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April 19, 2004 23:17 +0000  |  Miscellaneous 0

you remember those beer commercials where this guy was pretending to be monday and all these people are throwing shit at him and he's being all nice and polite? i like that commercial.

anyway. i managed to wake up at the ungodly hour of 8:10 this morning just so i could get into and out of work at a reasonable hour. why you ask? 'cause i'm having dinner with the pretty girl tomorrow night and i have absolutely nothing left to wear. all the hours i've spent on the sustainable living lady's stuff (or putting it off) has led to a backlog of dishes and laundry -- and i'm not showing up tomorrow in sweatpants (ew). so yeah: "t.g.i.m." good day to clean all this stuff up and catch up on everything.

one minor gripe though. when chrystal and i broke up a terrible balance was upset in our lives. together, she had all the cooking equipment and i did all the cooking. now, i tend to starve more and she eats popcorn for dinner. does that seem right to you?

April 18, 2004 01:23 +0000  |  Personal Life Why I'm Here 6

a great day in fact. after my last posting, i admit, i've not been in the best condition. "a mess" while not entirely accurate, is about as close as i can come up with at the moment. but i got a great email from my parents, and some additional support from my friends, so while i'm not "all better" i'm sure things will be fine.

so why is this a great day? why else? i met a pretty girl. great hair, nice smile, and fun to talk to, we walked all over this city today, going from cheesecake to the market, to a record store, to my apartment, to a steakhouse. i learned more about how the city's divided into different sections and re-discovered the "toronto hemp company" where i finally found some rope for my curtains. the company was wonderful and made for great conversation... for eight hours. somehow, things don't seem so terrible anymore.

ps
noreen's mentioned that she'd like to get actual, named credit for being one of those cool friends with all the support through the previous post. so yes: noreen kicks ass. thanks dude.

one final note. it's now 2:32am eastern and my boys have pulled through to take us to game seven back home. after three periods of overtime... morrison bagged the game winner. just a nice end to a good day.

April 16, 2004 01:41 +0000  |  Society & Culture Why I'm Here 2

chrystal got her official posting confirmation to raleigh, north carolina today. she's quite excited, and i'm quite proud -- maybe "proud" isn't quite the right word, but i'm not really feeling very "thesaurical" today. nonetheless, a huge congratulations goes to her, she's known who she was and what she wanted for so long now, it's about time she got it.

this is however, not a happy posting. if you're in a good mood at the moment, go out and enjoy the weather, no need to bring yourself down. come back later if you're really interested. you see, today is a big day for me. lots of stuff happened, chrystal got her long hoped-for posting, i picked up the babylon 5 season 5 dvd and this... this very post is the 100th post in my blog.

so why is this a depressing post? in order to understand you have to know my reasoning for starting this thing. back in december i started out with a big plan. i'd come to the great real city of toronto, and i was going to do great things. i hadn't come to socialise, to make friends, get a job and buy an suv. no -- i'd come to "the centre of the Canadian universe" to find out who i was, and how to do what i felt i was supposed to do. i was going to meet with city officials, propose my big plans and get some shit done.... then i'd be able to go home and relax, knowing i'd done what "i was supposed to do". the whole thing would be chronicled here, in hopes of finding support from friends and family and keeping me on task.

but here i am, 100postings later. and all i have to show for it is some semi-concrete documentation and some time spent with the sustainable living network setting up a lan.

i wish this was easier. i wish i had the mind to understand how this sort of thing gets done, but every time i show my ideas to people it's met with decimating apathy or half-hearted, directionless encouragement. i was good at school -- school was easy. i had a task, it was written down. normally i would finish and be helping my friends long before everyone else was through the gate, but this... no instruction, no direction, just ideas, passion and a whole, damning heap of apathy. most people here don't recycle. they'd rather drive 6blocks to work than walk or take the subway. they complain about gas prices, but scoff at wind power, and every thursday there are 22 plastic bags full of garbage on the sidewalk on my way home from work. how do i fight that? i'm stranded here with a head full of ideas and no idea where to put them. and the worst part, the really terrible part -- is that i'm not even fighting here. an enemy, a task, a job -- they're all easy. but moving people, changing minds, when those minds have no interest in anything other than the hockey game... that'll cut the heart right out of anyone.

i don't know what to do. i left home to find myself, my calling. and here i am doing the same thing i was doing back home. working 9-5 paying off visa so i afford rent and food. and this blog contains more about the cancelling of tv shows than it does about anything of any real importance. i can feel myself slipping... but i'm not sure whether it's more into bitterness or dispair.

April 15, 2004 19:06 +0000  |  Geek Stuff 1

you won't understand why this is SO VERY COOL unless you're remotely familiar with X|HTML & CSS. but trust me. this is frickin' amazing.

April 14, 2004 04:20 +0000  |  Personal Life 3

for those who were interested, here are the pictures noreen has been pestering me to publish.

u of tu of tu of t

the pictures of actual people are, of course behind a login. so if you want to see those, you can use the same username/password you use on this page. merry: email me with what you want for a user/pass and i'll hook you up.

