Purple Monkey Dishwasher

Acoustic Guitar video tutorial of John Mayer's live version of "Neon" from Where the Light is with TAB

2011-10-28T13:27:00.000-04:00

I finally got around to making a video tutorial off my TAB of this cool piece I transcribed back in December 2010 after going on Youtube and seeing countless people butcher the thing. (see previous post here).

First off, the latest tab is here

This is the video for the Intro:

This is the video for the middle part:
And this is the performance it is taken from.. Awesome stuff!

Interlock project from Hell Summer 2011

2011-09-07T20:42:00.000-04:00

We were tired of the boring paving stones that came with our house and all of our neighbors were getting snazzy interlock entrances done so we decided to give it a go ourselves. My wife designed an intricate multilevel circular design with intersecting cuts and we got a line on a place that supplies the home stores with brick (why buy from Rona when you can buy from the place that sells to Rona?) so we got a catalog and went out to the place to choose the brick. The place only sells to contractors and I had a friend who did contracting on the side who would place the order for us when we were ready. My wife and her friend had designed the layout in Autocad with a ton of measurements and one nice sunny day we went out to spray paint the design on the front lawn. With the design being made up of four huge circles (the largest being an almost 19 foot arc) the best way to do this was to stake out sticks at the radius points, attach pieces of string cut to the proper radius length to the sticks and follow the extent of the arc leaving a spray paint trail behind.

Holy crap it was huge. We won't have any lawn left. The early design also incorporated a pathway that seemed to drop off into space and probably create work for me later (follow the yellow brick road) and two built-in planter areas for bushes or flowers (heck a tree if you wanted). The pathway ended up cutting right to the neighbors property line so we had to simplify. The circles all got tightened up, the pathway disappeared, we only left a single planting area and we got something we both liked. We had picked out a wall product and pavers so now it was time to order the stuff. We started by staking out the new design, spraying it onto the lawn again in a different color and checking all the measurements one last time.

It took me three days to figure out how much product to order - and that was with a hyper-accurate plan. One of the problems was that I had to impersonate a contractor in that I had to pretend to know what I was doing. Contractors order by skid layers. Johnny homeowners like me walk into home depot, grab a cart, and start piling bricks into it. When I screw up and need more, I go back and buy more. So how many blocks in a skid layer? I spend a day googling charts on the Internet until I found palette layouts I needed. What sucks about ordering by the skid layer is, if you get 16 blocks in a skid layer and you only need 8 blocks then you get another 8 just for fun! Contractors also deal in some weird measurements like wall square footage. I don't need to know that, my wall is two bricks high for the most part, I just have to know how long and how many levels of brick I'm piling up. So I had to simplify a lot of the numbers to make sense of them. The capping was weird too, they have this formula you so where you take your linear footage and multiply by 2.68 to get the number of modules you need, and a module seemed to be a collection of three bricks,an A, a B, and a C. I spent half a day staring at the front lawn trying to visualize where everything would go and when I ran into problems in my head I realized that I needed a 3D model to be sure I had it right.

I used Google 3D sketch up to mock up the interlock layout in 3 dimensions and that's where the problems began to show up. When it was designed, the layout did not take the dimensions of the product into account. We had worked out a 5 and a half inch step height but had bought a product that was 3 and a half inches high. Quickly we changed the design to use a 7 inch step so each step ended up being 2 bricks high. The way walls are made there should be a hidden row underneath for the wall to sit on so you end up buying a whole row of wall just to bury it :-). Excavation was also an interesting proposition. I wanted 12 inches of crushed stone underneath everything but since my lawn slopes up to the house and the design was a bunch of terraced landings I figured I probably didn't have to dig up the whole front lawn. Turns out I had plenty to dig (underneath the outside of all the walls and the first two circle landings) but the rest of it was piles of crushed stone. Getting rid of the earth was easy, I just dumped it in my back yard to level off the back of my property. The crushed stone was also readily available at a small quarry up the road for $32 a loader bucket full (my Dad has a trailer and I must have done 7 runs to the place and emptied with a shovel all on the front lawn).

A few days later the skids showed up on a delivery truck and there was a small problem with the order my contractor friend had put in. The supplier had misunderstood and I was missing about 34 capping blocks. I had to make a trip out to the place to pick up the missing blocks after weighing the A,B,and C ones on my bathroom scale and calculating it to be 1400 pounds (They weighed 57, 37.5 and 27.5 pounds respectively). I needed to make sure the truck I used would be able to take it. Knowing the weights of the stones was useful when the forklift operator pulled up to the truck and let me know I was going to lift them off individually by hand and load my truck with them. Woohoo!

