bopuc/weblog

An awesome Flash based video for The Beatles classic "Come Together". (~8Meg SWF)

Beautiful tribute. Beautiful example of being inspired by someone else's work and producing something beautiful.

Lest no one get hurt. Or in trouble...

International Symposium on Online Journalism Home - Symposium Research Papers

May be of interest to some folks I know...

Merci Ludo.

USATODAY.com - Japanese Internet star spreads blogging gospel

I am wearing this t-shirt by one Geoff McFetridge, at this moment, as a pot of pho bo (vietnamese beef broth) simmers in the kitchen.

Roast onions, garlic and ginger under broiler until burnt. Cover beef bones with water and bring to boil a first time. Pour out and discard water. Put roasted stuff, green onions, carrots and salt on bones and fill pot with fresh water. Simmer.

The bones will go clackity-clack as the broth starts to simmer.

Skim the scum. When done, I pour the stock through a sieve into glass bottles. One bottle affords me three bowls of soup which I usually serve myself with tomoshiraga somen noodles, chopped green onions and a sprinkle of toasted & roasted sesame seeds.

Comfy tee. Yummy soup.

MUTEK

Shows aside, apparently there are some interesting panels and workshops. Sadly though, the whole site is in flash, the schedule all done in little flash modules, making it nigh impossible to get a clear overview of what's what.

Shame. Hope I remember to check it out.

Don't you hate it when people who should know better still don't. Sigh.

This may be old news but I just heard it and well, you should too:
Pythonline - Eric Idle presents... The FCC Song.

I awoke this morning thinking of a friend who seems to be at one of those crossroads in his life where the next incarnation of himself is unsure. I thought of what advice I could possibly give him.

Perhaps because of my own current re-evaluation of style and fashion - he is a plain dresser - I came up with this:

I want you to go into any one of the many secondhand clothing stores you can find around here. I want you to find the first piece that you absolutely love, but that immediately makes you think "I could never wear that".

I want you to buy that piece.

Then, I want you to go out for the next three nights, to nightclubs, bars, lounges you've thought you could never go into, wearing that piece.

I want you to do this and remind yourself every time you waiver: "I am not whom I appear to be. I am."

Later this afternoon, I find myself in the men's section of Sisley, confronted by this jacket.

"Oh man," I think, "that is sa-weet! But I could never wear tha..."

So now i have this jacket. Essentially it is very similar to the Paul Smith I bought in Shinjuku: semi-casual pin-stripe jacket. This one is a tad less casual - the pockets are inside as opposed to cargo pocket style like the Paul Smith - being more fitted, more tapered.

Oh, and it is white. Pristine, shining, loud: white.

"I am not whom I appear to be. I am."

Now, lemme get this straight...

"On Sunday, Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin called general elections for June 28, 2004."

One month.

On Politics

'In our time the destiny of man presents its meanings in
political terms' - Thomas Mann

HOW can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a politician
That has read and thought,
And maybe what they say is true
Of war and war's alarms,
But O that I were young again
And held her in my arms!

-William Butler Yeats

A list of mp3 blogs.

I've wanted to do the same for a while now but was hesitant. Guess I'll start too. :)

No, not *that* f-word...

The Daytona Beach News-Journal: Editorials: Hard lessons from poetry class: Speech is free unless it's critical

A school military liaison and the high school principal accused the girl of being "un-American" because she criticized the war in Iraq and the Bush administration's failure to give substance to its "No child left behind" education policy.

The girl's mother, also a teacher, was ordered by the principal to destroy the child's poetry. The mother refused and may lose her job.

Bill Nevins was suspended for not censoring the poetry of his students. Remember, there is no obscenity to be found in any of the poetry. He was later fired by the principal.

There is something obscene in all this, though. Need I point it out?

Ok. "Military liaison"?

The Morning News - The Deli After Work

I blame the ATM... ;)

This kind of thing drives me up the wall:
TIME Magazine Cover: Secrets of the Teen Brain - May. 10, 2004

"Research is revolutionizing our view of the adolescent mind - and explaining its mystifying way"

Listen, here is some insight: try *really* hard to remember back to when YOU were a "teenager". Remember all the wondering and uncertainty and discovery and whatnot.