April 12, 2004 06:30 +0000  |  Geek Stuff 2

so it turns out that when i upgraded my blog i missed a very important bit of the upgrade: the database. this oversight caused none of the comments to work, so if you left a comment anytime between now and then, sorry, i missed it.

the sad (or funny, i guess) part about all this is that the person who found the bug was my grandmother -- thinking that it was her own inexperience with the web that was causing her comments not to show up when it was in fact my own lack of attention to detail and testing that was the problem. so yeah, next time, if you see something like this, please tell me. i don't want to be responsible for confusing my grandmother anymore ;-)

April 12, 2004 06:08 +0000  |  Personal Life 3

noreen and merry came to visit me today -- all the way from vancouver. along with them, i got to meet mer's cousin, and noreen's friend dave, both of which are very cool people. we did a whole tour of the more asian parts of the city, including china town and a restaurant called "congee". they were convinced that i could actually like chinese food if i would only give it a chance and have "good" chinese food, so they took me out to this congee place. i don't understand really. why doesn't anyone believe me when i tell them that i've had all kinds of chinese food and not liked a lick of it? i learned some more about cantonese, mandarin and the cultural history of China from dave, so while i may not have had anything "good" to eat, i at least had a good time... merry joked that i'd been given the full triad tour: china town, congee, and then, bubble tea @midnight.

we also visited the legislature and the university of toronto and took some great pictures which i'll post later. noreen and i "caught up" on things and merry and i had some great conversation -- something we could have done more of back in our highschool days, but somehow that never seemed to happen.

we did eggspectations and a lot of walking, everyone came up to my place to check out the view, and we enjoyed some healthy debate on which hobbit accompanied gandalf to minas tirith in "the return of the king". turns out that merry and i were on the wrong side of that one... o well.

noreen is still just as stressed and playing the part of atlas, and merry is still an absolute joy to be around -- john there's a lucky guy. noreen's got a lot of stressful decisions and a difficult path left to walk, but she's made it this far, so i'm confident that she'll find a way -- she always does. i just wish she'd try to smile a little more... the vibes she's carrying with her are just so intensely weighted that i sometimes worry that she's forgetting why she's doing all this... i guess that's why she has people like merry and i.

i had a great time this weekend, finishing off with a great hotdog from a street vendor that is apparently open 24/7 from now 'till winter... this city is getting cooler every night ;-) thanks for coming out you two, you really made my month.

April 10, 2004 04:53 +0000  |  Nifty Links Society & Culture 6

cbc is running a contest to see who we, as Canadians think is the "greatest Canadian" -- ever. you may have seen the ads while you were watching hockey night in Canada. anyway, while i was sifting through the names, looking for ideas of who to vote for myself, and hoping to find my grandfather's name, i found the following names:

and those are just those i could quick pick out of the list. some of the accomplishments of the people i didn't recognise are staggaring, while the Canadian heritage of others was surprising to say the least. i'm not sure who to vote for yet, as i'm torn between Trudeau, Pearson and David Suzuki. who would you vote for?

April 09, 2004 20:43 +0000  |  Miscellaneous 0

it's a pretty day, so i took some pictures from my apartment to share. i've also included some shots of the wind turbine and the cn tower i took last weekend during my wanderings...

the first urban wind turbine in north americathe cn towerthe first urban wind turbine in north america
the view todaythe view todaythe view today

the colour in that last one appears a bit weird i know... photoshop's autolevels seems to have gibbled it somehow, but i'm not interested in changing it, so there you go ;-) and yes, that's the "lake" just past the buildings... it seems to go on forever, but still doesn't feel like the ocean.

April 09, 2004 07:54 +0000  |  Geek Stuff 0

you probably won't even notice unless i point it out, but you're looking at a new version of the blogger. the software itself still has no name, but i've managed to come up with a name for "my" blog... it's long, but i think its appropriate.

new features include:
  • better search engine - now you can search both the blog entries and the comments and it works more like google does, but with less content ;-) ie. you can search for bush "our number one enemy" and your results will only include posts containing the word "bush" and the prase "our number one enemy".

  • bad code stripper - after i read about angela's bad experience with spammers in her blog, i got to thinking that i should restrict bad code from popping up in there. no one's tried yet, but i like to be prepared.

  • new user management - i built a rudimentary user object to handle user data from now on and have also abandonned persistent sessions in favour of cookies because... well... i could go in to it, but let's just leave it with: i was an idiot to use sessions in this fashion in the first place

  • the time is now in a standard format - i tried a few variations on formatting the timestamp you see at the top of each post. this one, while more cryptic than a few of the other options, had the benefits of (a) being a recognised standard style (apache uses this format in it's logfiles for example) and (b) it can tell you that it was written in eastern standard time, so the blogger is now as time-passive as possible... if that's even a proper term.

  • new and improved swear filter - it's more expandable now, less restrictive. now i can make up a list of exactly how i want to lock out bad words... i can even rename them: "instead of 'shit' say 'poo' as in bull 'poo', 'poo' head, and this 'poo' is cold" ...mmmkay ;-) i plan to expand it later to include support for those dorky smileys everyone is so fond of.

  • printable layout - it was easy to do, so i threw it in.
i also laid the groundwork for a few other major adjustments still to come. most notably an ugly bug that rejects your comments if you forget to put your name and blows away all of your post (ew). for now, uh... just don't do that kay? it only happens if your comment is really long, and if it does happen, just hit the back button on your browser and things should work. it's next on my list of stuff to fix.

so yeah, enjoy the blog. i'm going to bed.