The next day I started laying out the wall and the caps. The first level was ok, the second one was better and the third one was pretty much perfect so I went back and recut the first one. I discovered that in order to cut a nice curve you need to place the two blocks side by side on a curve, measure the outside edge of the triangular space created by the curve and distrubute it evenly across the front of the bricks where they touch side by side. This gives you radian shaped wedges that form a natural curve. Fortunately I was able to borrow a cutter. Unfortunately the cutter only had a 3 inch cutting depth and I had 3 and a half inch blocks. That meant I had to cut every block at least twice, on the top and again on the bottom. Furthermore, the blocks were 12 inches long and the max length I could cut was 10 inches. That meant each block was actually cut 4 times, top, bottom, front, back. A lot of blocks were cut on both sides so that was 8 cuts per block. I got fancy in the areas where the bricks met at the curved arcs and recessed them (so it looked like it was coming out of the wall). I cut a lot of blocks.....

As I was outside doing all of this fun stuff I got mistaken for a contractor no less then 3 times. Neighbors would wander over and ask for a quote. Then I'd take my safety sunglasses off and they'd go "Oh sorry, I didn't recognize you, Oh so you're doing this yourself." Other neighbors that caught on to this would come over and offer advice. Most of it I already knew and had researched but one or two had some great tips. It's amazing how many people think that landscaping fabric is there to stop weeds. Weeds need sunlight and the seeds come in from the top and wedge between the cracks of your brick. The landscape fabric is there to prevent the soil from creeping into the crushed stone and shifting it. It provides a barrier between the two materials.

One guy alerted me to the fact that I was building some Hornet condominiums into my design by leaving nooks and crannies in the back. I took his advice and back-filled the hell out of them with large stone the little buggers won't be able to excavate.

As far as product ordering, it was pretty good. I was missing ONE capping block (think I was going to order a skid for one block?). I went back to the brick place and they gave me a demo block for free. It was not exactly like the other ones but it would do where it was going.

When I got to the bottom row, I ran into my last gotcha. I had not taken the slope of my lawn into account where it encroached on the design. I had to cover a 1 foot drop over 3 or 4 feet and it just wasn't happening. The angle looked horrible. It looked like I needed a whole new step (Hey, on the bright side, I was able to order my missing CAP and throw away the stand-in demo one).

Tips I'd follow if I was to do it all over again..

1. Take the dimensions of your brick into account during the design phase. If your brick is 3 1/2 high, consider a step height of 3 1/2 or 7 inches..
2. Don't forget that the top of your landing is kind of like a step (Doh!)
3. Nothing beats a 3d Mockup on your PC to find your mistakes before you make them.
4. Don't forget to take the slope of your land into account.
5. Tamp and compact they hell out of your crushed stone THROUGHOUT the process and wet with water between tampings. It helps later on.
6. There's no such thing as TOO level. Get it perfect everywhere.
7. Don't aim your brick cutter at anything you don't want coated with a fine film of sand-blasted goop.
8. Do every step of the process the best you can make it. It's not worth doing it over later on.

My Mom. Defender of Tim Hortons staff everywhere.

2011-09-06T13:24:00.000-04:00

From the "I wonder where I get it from department" . A few weeks ago my Mom was in the local Tim Hortons and this guy got in line behind her. He was a short body-builder guy with very expensive sunglasses and rolled up sleeves so you could see how much time he spent on his enormous biceps. He wasn't in line right, he was kinda half-way between the entrance to the toilets and the area where you'd think a line would start so when some other people came in behind him, stepped around him, and got served before him and he lost it.

"Is anyone going to ^%$(*&^*%$ serve me?" He yelled. Everyone looked at him. "This has got to be the worst &%#$@% Tim Hortons in the city!" He screamed. My Mom had sat down by the window with her friend and being my Mom she could not just sit there and uhh, let the guy make an ass of himself. She had to help.

"No it isn't!" she yelled. "This is a great Tim Hortons! The service is excellent!"

The guy looked at her and told her to "No one's talking to you lady, butt out and mind your own business!"

To which she said "Yes it is, what you said was wrong, and you're the one yelling at everyone in here, you could be talking to me"

"Well I'm not talking to you! This is none of your &$%*&% business!" (again with the potty mouth)

At which point my Mom said: "It's everyone's business. You're screaming like an A-hole!"