Now, take that person, you essentially, and stick them in the present. Think about the environment your adolescent inhabits. Highly fractured and accelerated culture, with specialized cults of interest and an overarching tribal system.

Think about constant and unremitting bombardment of information, entertainment and clashing contexts.

Think of sex, sex, sex, sex, violence, death, sex, war, sex. Pop, hip-hop, garage, whatever. Hollywood, Miami, Chelsea, Afghanistan, Iraq.

Now, how confused, mystified are YOU?

YOU created this world for them. If you are mystified by your adolescent, it is because you did not care enough to look.

Yes our brains are changing. They have to.

Friend Jim Moore is doing all he can to garner attention, raise awareness and just get people to care about a situation of genocide and other nastyness happening in Sudan at the moment.

Much of his efforts are focused on getting the blogosphere to CARE and visit and link to and subscribe to Sudan: The Passion Of The Present Blog.

Jim wrote me a few days ago to say hi, and also to see if I had any thoughts on helping getting the word out. I was immediately reminded of two things: a conversation between Jim and Joi that I was privileged enough to sit in on in which they discussed how hard it seems to be to get people to care about things outside of their own immediate spheres, and the concept of "The Attention Economy".

The information is all there, available to any one of us. The "Attention Economy" is, loosely, about getting enough attention to the information that matters or is of value. Weblogs seem to do this quite well. But there is another threshold: caring. Once one's attention is grabbed, for example the news of genocide somewhere in the world, there is a gap between intellectually "getting it" and viscerally "feeling it".

I think, in the information overflow of today, we've definitely turned on some sort of desensitization mechanism. A major part of that mechanism is a belief, and therefore actualization, of helplessness. "Yeah but what can I possibly do?"

Weblogging's power of growing attention is definitely one, albeit small perhaps, "thing I can do", which creates a sense of caring in the individual. And when many people exchange, share, spread that caring, we create an "Economy of Caring".

Enough caring always results in some kind of action. Call it emotional payoff.

This event was just announced yesterday. Just checked with my travel agent... a last minute flight to Helsinki, departing tomorrow evening, would cost me an arm.

Damn. I must consider this carefully.

It is 8:30pm and I am so hungry I am shaking.

Problem is I decided to do a complete scrub down of my kitchen and the floor is still wet, the furniture still packed into my living room and the sink is full of dishes. So, I can't cook anything.

I can't go out for food because a) it is raining, b) I am dirty and have not the energy to shower, c) I'd have to drive and would lose my parking spot (which means I'd have to wake up at 8am tomorrow to move it before I get a ticket)...

I guess I'll just curl up in fetal position and await death...

;)

Update!
Good news indeed! The floor dried quicker than I had expected. So I steeled up, took a deep breath and multitasked, preparing my favorite spicey italian sausage tomato sauce (the pasta is cooking as I type) and doing ALL the dishes.

I shall live to whine another day... ;)

Blah blah blah licenses. "W!"

My question is this: is 3.0 any better? And by better I mean faster. Has the code finally really been cleaned up and optimized? Does it run better?

Cause, in all honesty, and I love MT, but hell is it a hog on system resources (or so it seems and so it has been explained to me).

I've got MT running on a bunch of different servers, and on some it is unacceptably slow. Posting comments takes upwards of 30 seconds, rebuilds take for ever, and timeouts happen waaaay too often.

Switching blog softwares is NOT an option. YOU tell Joi to migrate to Wordpress... (Ironically enough, it is Joi's blog that has the most performance issues of all the MT blogs I maintain...)

So, someone tell me: is 3.0 better?

There are narratives in my life that have quietly threaded along in the background, closely following me. Slowly parts of these stories have meshed into my "real life", and this morning another part intersected for the second time with my blog-life.

In the summer of 1999, I came across a french musician by the name of Philippe Katerine. He had become quite popular here in Montreal that summer with a song entitled "Je vous emmerde" ("I am annoying you"), which is about a drunk poet annoying a girl in a bar by trying to pick her up.

