rob was here.

I have very bad posture. You really have no idea.

here's a few snaps from a few weeks ago, when I had to relocate my computer to my bedroom for a few days. My computer isn't usually this low, but this is pretty much how I sit anyways.





my spine, probably.

oh, and I added a new blog (a good ol' friend) to my blogroll on the right side there.

I just finished watching this weeks episode of Lost, when an awkward commercial came on. It was one of those coca-cola holiday polar bear commercials where the family of polar bears manage to open a bottle of coke and enjoy it. However, there's a new twist in this years incarnation of the commercial.

I was shocked that the polar bear family stumbles across a large penguin colony, and they appear to be fairly interested in the bottle of sugary cola goodness as well.

Polar bears, as we are familiar with in Canada, live way north, where Santa lives - the North Pole, so they say. The whole problem with the feasibility of this commercial is that penguins strategically avoid polar bears by living at the South Pole.

Coca-Cola: shame on you. Use teh Google.

Well, I'm seriously considering buying and trying Blizzard's popular MMORPG computer game, World Of Warcraft (WoW).. I know I'm a little late on the bandwagon for this game, and a lot of people have been playing it for a year or so. I just never ever seem devoted enough to a single game to feel warrented to pay a monthly fee to play. I think it's less than $20CDN/month or something to play. However, I'll probably end up buying a 60 day gamecard and try the game out for 2 months or so to just experiment with it.

I've fallen out of computer gaming over the last little while, and have moved to playing consoles more and more. Actually, ever since I modded my gamecube months back, that's all i've played in terms of games.

It's time to change all that, I was raised on the PC and i'll jump back into the frey, as soon as I find the opportunity to pick up the game and a 60-day gamecard :)

wow, what a lousy week. I have witnessed, firsthand, the inherent disorder present in the machine that surrounds us all.

Phase One: Pwn Thy Car

Earlier this week, I spent a day on the road driving from home to marystown (and back again) to do some field work. Just as I arrived to my destination, I heard the spine chilling 'KA-THUMP-KA-THUMP-KA-THUMP" sound, audible evidence that the car is fux0red. I quickly stopped and got out to check the car's four black circles or "car-legs" as I call them. Yup, one of em was flat. So I put on the spare and did a few hours of field work. As it began getting late, I decided that it probably wasn't a great idea to drive 300km back home on a spare tire, and I decided to make an effort to get the tire repaired.. So I began driving around marystown, looking for a garage. I found a tire shop, where the guy tried filling up the wounded tire with air, only to find that a long strip on the side of my tire was blown out, and that air only stayed in the tire for around 0.4 seconds. Repair wasn't an option apparently. I was on a new quest to find a new tire alltogether. He didn't have any 15 inch low-profile tires at his shop, so he recommended Canadian Tire down the road.

Lets stop here for a minute. Yes, marystown has a Canadian Tire. They have quite a large selection of stores and resteraunts, to my astonishment..

Back to the story, I went to Canadian Tire and asked for a replacement tire.. for ONE all-season tire, it was $120. I didn't buy it. Luckily, Canadian Tire doesn't have a tire monopoly in marystown, as someone in the lineup suggested a used tire shop just a few minutes drive from there.

Fast forward a few minutes and I'm inside the basement of someones house looking through stacks of tires. Apparently some old fellow runs this used tire shop but he was in St. Johns for the day and his wife was kind enough to let us in.. We found a rather used 15-inch tire quite similar to my blown-out one, and it was marked down to $20 from $25 dollars. What a steal! I purchased said tire from the lady. Now we were burdened with the task of getting the new el-cheap-o tire onto my tire rim. Unfortunately, the basement tire shop had all the equipment to do that there, but the lady didn't know how to use it. Fortunately, she happened to be the mother-in-law of a manager at the KIA dealership in marystown.

Fast forward a few minutes and I'm inside the KIA dealership. I meet up with the manager with our new rather-used tire in hand.

"Your mother-in-law sent us."

"Grumble." *installs tire onto rim*

Fast forward a few minites and I'm leaving with a decent tire installed where the blown out one was, and had it professionally installed and balanced at KIA. Ah, marystown, where people treat people right.

Phase Two: Pwn Thy Puter

So I was vacuuming yesterday, and I accidently got my computer-microphone cord caught in the power-nozzle of the vacuum.. It sucked up the microphone, ripping the cord and some of the innards right out of the microphone casing. I did a bit of swearing and grobbling but I didn't really use it that much anyways, and I wasn't really happy with the sound quality of some guitar recordings I've done in the past... Take that, microphone.

Also, I'm really battling with my computers harddrives lately. I have 80 gigs internal, and they are always borderline full (a few hundred megs free).. I really need some bigger drives.

Phase Two and a Half: Pwn Thy Self

Over the last, say, eight months, I've gone through cycles of quasi-healthyness and extreme self-neglect. For example, about 2 months ago I seemed to exercise every night and eat only healthy things (like salad for lunch with vegetable juice)... I'm in a bad phase now. I had pizza hut for breakfast/lunch/supper today, and wendy's for the last few days for lunch.

In all honesty and to nobodys surprise, I feel 100x better in the healthy sections of the cycle. I currently don't feel as phsically and mentally focused as I do when I'm in health-mode. Perhaps it's time for a change-over soon.

a friend pointed out a new microsoft site to me the other day, found at www.live.com.. Essentially it's a conglomoration-information type page that bundles webmail, rss feeds of different sorts, news subscriptions, and whatever else into one handy website. Theres nothing absolutely new about these things, yahoo! and google have similar ones operational for some time now.

The wierd thing i noticed when visiting the site is that things didn't render properly in mozilla firefox and theres a big title at the top stating, ahem:

Firefox Users
Firefox support is coming soon. Please be patient :-)

What the heck? A smiley.... from microsoft? And whats this about supporting firefox.. the last i heard from microsoft regarding firefox was that it was "supposedly" less secure than IE, and that firefox's features were not relevent to users... Why the switch to favour the competition?

Microsoft.. that's awfully..... google-ish of you.

Yep, Microsoft is hopping on the "cater to the users" bandwagon that Google is pioneeering.. That is, giving people what people want instead of giving people whatever your engineers and software developers produce (and then having the engineers and developers EXPLAIN why it's what people want, to the people)...

The technolgies themselves arn't inherently new.. and I hate debates and articles which try to figure out which company "invented" a specific thing. Who's the first on the block to create a certain thing is much less relevant than who can do it right, by improving on whats all ready there. Indeed, most web and user based technology is more about improvement rather than constant invention.

This gets us back to the topic, conglomoration. In the wake of www.live.com, google has revamped their personalized-homepage by spreading outside america.. That's right, you can personize your google homepage to now show Canadian content such as weather in your city, movies showing in your surrounding area, and the like. Good old Google, always moving forward. Check out www.google.ca/ig if you're in Canada, and try it out for a while as your homepage. It's really nifty.