Mon, 16 Dec 2002
The days have been just zipping by of late. Work has been keeping me busy, and with old friends moved back to town I am much more frequently occupied in the evenings. Not that I am complaining mind you.
Because I have been so relatively active, it has been more important for me to ensure all my nutritional needs are filled. To that end, I went out and bought some multi-vitamins. Not a very big step, but especially with the winter meaning I'm not going to get as much fresh produce, it will certainly help.
The sound of the capsules rattling around in the container must have sounded too much like cat food to Griffith, because suddenly he was quite eager to get at whatever it was I was holding. And in fact to some extent, the things were much like human cat food; everything I need, but nothing I want.
Sun, 17 Nov 2002
Carmen's sister Lenore came down for the weekend, taking a break from school. We went to see the new Harry Potter movie with a group of my geeky friends in Guelph. Come to think of it, most if not all of my friends are geeky. I drew a half fragment of this picture shortly after Lenore had just arrived Friday, and finished the rest of it just now. It's okay I suppose. I went over the sketch lines and shaded a bit, made much simpler with the new tablet.
We had a nice snowfall here Saturday night/Sunday morning. It made the drive back from Guelph a little hazaardous, but that's okay. Other than that, we pretty much stayed in and watched TV. Another friend from out of town was visiting while he changed his status on his visa. A really good weekend all told. It was quite enjoyable seeing so many friends I hardly ever get to see.
Speaking of which, a couple that moved away while the one worked on his degree are moving back to Waterloo this weekend! I'm very excited about that. I haven't seen them except in breif little spurts here and there, and I have yet to see their two month old (or so) daughter. Wow!
My kitty has become a very big suck of late. I'm not complaining really. He's tremendously well behaved in general, and very easy going. I have no reason for mentioning this, other than he likes to demand attention every once in a while. I had to pause writing my entry cause he wormed his way into my lap for a few minutes.
Mon, 11 Nov 2002
Far be it for me to use Rememberance Day as an excuse to update my Blog after over half a year of disuse. I think Rememberance Day is an excellent and extremely Canadian holiday, although to be honest, I have no idea if it is even an exclusively Canadian event.
Not that I have any readers who are unfamiliar with the event in question, but Rememberance Day differs from Veteran's Day in the focus of who and how we pay tribute to those who fought our battles for us.
It's a small difference; a semantic one perhaps. I went looking at the Google.com website today to see how they had modified their logo. Google.ca had thoughtfully replaced one of the 'o's in the name with a poppy. Oddly enough, Google.com showed just the standard logo.
Maybe I'm overreacting. After all, the States do have Memorial Day. But I experienced Memorial Day, living in Wisconsin oh, so many summers ago, and it really seemed like a celebration of past glories, as opposed to Rememberance Day's past defeats.
That aside, I am actually updating my Blog. I bought me a brand new Wacom tablet (and Intuos2 6x8 inch beauty) and it makes drawing a breeze. I think it's also partly that the drivers for OSX are so much better than for Linux. Nevertheless, I strongly urge you to click on the image accompanying today's entry. The miniturized version doesn't do it justice.
The other nice thing from your perspective, is that I no longer really have any excuse to not keep up with my writing/drawing of this journal. I'll probably go back and touch up images that I was too embarrassed and discouraged to put up after the fateful hard drive crash in the spring. Any entries I do put up will have their original intended dates, but I'll put a footnote stating when they were actually posted.
Thu, 11 Jul 2002
Well, this sucks. Around the middle of May, I had a rather complete hard drive failure. I won't innundate you with details, save that I plan on never buying anything from Icomshop ever again. Not my first bad experience with them or their parent shop right next door whose name I can't recall.
Needless to say, I've lost about a month's worth of personal files, plus a lot of my archived stuff. MP3s, various hard to find drivers/software/whatnots I've downloaded. All my personal files, I burned to CD at the beginning of April, but sadly, none of my archived files were.
It took a long time for me to even get to this point. I discovered that my apartment can get fairly quiet at night with no hard drive or fans whirring away in the inky blackness. Less so, now that the cafe patio outside my window is populated with idiots late into the night.
Nevertheless, as disheartening as it all was, I don't want to be stopped just because I lost a few drawings that looked marginall better than the ones I managed to get backed up.
Tue, 02 Apr 2002
Well happy Easter, or whatever. As I write this, I believe myself to be the victim of some cruel April Fool's day prank. Granted this entry is a day late. Nevertheless, I'm sitting at my desk, still sick with this thing that I've had for maybe a week now, and there's a bloody flurry going on outside. I mean it's April already! Is winter trying to make up for such a crappy job it did when it actually was winter?
Oh yeah, and I'm sick. I've been sick for a week now, and I'm getting pretty fed up with that too. I've missed a few days of work because of it now, and I'd like to just stay home and mope about it, but I don't think I should push my luck.
Despite all this, I had a pretty good weekend. Friday, for those of you in the know, was "Take back the Lounge day". A whole mess of people that I haven't seen in forever descended on the Comfy Lounge in the U of Waterloo Math building and we played cards, board games, and just bummed around all day.
Saturday, I visited Carmen's sister and her friend who are going to Humber College. We bummed around looking for a movie theatre, found the wrong one, found the right one, missed the movie, ate dinner, saw the later show, then bummed around after.
All in all, a very non-productive weekend.
Mon, 11 Mar 2002
I've been playing with cascading style sheets on my blog and fingerfood pages. I'm trying to use CSS2's layout codes to replace tables. As you probably noticed, the layout is currently simply dreadful. Depending on your browser, it may even be worse than that. I shudder to think of how it looks for the fingerfood entries. I haven't even bothered testing it there until I get it working with my Blog.