On the same album, "Les Créatures" ("The Creatures"), is a track entitled "Jamais je ne t'ai dit que je t'aimerais toujours, oh mon amour" ("I never told you I'd always love you, oh my love"). The song is a duet with a whispy, childish female voice. That is how I came across Kahimi Karie.

Kahimi Karie is a japanese songstress who sings in japanese, french, english and italian. She and Katerine had collaborated on a few projects. She sang with him, he produced an album, or some songs, for her, with her, etc...

So I started grabbing Kahimi Karie tracks. Turns out she'd collaborated with two other gentlemen (and more, but these two are significant to my story): Cornelius, her boyfriend at the time, and Momus. Both were unknown to me at the time but I grew to enjoy their work as well.

Here the story forks, frays actually. The Cornelius thread crossed over to my blog-life a few months ago, the Katerine thread during my recent jaunt to Tokyo, and the Momus thread this morning.

And the tie that binds all this together, believe it or not, is my friend Joi Ito...

Bear with me.

The Cornelius Thread
Cornelius's work quickly became some of my favorite music. Awesome stuff. Turns out, he is Joi's second cousin. What were the odds of that?

One night during my recent trip to Tokyo, Joi took me to a bar run by his old friend Ko and his wife NaNa: the Tera bar in Sangenjaya. Joi had also invited Cornelius to come by and hang out. Awesome. Joi showed him a little video project I am working on which uses a track Cornelius apparently had released using a Creative Commons license. He thought it was "sugoi" (cool). Double awesome.

Later that night, I noticed on the wall behind me a poster for a Jean-Luc Goddard film from 1965 called "Pierrot le fou", starring Jean-Paul Belmondo and Anna Karina...

The Katerine Thread
The next day, waking up on the futon I was sleeping on at Jim and Yuka's, I turn my head to see a stack of DVDs under the desk beside me.

In this stack of DVDs is a copy of "Pierrot le fou". Zoinks! A few nights later, with nothing else to do, I decide to watch it.

Twenty minutes into it, my jaw drops. Anna Karina and Jean-Paul Belmondo start to sing "Jamais je ne t'ai dit que je t'aimerais toujours, oh mon amour"... A bit of Googling and it turns out 1- Katerine is an Anna Karina fan and they even collaborated on an album: "Histoire D'Amour" ("Love Story"), 2000 and 2- the song had been written by one Rezvani for the Goddard movie.

The Momus Thread
The Momus Thread is ... weird... Perhaps because Momus is weird. Perhaps because his is the thread that has come closest to my real life a few times, without crossing over, and for the first time today crossed into my blog life. What makes this doubly strange is that Momus has kept an online journal for years, publishing insightful articles on a regular basis, posting picture collages of his travels, etc... He is a blogger sans a blog. And has been for a loooong time. Also, Momus was galavanting across Japan at the same time I was last year... we were in Kyoto, Hiroshima and Tokyo only days apart... It even went so far as him playing a show in the same venue, Super Deluxe, where I had attended the 1IMC (1st International Moblog Conference), where I had finally met and befriended Joi!

In the 70's, Momus briefly studied at McGill Univeristy (in Montreal). During Kahimi Karie's last North American tour, Momus appeared with her in Montreal where he recorded two tracks with local pop heros, Bran Van 3000. I know at least one Bran Van alumni personally, and have often often often crossed paths with three of the main Bran Van 3000 "celebrities": James DiSalvio (who in an interview in a local weekly once listed my favorite bar as his favorite bar... oooooo), Sahra (who for a while was a regular there too), Jean Leloup (a Quebecois rock god whom I admired much as a teenager and whom I've had numerous encounters with over the years). Oh and all three could be spotted on any given day at one of two popular Café's in Montreal's Mile End district... an area I too frequent quite often.

But I digress...