She actually said Letter "A" plus "Hole"... Then he said:

"No lady I'm a F@cking A$$hole!!"

"Is that how you talk to a 64 year old lady!" My Mom said.

"That's how I talk to 64 year old ladies who don't mind their own f@cking business! F%$# this I'm leaving!"

Then my Mom gave him the finger. She has this thing where she checks her hand to make sure she has the right one because sometimes she uses her index finger to give people the finger by mistake.

So the guy goes outside and gets in his red sports car and slams the door and looks at her through the window, revving the engine. He is parked right in front.. And my Mom notices and yells:

"HEY! He's parked in the HANDICAPPED SPACE!" and the guy tore out of there.

My Mom.. Protector of the Tim Horton's Universe.

I take after my Dad....

How everything goes to hell during a Zombie Apocalypse

2011-09-02T00:29:00.000-04:00

This is funny. From theoatmeal.com Thanks to Ross M for the link..

Lost my SUV in the Walmart parking lot

2011-08-07T12:47:00.001-04:00

But then I found it again. Ok, to be fair, it's technically a Mini-SUV...

If Elephants had no Ears or Trunks...

2011-07-20T11:57:00.002-04:00

Game of Thrones is Awesome!

2011-07-18T21:32:00.002-04:00

This years must see TV miniseries at the Zartimus household (while we wait for the walking dead to start up again) was the 10 episode series Game of Thrones. How the hell did these books get by my reading list. That George R.R. Martin dude can really write a good yarn! It's like The Lord of the Rings meets The Sopranos (of course it helps to have the guy who played Boramir in LOTR actually have a lead part in this thing). Not only that, but if you find yourself getting attached to a character or two LOOK OUT because he'll kill them off faster than you can frickin' blink.

I LOVE THAT! It adds to the realism. Death is final and in this book/mini series if a bad person is in a position to screw you over for money, power or sex, they do! They stab you in the back, strip your clothes off before you're all the way dead and wipe the blood off on your clammy skin (because they already took your clothes remember?). It's loosely based on the War of the Roses and the 100 years war so you get a great feel for medieval times. There's magic in the series but it's not up-front. It really takes a back-seat and isn't used as a crutch ("A Wizard did it").

It has simply amazing characters and awesome subplots and layers and intrigue and mystery and gets you hooked even if you need a family tree book to keep everyone straight, who's related to who and why and how and whatnot. Even swords become major characters in this story. You catch on quick and pretty soon you know the Lannisters from the Starks. Every house has a sigil (the Starks have the Dire Wolf as theirs) and that helps keep them straight when they're about to clobber each other on the battlefield. When the series started I cracked open the book and I'll say that the adaptation is superb. It's faithful to the book but speeds the right things along for brevity. Nothing is missing that doesn't need to be there. The casting is excellent (although I saw the show first, read the book second so I'm already biased). One of my favorite characters is "The Imp", a high-born Dwarven lord. He really stirs up crap in this series (when your brother is the medieval Brad Pitt and your sister is a hot incestuous psychopath it tends to affect your personality).

In the novels the author titles each chapter after the name of a major character so you see the story through their eyes only for that whole chapter. The characters get scattered early so some very major plot points don't get spoon fed to you, they are picked up through hearsay or in passing from other characters. It's an awesome technique I've never seen used before and easily lends itself to film. If you haven't checked it out, do yourself a favor.

Another great touch is the intro credits sequence that depicts the Seven Kingdoms and other parts of the land, introducing them as a huge clockwork diorama. They seem to introduce the new lands as they are about to appear in the episodes of the show by adding them to the sequence. You see the Wall, Winterfell, Kings landing, etc.. A great touch.

Check it out!

Landslide - The Smashing Punpkins version guitar tab

2011-07-18T20:50:00.003-04:00

My friend Bryce got married awhile ago, and he wanted this song for the father/daughter dance part. He had a twist though, he wanted to perform it and just needed a guitar bed track. I've always liked this song, the original Fleetwood Mac version, the one the Dixie Chicks did, and I'd heard the Smashing Pumpkins one at one time or another (check out this Brokeback Mountain video montage with it!). I've even performed it once or twice, accompanying a singer so I thought I knew how to play it. Sure Bryce, I can make you a guitar track with it!