Despite all that, it's kinda nice to be working on it. I hope to, after I fix up all the layout specific stuff, to get some kind of page customization for all you nice people, whomever you are. Oh, and fix some outstanding issues, like including older entries when you click on a date in the calendar nav. (And limiting the number of months shown there, for that matter.)
Anyway, it's... it's tomorrow. It looks a lot better now, although I still haven't checked the fingerfood layout. It's not perfect, of course, but it will do until I can get some rest.
Thu, 07 Mar 2002
I did something that I really regret yesterday. I will probably feel terrible about it for a really long time. I took one of my cats to the Humane Society to (hopefully) be adopted.
We had, I am sad to say, been considering this for a very long time. Meecah had been very expensive pretty much from day one. At one point, he had a blocked urinary tract that cost us a thousand dollars to fix. This is not why we gave him up.
Sadly, our reasons are much more mundane. Since we have moved, six months ago, Meecah has had a lot of problems adjusting. Maybe it's because there were three cats living in our unit before us. Maybe it's because it's so much smaller. At any rate, Meecah is having "accidents" approximately once a week or so since we've moved, and no matter what we've tried to accommodate him, nothing seems to help.
So we took him to the Humane Society. He's probably sitting there in his cage right now, mieowing pitifully. I miss my kitty.
Tue, 19 Feb 2002
I'm learning Japanese. (I really think so.) At least, I'm trying. It's a self taught Japanese, and I'm pretty much doing it only from a book I picked up recently. So either my accent will be simply atrocious, or if I'm lucky, I'll end up just talking like a 22nd century bounty hunter.
The decision to actually go ahead with this has been a long time coming now. Since I've graduated, I've given it a bit of thought here and there, and now that I have a bit of an income and can afford to indulge in anime among other things, I felt it would be a good thing to have at least as a hobby.
So this weekend, I found myself at chapters with some friends, and on my way to the mathematics/science section, (because I'm an über geek,) I stumbled through the languages section. I picked up what seems to be a pretty good book, as far as I can tell, and a Japanese-English dictionary.
I'd like to think that I'll actually follow through with this to the point where I might actually be able to understand enough of a movie to be able to tell what's going on. But knowing me, I'll give it up when I discover the next cool thing down the line. We'll see.
Tue, 12 Feb 2002
Blocking out the scenery, breaking my mind.
While we're on the subject of things I have never done, I just recently figured out wow to draw bloody straight lines using the Gimp. The link is pretty tongue in cheek by the way. If you have a couple of minutes take a look. At any rate, to celebrate, I did a really quick thingie here to test it out.
I am neither pleased with the end result, nor upset. I was just playing around with using straight lines to good effect, but it's nice to know that I have that ability. I half expect that any faces I am likely to draw in the future are going to have rather well chiseled features.
Then again, who knows. Maybe I'll figure out this bevel tool thing.
Thu, 07 Feb 2002
Once upon a time, there was a little Qioxikahoptecaweii native.
Once upon a time, there was a little Qioxikahoptecaweii native. This native discovered a novel way of preparing a local berry, by drying it out, slow roasting it, then grinding it up and boiling it in water. It was a sort of dark foamy broth, that he sometimes drank by itself, or sometimes with cane juice and/or llama's milk, or sometimes with a nice biscotti or bran muffin.
One day, while the native from Qioxikahoptecaweii was enjoying his morning brew, a roving band of Aztecs raided and pillaged his home, destroying his furniture, and drinking all the alcohol in his fridge. Needless to say, the native was not terribly happy and complained loudly to the local constabulary. The roving band was brought to justice, and their Harleys were sold at a police auction. All in all, justice was served.
One morning, the native was out gathering resources for his drink, on the side of the mountain where he knew the berries grew in abundance. Sure it was a live volcano, but he had prepared for almost every eventuality save for perhaps alien intervention, so he was unconcerned with the dangers.
Unconcerned, that is, until an alien spacecraft warped in from somewhere upstate, and another roving band of Aztecs got out and beat him up and threw him into the volcano to appease their god.
The End
So the movie has been out for what, two and a half months now? I finally saw it for the first time last week.
So what does this mean? Well, if my workmates are any indication, I am no longer a social pariah. It's nice to know that I can rejoin society once again, and partake of the meaningful conversations that drive the world forward. Mostly, these consist of how cool that latest article on SlashDot is.
It's not that big a deal really. (The movie, or my former status as an outcast.) Certainly, I am as guilty of this kind of thing as the next geek. (The Matrix: It's almost as good the second time as it was the third time.) The movie was indeed a good movie in and of itself. But is it really worth the hype? Is anything worth the hype that such things generate?
Anyway, that's all the time I've got for today. A line is starting for Star Wars: Attack of the Clones, and I want to be sure I'll get a good seat.
Update: Holy crap! A line really is starting for Star Wars!
Thu, 31 Jan 2002
My weekend (oh, and month, I guess)
Alright, so it's been over a month. Things have been pretty busy lately with work, not to say necessarily that things are bad, but busy. Have you ever noticed that once you start doing something as your job, you don't really want to do it recreationally? This is kind of like that.
So about my weekend...
Did I mention it's January? Sunday, was sunny and 10c. I got on my bike and went out trying my best to get muddy for twoish hours. For those of you that know the area, this consisted mostly of riding through subdivisions until I found a path heading through a park or something. Not terribly exciting, but there were a couple of nice parks, and eventually, I ended up on a riverbank at the outskirts of the city where Lexington ends at University (on the way to Conestogo).