So, this morning... This morning, in my RSS aggregator, I read an entry by Seb Paquet on Corante's Many-to-many weblog, where he links to an article Momus published in 1991 with the sub-heading "In the future, everyone will be famous for 15 people". Seb's entry is about, roughly, some social implications of weblogging, while Momus' article seems to be about the future of the recording industry (haven't read it yet... heh...).

While I missed my chance to meet Seb face-to-face last week (my apologies to both Seb AND Mike...), we have chatted briefly, on #joiito, and he is a very respected voice in the blogosphere. He is also a friend of a dear friend of mine, Karl Dubost, who, it must be said is one of the originators of my blog-life...

This story could have been told from the perspective of my blog-life, as well as my real life. There are many many people, close and dear to me, who are also implicated in all this. I became friends with Karl during our trip to SxSW 2003, which I attended only because friend Warren's company, Plank Multimedia, had been nominated for their work on Michael Moore's websites, and they had an extra pass. Plank Multimedia is where I worked, along side one of my very best friends, Stevey, when this particular story started... I met Jim in Joi's IRC channel last year when he ever go graciously offered to let me stay at his place during my first trip to Japan. We became fast friends, and Jim now works for Six Apart Japan, a company Joi is an investor in.

The threads intertwine, and sometimes they connect...

That night at Tera Bar, Joi and John, another great new friend I've met because of all this blog stuff, chided me for having no "ochi": my stories have no clear ending, no punch line, no point.

Perhaps I am a bad story teller. I'd rather believe that stories have no end, and that what I do is point out observations of mine, narrative outakes from my lives... but that's another story.

Telegraph | News | 'Buddha' sweet has sour taste in Japan

I'd like to think that Buddha was a down-to-earth kinda guy, who occasionally DID pick his nose... and who most likely would laugh at such things.

En-lighten up people! ;)

After reading Foucault's short piece "Author Function", I thought the following.

Take any expression, be it a text, a song, a painting, and label it "The What". Label the author (composer, painter, etc) "The Who", and and attach it as a property of The What. The Who property can contain the properties of "The When" and "The Where", giving us the contexts of a point in time and a point in space: environmental geo-political, historical, cultural context for The What.

If we bypass The Who, and ascribe The When & The Where directly to The What, as is the case with much Whats in the history of human expression, the role of The Who is stripped of it's Ego (or Id). Who said What, for Who's sake, is to a large extent quite irrelevant.

However, if I consider that had the aforementioned piece not been adorned with the name of Michel Foucault, I may not have stumbled across it, or even read it for that matter. The Who becomes a broadcast tower, a cultural signal repeater. The taller the tower, the further it's reach. The height of the Tower of Who is a function of relevance, quality, reliability... and social network engineering. I say engineering because it takes a lot of work to build one's Tower of Who. Who am I. Who do you think I am. In marketing, this is called brand building. And the more time one spends on building one's Tower of Who, the less one spends on refining one's What.

Arguably, in a cultural system where every What has clearly mapped When and Where, the Who becomes increasingly irrelevant.

With timestamps and GPS coordinates, the battle against the ego begins in earnest.

As for The Why... are we not still trying to touch the face of godliness? Are we not still merely trying to recreate the world in our own collective and connected minds?

While I loathe linking to BoingBoing, I hafta say I'm with Cory on this one 100%.

The retro sneaker craze is getting to me. For some reason, I love it.

I'd have to say I'm partial to Adidas myself. The solid teutonic three stripes. Puma never appealed to me, probably because of the brotherly strife (1920 & 1948) that begat it.

But now, oh my, Asics have exploded onto the scene. The Onitsuka Tiger stripes are just... so... damn... cool. I SO should have grabbed that pair I saw in Shinjuku. Sigh.

Seeing this Steve McQueen super-detailed action figure in Akihabara didn't help my condition.

Sigh. McQueen is SO cool.

Mac OS used to have this nifty utility app called "Key Caps". It would display a keyboard on your screen which would allow you to see the keyboard mappings for all the characters of any fonts you had installed. It came in handy once in a while when trying to find something.

Then all of a sudden it disappeared.

This evening, friend Anders, who does alot of weird shit with weird old dead languages asked if there was a way to find characters mapped on the keyboard... After thinking about it for a second and going for a look, I found it!

