It's very likely that most everyone reading this does not care in the slightest, but on the off chance that you might, FINAL FANTASY XII IS RELEASED TOMORROW!

I've already reserved my collector's edition game (shiny, metal case), and collector's strategy guide (complete with art compilation). I fell in love with Final Fantasy years ago and every time a new one is released I get a little giddy.

I don't care that this one purchase will likely run me about $140. It's FINAL FANTASY!

Alright, I'm done.

On a slightly related note (in the sense that this may help me one day pay for the above mentioned obsession) I have a phone interview tomorrow with a cool music company here in Toronto. Wish me luck :-)

What do you eat when you're unemployed? How 'bout $3.25 gyros at Alexandros on the Danforth?

Tanya Chapman, a dear friend of mine officially launched her first novel last night at Revival, a little venue on College Street. "King" has been in the works for years and I remember when she started working on it: That girl would not stop writing and rewriting. Tan is a force when she's determined.

After years of writing and more years of looking for a publisher, she finally found a buyer in Coah House Books, the people who brought us UTOpia last year. She's done an amazing job and I'm so proud of her. I have a copy here next to me... it's quite the thing to see the name of someone you care about printed across the face of a book.

Congratulations Tan. This is your victory. You earned it.

You'd think that being unemployed with no definite job on the horizon would be a scary thing but so far, I'm rather optimistic. I had a job interview today (details below) and have another one tomorrow. Not only that, but Noreen has been super-awesome and has been sending me job ads she's discovered in travels every day. The market is pretty good in Toronto presently so I'm not too worried.

Today's interview was awesome -- at a nice medium-sized company with a small company atmosphere right downtown. The HR guy was friendly and receptive and the job looked to be exciting.

It's at about this point that you should notice that the tense of the above paragraph is in the past. You see, while I killed on the interview, they ran into one rather important sticking point: They're a 100% Microsoft shop and I don't do Windows.

Now I should make it clear that my position on Windows is not one out of spite. I'm sure there's a lot of really neat things that can be done with Microsoft software. No, I couldn't take the job because frankly, Linux stuff is Very Different from Windows stuff. Sure, if you know one you can work your way through the other, but it's practically unheard of for one person to be straddling both architectures. The technologies are just too foreign to each other.

And so I'm onto the next set of interviews, hoping that the next company is as cool as this last one. But I'm not worried.

Not yet at least.

I love hot food in the morning after a long night of coding. But I love it even more when it's made and brought to me by a pretty girl :-)

Praise be to the one who discovered caffeine, it's finally up. The media will be checking it out over the next few days and sometime between now and next week I have to add in the bits of feature creep Stephen's been pestering me about, but for now... it's done.

Of course, by "it" I'm referring to the TPSC's elections site, a.k.a. the thing that's been consuming almost as much of my time as Melanie lately. It's almost 5am now and I've just put it live.

It looks pretty slick though, and the scalability is awesome. We'll be adding in cool stuff like candidate questionnaire results and incumbent voting records very soon. I hope this is all worth it though. It's now up to our media people to drive eyeballs to the site. For now though, I'm going to bed.

If you have a few minutes, please check out the site and tell me what you think (please be kind). If you're living in Toronto, you should definitely check out your ward to see what your voting options are next month.

Lastly, a big thanks must go to Stephen Young for running this whole thing and to David Lewis for doing all the fabulous design work (and Google Maps.. very cool). I'd also like to commend all the researchers who poured themselves into the project, I do believe Stephen has some sort of thankyou in mind.

Alright, that's it. I'm going to bed.

Call me naive if you like, but I was really hoping to be surprised by the Conservatives this time around. Here we are at a crucial moment in the Planet's history and Stephen Harper stands at the helm of one of the worst polluting countries in the world. But instead of doing the Right Thing, the Conservatives have opted to abandon Kyoto and persue a plan that will do nothing but kill more trees for the paper it's printed on.

The short version of the plan in plain English:

We will do nothing until we consult with industry and discuss what needs to be done. We don't care that this has already been done over the last twenty years, we want to look like we're doing something.

We will put intensity limits on carbon production but will do nothing to curb the overall number of carbon producers so carbon output can only increase.

But most importantly, we will join the Americans in working out of step with the rest of the world, thereby ensuring the failure of the Kyoto Protocol.

Sadly, the minute Canada pulled out of Kyoto, any plan the Conservatives had in mind was automatically an abysmal failure. We can't beat global warming alone. It will take honest commitments from all nations and there's no way to ensure that by backing out of the simplest of international agreements.

Never before have I been more ashamed to be Canadian. On behalf of my country, I apologise to everyone who has a stake in the survival of our species. We have failed you. We have failed ourselves.

It may be hard to see, 'cause I've tried to make the whole desktop shot look pretty, but that's Internet Exploder running on my Linux system. It's easy to do with the help of IEs4Linux, a stupid-simple script that you download, run, answer 4 questions and *poof* you have a link to Exploder on your desktop. Very slick stuff.

"But why would you do this?" you might ask. The answer is that while Exploder sucks, the masses still insist on using it and therefore I have to test my sites against it and I'd like to not have to boot into Windows to do that.

My time is officially booked between November 2nd and 6th as that's when my dad and his best friend will be in town! I'll be showing them around the city and would appreciate any suggestions for sightseeing in November :-)

I have an appointment with a nutritionist tomorrow at 12:15. I'm hoping I'll be able to get some advice as to which foods I need to get into me to hopefully solve this cloudy mess I find myself in. What better time to look into this than when I obviously have time time?