Turns out I was wrong. The Billy Corrigan version differs quite a bit from what Lindsey Buckingham wrote. The original uses a Capo on the 3rd fret so I slapped it on, took a listen to the Smashing Pumpkins version and lo and behold.. That's not what's going on at all. It's in some sort of alternate tuning! WTF!

To save time I went to Ultimate Guitar Archive and tried the 3 or 4 versions they had there, and as usual. It was a BIG WASTE OF TIME! If the song is complicated or a cover that differs in any way from the standard way the tune is played you can bet the person who submitted the tab is an earless wonder Cro Mangon guitar player with no ability to differentiate notes and string types and intervals to speak of. You should see some of the absolute clueless shite people slap up there. Surprise surprise, this thing had to be transcribed. So I set about slowing it down in some software and checking out the guts. The guy actually de-tunes the 1st and 2nd strings, 1 semitone down, 2nd a semitone up. I've never heard of a tune that does that. It's almost like Billy C didn't realize the Fleetwood Mac guy was using a capo when he started to lift the tune and just switched the tuning around to accommodate the mistake he made.

But Ohhh what a great mistake. I now love this version more than the capoed travis picking original. The pull offs to the low open strings sound much better. After awhile, I checked for live versions of them performing it on youtube and low and behold, Billy C has a capo on the 3rd fret. WTF? I listened to the notes, they are all wrong. He's playing the Fleetwood Mac version live on Yourtube. Every vid I saw he has a capo and he's playing it the standard way, not his cool studio way.

I finally stumbled on a newsgroup where there was a story that Billy C met Stevie Nicks at a party and she told him she loved the version they did of their song but that her guitar player complained that he was playing it all wrong. Billy C meets Lindsey Buckingham. The CAPO gets slapped on the 3rd fret, a guitar lesson ensues and now he plays it the standard way. Many years later, I am confused for an evening but in the end, here is a tab of what Billy C is doing. As far as I know, it's the only right one out there that I couldn't find, so I did it myself. Woohoo!

Landslide - The Smashing Punpkins version guitar tab

And for you aspiring Karaoke artists, here's the instrumental track.

P.S. in the course of looking for live pumpkins video I ran across this guy, who has the right of it as well. We only differ in one or two places (and I have proofs for mine so it's right, har har har). Still it's a nice video tut. Check it out!

Godzilla is still cool!

2011-07-15T00:18:00.001-04:00

Although my wife had a hand in contributing to our kids DNA, I'm pretty sure they got their love of Godzilla movies from my side of the double helix. We're doing some Godzilla movie marathons this summer combined with heavy doses of good old XBOX Godzilla - Save the Earth monster fights. If you check on YouTube they show guys making their own suits out of foam and poured latex... Hmmm. Be the coolest kid on your block! If I wasn't so busy with half a dozen other hobbies....

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Canada Day 2011 - out with a bang!

2011-07-01T10:13:00.001-04:00

This year we got to avoid the extra large crowds on Parliament Hill because of the prince and princesses in attendance. Royal watchers can be as rough as soccer hooligans if you get in their way, understandable considering they haven't been able to go to the bathroom since 2:00am lest they lose their spot).We spent this Canada Day at "Da Hung Monkey", a backyard cabana bar in Riverside South created by friends of ours. The kids had a great time in and out of the pool, snatching hotdogs from this neat steamer device they had going (I think I ate 4 of them). There was a pizza cook-off between some of the guys but I wasn't able to vote because I forgot who made what. It was all good! I voted for the Hawaiian pizza (of which there was none).

I brought the bullwhips and spend some time edjmumacatin' the folks on how to toss them and apart from the odd strap mark, everyone managed to leave with their eyeballs and skin unflayed. The snowbirds screamed by overhead twice in perfect formation as always. Forget all that talk of those new billion dollar fighter jets, we need to get these guys some new planes! They've been using those ones for ages! The bar-owner had some sort of AOOGA horn connected to a stuffed monkey in the cabana that he pulls when he serves shooters. The neighbors must LOVE that!

We ended the eats of with a Canada Day cake from Costco. The only way to get more Canadian than that would be to slather the top of the cake with poutine (it's been done).

When it got dark we decked out the kids with glow sticks and lights and headed off to the nearby ball field to launch some fireworks. We dug in a series of holes to hold them at about 2nd base line in the infield and things were going well until we noticed another group of people setting up some fireworks at home plate. In hindsight, the fact that they had no flashlight and were using their BBQ lighter to read the instructions on the back of the firecrackers should have been a dead giveaway. They were a bit close but it should be ok. We set ours up with the fuses all pointing to the same side and lit them 3 at a time.