System Preferences > International > Input Menu > Keyboard Viewer

Voilà!

Mark Federman, over at the McLuhan Program, offers up this great entry.

While the framework of his entry is based on how the limitations on media use that the RIAA (and MPAA) are seeking will effectively limit access to information - in itself a frightening possibility because what government, no matter how so-called democratic, doesn't wish to keep it's people in the dark ? - what I'd like to point out is his use of the language of (what I've come to call for myself) "pattern learning".

The knowledge one gleans from the patterns that emerge from freely aggregated information is, as they say, worth a thousand words, if not more. Juxtaposition of many bits form to create a picture of the whole, and when one uses such universal and "true" pieces of data as pictures and video - for understanding what one sees in them requires little if no foreknowledge of a specific language or code - then the communication and impact is far more far-reaching and powerful.

"Draw me a picture"

As the title says, here is an MT Template which gives you a nice RSS 2.0 (don't start with me!!!) feed of your blog's comments, complete with handy dandy links to your MT admin and MT-Blacklist interface for quickly identifying comment spam and getting rid of it:

• Despam via MT-Blacklist
• Edit the entry (to quickly be able to delete multiples
• Edit the comment (you may just want to remove something as opposed to the whole thing)
• Use MT-Blacklist to show all comments from this commenter's IP (for spam floods from the same IP)

Cheers

Instructions:
In MT, go to Templates, Create a new template, call it something like "Comment feed", name the output file something original (if you don't want the world to find it...), copy and paste the above template, change the link paths to reflect your particular setup (and if you don't have MT-Blacklist you can remove the lines which link to it), save. Voila.

Normally I'd write much better documentation but hey... it's pretty self evident... and I'm tired... and ashamed to only be sharing this with y'all now as I've been using it for months... ;)

It looks a bit tricky but by the second or third try you too will be a master t-shirt folder. Try it. Now.

Thanks Jim!

[this is aaronland] proof of concept : what's on first?

Mad scientist Aaron polls the New York Times for metadata keywords, matches them to http://del.icio.us/ "tags", crosschecks those against http://www.flickr.com/ image "tags"... RDFs it all and spits out a nifty SVG graph.

So... um... how do we make this.. um.. useful?

Perhaps an Etherpeg-style UI?

over at Jim Moore's . I read it like this:

The more information leaks out of Iraq, the less enthusiastic the American public is about the whole thing. (There is hope afterall!)

And, look at what was needed for the switch to happen! Unofficial, unsanctioned photos and video being leaked. A few drops of "truth"...

I also read the red line as being the rightist propaganda machine desperately trying to keep a grip on the minds of Americans, fighting hand nail and tooth as the sheer weight of reality pulls down on it.

Shams always collapse. Why despots never learn this lesson is a mystery to me, and a miracle, our ace in the hole...

Near the end of my Tokyo trip, I had the privilege and good fortune to hook up with Patrick of Tokyo Recohan. Patrick is a fellow Québecois, living in Tokyo who in his spare time runs this used CD website. I had ordered some stuff from him about a year ago and when he saw my address he emailed me right away: "hey! I'm from Québec too!" Hehehe.

So Patrick invited me to "Tokyo Fun Party" in Shibuya on a Saturday evening. It was held in a 5th floor space called Uplink Factory and it was something.

Being all in Japanese, the subtleties were of course lost on me, but the energy was great and the music, for the most part, loads of fun.

I especially liked the second band, the Aprils. Really sweeping fun uplifting ... er... indy pop? I managed to get a video clip of their performance using my keitai. Check it out.

Ey, Patrick... you have any CD's of theirs? Let me know when the "new one" comes out. :)

"Notre Père, qui est aux Cieux, que ton nom soit sanctifié..."
(Our Father, in french)

GodDAMN. SEVEN days?! SEVEN DAYS!

Seven days of sore joints, of tingling skin, of cold sweats, of confusion and dementia... over! Finally.

