party and a little casual flirting. But due to controls on certain keywords, she's avoided using the name of the show in question in order to avoid paying the licencing. She did however, spring for the cost of the emoticon symbolising "i think you're cute", because she didn't want him to think less of her.

Years ago, Shift printed an absolutely stunning article entitled The Privatisation of our Culture covering this subject and it's still online... no doubt because it remains relevent.

i know, they're not really even remotely related, but it seemed dumb to post these separately. before i get into anything though, take a minute to look at this shot of saturn. courtesy of nasa's photojournal. thanks to colin for this shot and the following links.

we'll do the cool, but questionable first. apparently, the brainy-types at the european space agency seem to think that there might be life on titan. that is to say, life in the form of tiny microbes that eat hydrogen particles in the atmosphere. they're going to attempt to test for this by sampling the atmosphere at various depths with the esa's shiny huygens probe. sounds exciting really. the whole time i was reading the article, i kept hearing the sound of mr. lowen's voice (my grade 9 physics "teacher") in my head: "life doesn't exist anywhere else in the universe" he said. maybe this is why he's still a grade 9 science teacher -- no imagination.

the second link i have for you is pretty damn cool... even if it is all about walmart. finally, the brains in business are starting to realise that building construction favouring energy efficiency and renewable energy production is actually good for the bottom line. walmart has built a superstore in mckinney, texas that uses all manner of new technologies to dramatically reduce its footprint on the earth while simultaneously saving them a great deal of money. it's very cool, and long past due. it's just too bad that it's walmart that has to be first on this sort of thing. it's almost enough to make me like them -- but not quite.

...and apparently they're morons too.

the world wildlife fund needs your support to try to teach our "fearless leaders" that drilling for oil in the middle of a protected wildlife reserve is a bad idea. you'd think they'd know this already and act acordingly, but one assumes that some oil company wants it and that they've managed to convince our "government" to act on their behalf. do me a favour (not to mention the thousands of species that live there) and sign the petition. normally, i don't much care for these things, but this isn't pettiononline, it's the wwf and they know what they're talking about.

it's taken the entire day.

i woke up at noon, proceeded to eat some food and start reading the instructions for installing my new air conditioner. i was somewhat horrified at the whole prospect actually, mainly because i have a well-earned reputation for not knowing what i'm doing when it comes to anything typically reserved as a "manly" art. cars? well i know some of their names (thanks chris). i like my canucks -- course i was introduced to them by michele. and home improvment? heh... well my dad taught me how to hammer a nail so...

i realised i needed something to support the a/c from the balcony, so i headed off to Canadian tire, where i spent hours looking for just the right thing -- it doesn't exist. instead, i settled for second best: a big plastic collapsable support horse... that was 2.5" too short. i bought some light bulbs, some handy boxes for my mess of cables, and some duct tape 'cause if i'm going to be doing anything with tools, i'm going to need duct tape ;-)

when i got home, i didn't set about installation just yet. first i had to go through that mess of cables and sort it all out into my new shiny boxes. i now have every part of my formerly known as "cabling box of fun" sorted into neatly wrapped sets, all held together with the tape. then i had to move everything from one side of my apartment to the other and re-setup everything since the one free window i had was just too small. when that was all finished, i finally set about installing the beast.

most of the instructions were useless for me since they called for screwing things into the frame etc and my frame is all metal and glass... oh yeah, and i rent. instead, i setup my shiny horse, cut off some styrofoam from the a/c packing and duct taped it to the top... 3" -- "well the weight should even it out" i reasoned.

more screws, then lots of heavy lifting, sliding, screws again and then... it was done. it's quiet, sealed with foam, and everything is at just the right angle. all the time after i kept thinking about that old (horrible, but funny) movie, cabin boy: i shall leave a cabin boy, but return a cabin man! -- heh.

perhaps we first need to get our facts straight. (thanks to my grandma for the link)