We were lighting the 2nd or 3rd series when a Roman candle whizzed right by my head from the direction of home plate. We looked over and one from the other group had fallen over and firebombing us. We all scattered, looking for our kids and I felt a THWACK! as the next firecracker hit me square in the back of the head. I was wearing a Tilly Hat with a headlamp attached to it and it saved my hair from catching on fire. I took it off and shook off the burning firecracker and put it back on and ducked the next 3 or 4 that came our way and it was after they stopped that my wife told me my hat was still on fire.

I thought it was my headlamp light but no, there was a burning firecracker ember smoking away happily in my prized Tilly Hat I've had since 1991. I was putting it out with gravel from the infield when the 2nd roman candle from the same group at home plate fell over and showered us with burning embers. That's when it became a good time to go introduce myself with who was trying to set us on fire. It was either someone clueless or a group of mean spirited idiots doing it on purpose. Turns out it was option #1. I came up on two 10 year old something kids who immediately apologized for letting the firecrackers get away from them and their parents appeared out of the dark with three more firecrackers ready to go!

Turns out they were new to Canada Day celebrations (maybe they don't shoot off firecrackers in India?) and just setting the Roman candles on the ground, balancing them upright and lighting them up, thinking that they would just stay put as they belched forth gobs of Pyrotechnic stars. It being Canada day and all the diplomatic solution turned out to be to go get our shovel, dig three small holes beside home plate, show them how to bury at least 3 to 4 inches of it into the ground pointing upright and shining my light for them as they lit them up.

BOOYA! No more potential accidents.

I was thinking of getting a new hat....

Monkey HATE Clean!

2011-06-26T20:20:00.001-04:00

Excellent Saturday Night Live skit, hard to find on the net. I like when they throw the old one out. My friend Paul was offered a Monkey at an airport in Indonesia once. Some guy shoved a monkey in his face and screamed:
"Monkey! YOU BUY! YOU BUY!" but he declined. Although there was no way he could have gotten back into Canada with it, he could have kept it in his hotel room for the week. He could have RENTED the monkey! (he said it looked ill though).

MONKEY HATE CLEAN!

UFC 101 - Remembering Forrest Griffen v.s. Anderson Silva

2011-06-01T12:18:00.003-04:00

I came across this great bit with Forrest on a radio show talking about the infamous fight with Anderson Silva. It probably ranks as one of the most extreme examples of a one-sided fight you'll find. I watched that on PPV live and I was amazed at how bad Anderson made Forrest look. I was expecting a real slugfest. Man.. It was so one-sided at the time I thought it looked staged, until I watched it a pile of times. Forrest gets hit again and again and they just take their toll, although the backpedalling jab that finally does him in makes it look all the worse because it looks so harmless. I love Forrest's take on it in the Interview. Every fighter should handle a loss like that. Hillarious! Here's a video of the whole fight.

This photo pretty much says it all. Anderson is looking at him (like Forrest says) and it's like he's thinking "Did You really think you could punch me? What a stupid thing to think. Why would you think something stupid like that"?

Darth Vader Urinal gone viral

2011-05-20T00:15:00.002-04:00

When I posted the pics of what someone did to a garbage bagged busted urinal at work back on April 20th (our urinal is still busted by the way, one month later!) it went viral very quickly, appearing in a bunch of popular joke websites, all stemming from the originals I posted on my Flickr account.One day it had 3 views and the next day it had 4000. Since then it's been copied and posted around all over the place.

Check it out where it's been by doing a "Darth Vader Urinal" search on Google.It's amazing how these things get around. What's even funnier is seeing all these posts by authors claiming they were responsible for it. At least some of them tagged my name on there. I wish they linked back to the original flickr photo so I could see the counts. A few days after Darth appeared in our can on the 3rd floor of the Main building, people started adding things and changing the captions. I had some pics of the Storm Trooper heads that I didn't post because they were blurry I was laughing so hard. What makes them extra funny is that they match the white porcelain urinals while Darth Vader's is black. Even Yoda was up there for awhile. I think the cleaners didn't get what was going on and took them down.

Thanks to D Dunbar for forwarding these clear shots, taken I suspect by M Savard, and speaking of the real credit, the person who actually taped the vader head and chest piece up on the wall, I think I know who it is but they are not owning up to it!