The hardware issues engendered by the flu are mostly bearable; essentially a bad cold, right? Sore throat, cough, congestion, etc. Not the best state of affairs but livable. No man, for me, it's the software issues that kill me...

I/O buffer interference.

All my senses go wonky and basic motor skills fall to sub-performance levels. We're talking vision, hearing, balance, speech... let's not speak of taste buds.

Signal scrambling.

Limbo is too light a word, and for someone who long ago lost faith in codification, this situation is doubly maddening. NOTHING makes sense and messages on every level of the system get SNAFU'd. "What did he just say, and why the HELL is that little muscle in my ankle twitching!? Argh!"

Factory reset of all settings.

Most marked this time as this illness hit just as I faced turning back my internal clock 13 hours (read: JST -> EST jetlag), but basically in the space of 24 hours not only was my body slammed back into this time zone, it was also handed the internal clock I lived by when I was, oh, five? In bed by 10pm, up by 6am, with 2-3 pee breaks per night, oh and a nap at mid afternoon. Ouan. And where, pray tell is my mother? I mean, hell...

Anyways, that's all over. Just a bit of hardware issues left... actually, just one. Some sort of infection which creeped down into my lungs. Hopefully these damn antibios I stooped to accept will take care of that. Ugh.

Giant killer bugs, that's what I see. We will all succumb to giant killer bugs.
Helloooo Sunday morning sunshine!

From A girl in Tokyo: News of love

From Yahoo!Japan News (This page contains Japanese)

It is very heart warming, lovely news.

April 20, Kyoto: A female swallow fell down from the nest and then didn't move for a while. Her husband swallow flew down to there immediately. He pecked around her so that he can wake her up. He was trying for almost 5mins, she woke up and they flew back to the nest together.

I didn't know swallows are that caring to partner.

I've been back one week now. I had exactly 36 hours between arriving and falling ill. I've had the flu for 5 days. Yesterday I gave in and went to the "clinic". Normally a flu lasts 2, 3 days max with me. One delirious day, one sweaty night, the rest is just minor discomfort. Not this time though. I have been in major discomfort since Sunday.

My natural inclination in times like these is to raise my fist to the sky, shake it violently while yelling "why me, you bastards?!", but eh.. what's the use. ;)

Since the weather has been terrible anyways, I don't feel SO bad about being lamed. However there is a LOT of work, chores and administratavia that did not get done this week, and it is gnawing at my mind.

Ah yes, and my mind... my mind... that thing up here that turns into an utterly useless mass of pudding whenever I get sick.

Useless mass of pudding.

Mmmm... puuuddiiing...

Sorry, where was I?

Nowhere.

I'm going back to bed.

Bear with me.. I recently saw "Master & Commander" (twice, on flights) and "Pirates of the Caribbean". This is to bring back memories of cheap beer night on Tuesdays when the Irish band would play at the Brasserie in Ste-Anne-de-Bellevue.

BARRETT'S PRIVATEERS

Oh, the year was 1778, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
A letter of marque come from the king,
To the scummiest vessel I'd ever seen,

God damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.

Oh, Elcid Barrett cried the town, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
For twenty brave men all fishermen who
would make for him the Antelope's crew

God damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.

The Antelope sloop was a sickening sight, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
She'd a list to the port and and her sails in rags
And the cook in scuppers with the staggers and the jags

God damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.

On the King's birthday we put to sea, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
We were 91 days to Montego Bay
Pumping like madmen all the way

God damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.

On the 96th day we sailed again, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
When a bloody great Yankee hove in sight
With our cracked four pounders we made to fight

God damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.

The Yankee lay low down with gold, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
She was broad and fat and loose in the stays
But to catch her took the Antelope two whole days

God damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.

Then at length we stood two cables away, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
Our cracked four pounders made an awful din
But with one fat ball the Yank stove us in

God damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.

The Antelope shook and pitched on her side, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
Barrett was smashed like a bowl of eggs
And the Maintruck carried off both me legs

God damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.