You Park like an asshole.com

2011-05-15T23:32:00.000-04:00

There's a webpage for people like this. It's called http://youparklikeanasshole.com/ . Now I have never felt the need to "key" a car but if I was to suddenly start, it would be with this guy. Nothing says "I'm a presumptuous wanker" than parking like this. I don't even know what it's supposed to accomplish. Is it that the owner thinks people are morons who are going to open their car doors and give his side panel a ding? Is he saying that his car is more important than your crappy car and he is forced to park like this lest our inability to place a vehicle between two parallel lines somehow places his car in great peril? Tell you what. PARKING LIKE THIS WILL ENSURE THAT ONE DAY SOMEONE WILL %$&^#* with your ride.

I have friends (who shall remain nameless) who let the air out of tires of cars parked like this. Cheers to them I say..

The site also has this handy ticket you can leave.

Sheesh...

Nature in the Backyard part 13

2011-05-14T23:13:00.000-04:00

I'm counting Freddy the neighbor's cat in this batch because he scared the crap out of me the day he did this. I though he was some hairy little person trying to break into the house. I've never met his owner but I don't think the cat likes him much as he is always at our house trying to get in. Maybe it's because we feed him bacon and stuff.. (no, it's because he loves us..)..

When I'm in the backyard I sometimes hear a weird SCREE sound and a large bird whips by overhead and I never get a good enough look at it. Well, this time it sat on that wooden thing the farmer has in the back yard. I'm not sure what kind of bird it is..

This was a neat one. When I was making breakfast for the kids one morning I caught a flash of orange across the creek in our backyard. Turns out it was the fox that sometimes hangs around out back. Today it was circling the wild turkeys that often waltz across the back field. I wanted to stick around to see if the fox would try for one but I had to go to work! I don't think he did, those turkeys can be mean!

And the deer are back..

The Bloody bloody Mary Mirror Monster

2011-05-12T22:20:00.001-04:00

About a month ago, our six year old started to act weird. A few days later we realized she was afraid to go into the bathroom and after a few rounds of questions it came out that she had heard a scary story at her after school program. An eleven year old had been egged on by the other kids to tell a scary story so she trotted out a nasty variation on the legend of Bloody Mary. If you look it up on Wikipedia or snopes, it's hard to establish the exact history behind the story but the short version is if you go into a bathroom at midnight, light a candle and say Bloody Mary three times (you may or may not have to spin around three times before or after) Bloody Mary's ghost appears and eats your face off. Well that's enough to terrify a six year old.

As I began to talk to people about it I found out that Bloody Mary is lurking in the mirrors at pretty much every school n the Ottawa area. She was even found in some kid's Jello pudding last week. Not only that but she is ingrained in the psyches of people in every age group. I grabbed the movie that came out in 2006 or 2008 and tried to watch it (It sucked pretty bad, I'm talkin' Major league II bad here...) and the funny thing was, my wife refused to watch it with me. These deviation type legends bite pretty deep!

One thing I don't understand is why my kid takes some eleven year old's word for this kind of crazy stuff but refuses to believe me when I tell her we've been living on planet earth for years and nothing's tried to rip my face off near a bathroom (well, there was that dog that one time.. and it was kind of beside the bathroom). I even tried to start a dirty rumor that bananas were about to take over the world by flying into our ears and hijacking our brains and we have to be on our guard but of course she doesn't believe ME! I'll bet if it came out the eleven year old's mouth it would be the gospel! R Gater had a great idea. He had the same thing happen to him and he got his daughter what he referred to as a "Hippy Crystal" which he told her gave protection from all mirror-based monsters. We tried it and it helped, but the fear is still there and it's real as hell and overrides common sense and parental pissed-offed-ness.

Her sister tried to help in her own way by posting a picture in the bathroom downstairs but that didn't work either. I went on youtube and found tons of videos by kids 9 to 12 (the Robinson age they call it) filming themselves saying Bloody Mary in mirrors hoping to show my daughter that nothing happens but OF COURSE half of these vids by the amateur PUNK'D crowd end with the kids slathered in ketchup and wailing when the lights come on. Thanks for nothing you jokers! I was playing L.A. Noire on the Xbox 360 last week and my character passed in front of a mirror and I got her and yelled "BLOODY MARY" at the TV and nothing happened. Not even in the digital world! So tonight when I tucked her in to sleep in her mirror-less room she buried herself under the covers once again and the thought occurred to me that she could use a snorkel to breathe.

My next step is to get some old rotting book and replace the pages inside with aged paper that depicts a medieval version of our family (our ancestors) and shows them doing battle with Evil Bloody Mary Mirror Monsters in such a way that alludes to us having built up a a family immunity..

We'll see if that cuts down on the "Oops I didn't make it to the bathroom because there's an evil witch in there waiting to rip my face off while I go pee" laundry, if you get my meaning.

Nice to be back amonst IT geeks. The Darth Vader Urinal

2011-04-20T20:23:00.000-04:00

About 5 or 6 months ago I switched positions at my place of work., I went from Project Management/ Development/ Database Monkey stuff to our Server Support Infrastructure section. Basically from Software Dev to Hardware/OS Support of Windows Servers (years ago I did both at the same time but then they consolidated and siloed everything). It's been a great move, the people on my team are very cool and although I worked here for over a year about 11 years ago, I'd forgotten what it was like to be surrounded by hard-core IT junkies. I went from being one of the only people in my old division voiding the warranties of all my electronic devices to a whole division full of people doing it. And it's obvious mostly through the humour that gets put on display.

Case in point. When our urinals are busted, the cleaning staff tapes garbage bags around them so people don't use them, flush them, and flood the place with unpleasant liquids. Now I had never made the connection that affixing said garbage bag to the urinal looks a bit like the Dark Lord of the Sith's cape, but someone on my floor did. They printed out a Darth Vader head shot and little electronic doohickey from the front of his armor and pasted it on the "black-bagged" urinal. Then a quote appeared. The quote gets changed almost every other day.

I love working here! (no jokes about us having too much time on our hands, we work hard., fast, and efficient, with tons of stress factors and you need to do stuff like this to laugh once and awhile).

Free HP Bladecenter training for gophers

2011-04-20T20:02:00.000-04:00

I was on an HP course a few weeks ago, learning about their blade-center hardware and software. It was a pretty intense course, we got to rip apart the blade enclosures, physically and virtually, and try just about any weird thing we wanted to simulate failures (which, I might add, is pretty hard to do with the modular design of the HP's, since they bought out all that great Proliant technology from Compaq years ago). The course was held out in Kanada at a recently purchased big empty building surrounded by green space. I saw deer and geese and gophers all over the place. There was a huge window at the back of the class and looking through it I noticed a fairly big gopher hole right on the edge of the building.

At one point, I was going through a lab and I heard a "kathunk" sound. I turned around and there was this gopher with his nose right up against the glass. I looked at him and he looked over at me and then turned his attention to the board at the front. he was looking at the instructor. This gopher was getting free training man! Usually rodents don't understand the "invisible force-field protecting me from the scary humans" concept of glass, but this guy was wise to it. He was not bothered in the least, (maybe it was like television for him). If he does this every day, he can come and work on my team man!

iPad2 Fedex World Tour

2011-04-15T00:29:00.002-04:00

Some shippers love to send stuff away from you before eventually swinging it back in your direction. I ordered an iPad2 a few weeks back and was excited when I started getting Fedex emails. They shipped it to MISSISSAUGA, ON, CANADA, 5 hours away from my house just to tease me before carting it off to OAKLAND, CA, USA and then MEMPHIS, TN, USA. Probably the moon next. I found this great thread entitled "WTF is Fedex retarded?" that seems to do a good job explaining why. This guy's stuff also went to Alaska and he was pissed that it had been subjected to -40 temperatures and most likely manhandled by clumsy guys in parkas.

GelaSkin skins for Ipad2

2011-04-13T01:01:00.002-04:00

I ordered an iPad 2 online a few weeks back, not wanting to stand in line at the Apple store at 5:00am. Oddly enough I know people who got their hands on some Saturday after the Friday 5:00pm launch, but their don't have "Say hello to my little friend" engraved on the back!! As it turns out I'm probably gonna cover that up as I stumbled across some very cool skins for iPad2 on a site by a company called Gelaskin that lets you do up your own! This is one I made from an existing Fractal.
What you get is a back skin and a front border frame skin and then you use wallpaper on your desktop to complete the image. The site is in Toronto and the iPad2 ones go for $29.95 CDN. Check some of the professional ones out!