So here I lay in my 23rd year, HOW I WISH I WAS IN SHERBROOKE NOW!
It's been 6 years since we sailed away
And I just made Halifax yesterday

God damn them all!
I was told we'd cruise the seas for American gold
We'd fire no guns-shed no tears
Now I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier
The last of Barrett's Privateers.

Written and recorded by Stan Rogers. Copyright © Fogarty's Cove Music

"I have missed more than 9,000 shots in my career. I have lost almost 300 games. On 26 occasions I have been entrusted to take the game winning shot, and I missed. And I have failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is precisely why I succeed."

Michael Jordan

Spring cleaning "au max".
Any article of clothing I have had for more than 3 years, and which I have not worn in at least a year, in a bag and off to the Salvation Army.
Pantry and fridge will be rid of any fancy pants junk, like sauces, noodles or spices I bought but never used.

And just for good measure, I'm going to pull everything off my shelves and restock em. What a mess.

I have too much junk. I live in a shoebox, literally. Everything around me, aside some basic furniture, is some sort of external memory storage. Souvenirs, scraps of paper, books, VHS tapes, CDs... The rest; doodads, flotsam... junk drawer overstock.

Yo! The future is THATAWAY dammit! No room for all this crap.

Purging. Force delete.

Taking a computer in for repair, especially a PERSONAL computer, should be like going to your GP, family doctor, dentist or vet.

Why can I not call up my local mac shop, tell em what's wrong, make an appointment, show up and be in the room while the tech fixes the problem, or at least diagnoses it? I mean really?! Usually it is some tiny little thing i could fix myself anyways if I had the special tiny screwdriver of it didn't void the warranty.

Case in point. The screen on this here PowerBook was poorly reassembled after they replaced the LCD for the "whitespots" problem. I could fix this, myself, right here, right now. I do not have Apple's special microscopic hex screwdriver, and besides, a technician screwed it up, a technician should fix it.

Point is, my computer is a part of me. An extension of me I cannot be without for a day, nevermind a few days! I don't mean this in a purely "freaky cyborg/emotional attachment/addiction" way. It is my livelihood, my main means of communication, a major component of my brain... an extension of me!

So I eschewed going to the big apple retailer in town, BMac, because I know how their service department works. Drop it off, we'll look at it, for $50, sometime in the next 48 hours and we'll call you. Yeah right. Dropped by INSO, to inquire. Make an appointment for thursday. Drop it off as early as possible and keep my fingers crossed it gets done by the end of the day. Not optimal, but will do.

I maintain though that as we "rely" on our personal computers more and more, technical service departments will have to change their methodologies to accommodate the more pressing, medical-esque nature of quick hardware/system fixes.

I'm somewhat a creature of habit, I suppose, and as such, little changes to things I take for granted sometimes leave me... rather pissed off.

Since last fall, the Ville de Montréal seems to have taken two very annoying actions, in the name of security, both of which seriously screw with my exercise regimen.

So, first of all, they have completely dismantled the 212 step monster staircase which leads to the summit. This staircase is a KEY element of my workout. Running up that thing is both the worst and best part of my run.

Now granted, it was in really bad shape, what with 250lb musclemen trampling up and down it everyday for their cardio as well... every week or so another wooden stair would be busted and in need of replacing. By last fall they had tried barricading the stairs but obviously I am not alone in my workout use of it: despite signs and chains and gates, we were always 3 or 4 pounding our way up it.

So, now, it is gone. replaces by a sign saying they'll try to have it rebuilt by the end of the summer. Which is of course, really really really frustrating to me. Not only because of the lost "extra workout punch" but also because it led to the summit park, where I would sit in the sun, tanning and reading. These are very important to me! Now I have to run around the west side of the mountain to get to the summit, effectively doubling my course! Argh!!

Probably for the best I guess. Bastards.

The other thing they did is half-assedly block the median opening at the corner of Parc Ave. and Duluth, where I usually cross to enter the park. Granted it WAS dangerous running across a six lane high traffic street before, but it is even more so now that I have to jump a median!! And I refuse to run up a block and cross at the lighted intersection in front of the statue.

Bastards.

Ceci pour Karl