Jamaica 2011 - Final Days

2011-03-25T10:00:00.001-04:00

The family and I were getting to be experts at the buffet now and I was able to cobble together something approximating your typical breakfast meal in my work's cafeteria. The kids loved this whole "go get whatever you want whenever you want for free" concept of food procurement (it was quite the shock to the system when they came back to Canada and didn't have the Omelette guy serving them up whatever they wanted). The food at this place was awesome. A good tip the next time you;re at one of these resorts is to go to Canadian Tire and grab one of those Big Bubba Keg mugs so you can get them to fill it with whatever you want and save yourself a few trips to the bar. The drink glasses on the resort are pretty small and a large drink container comes in handy!

They had these neat birds at the resort who really liked scrambled eggs so they would clear out the last remnants and feed them all in the back so they wouldn't bother the patrons in the dining area. My wife managed to get a shot of a Heron-like bird in the bay as well. There were quite a few cats running around. These were wild cats, strays, who managed to survivine on whatevber the vacationers at the hotel fed them and my kids were all over that (they are cat crazy). I'm surprised we didn't have one living in our room. Something struck me as strange with some of the cats before I realized that I'm not used to seeing them with their junk intact.

Every day there would be different vendors in the Hotel set up so you could buy stuff. They were pretty nice and no one hounded you at all. At another hotel there was a guy who sold stuff offshore. He was not allowed to come on the beach so he had a kayak full of stuff and he would paddle in about 20 feet from shore (outside hotel property) and get to to come over and see what he had. An interesting way to circumvent the system! Apparently whatever they offer you you're supposed to go down 50% but we didn't haggle too hard. We figured they needed the money more than we needed to save any.

The gift shop on the resort was full of great stuff! You could get various Jamaican phallic symbols as well as a Beatles Yellow Submarine Jesus! I really wish I would have picked up one of those Jamaican hats with the Dreads on them. very cool. In the end I settled for a couple of t-shirts. Remember the Jamaican bobsled team? They had posters of those guys as well!

That afternoon I went out into the water again snorkling with Dan's camera this time set to widescreen 30 frames a second video. I headed over to the drop off and tried to measure how deep it was. I hung there in the water and figured that about 5 of me would fit one on top of the other so about 30 feet. That's my limit as far as going down deep, actually probably about 25 feet but that took me to the mouth of these Coral caves and wouldn't you know it, there was ZIP in there, nada. I was expecting some huge sea beast to be hunkered down in there just waiting to be videoed. That's when I noticed something was wrong with the underwater camera. I've used cameras underwater before and Ive experienced the situation with throwaway underwater cheapie cams where the pressure is wacked and you can't even press the button because the air is so compressed. I headed back up to breathe and see what was up and the camera was not doing so good. Hmm, it should be good to a certain number of meters. Oops. later i found out it was only good to 15 feet. It sprung a seal and salt water killed it good. I did the bag of rice trick but to no avail. I just killed my friend's camera. Oh well. (I bought him a better one, a Hi Def model three up from his and newer the next day I got back. OUCH!). This sucked because i was on the fence thinking about buying a Go Pro HD underwater Cam and now here I was replacing a cam I broke. I should have just bit the bullet and bought the Go PRO before my trip. Let this be a lesson to you gadget freaks. If you are thinking you should but something, GO WITH YOUR GUT AND BUY THAT THING! (hehehehehehe).

When I got back to the pool Dan informed me that he entered me and this guy Luigi from our group in a talent show at the resort that night. That's nice of you Dan! What am I supposed to do? "Do some of that guitar stuff!" I asked if they had an acoustic, because I do a version of "No Woman No cry" slap funk fingerstyle that might go over well, but no.. They just had the house band and he had a Fender copy electric guitar. I met with him an hour before I was supposed to go on and I tried to get a high gain sound with a touch of delay like I like it but no deal man. That guitar was a reggae guitar, clean as a whistle and it did not dirty up very well through his setup. I fitzed around and went with the dirtiest sound I could get but it had absolutely NO sustain. ACK! And launched into RUSH's Limelight for the Canadian Contingent. After a few bars the drummer and bass player kicked in and I thought great! Rush, everyone knows Rush, Awesome! Until it hit that time signature switch from 4/4 to 4/ 3/4 and then it was like that scene in "Back to the Future" where they got lost, looked at each other and stopped playing... hehehehehehehe.

Still it was fun. If that ever happens again I'm bringing some Amp Models on my Iphone and plugging into that. Playing any guitar pyrotechnics when you don't have your sound (the brown sound or something like it) is like trying to make out with your head wrapped in cellophane. You can go through the motions but it's not gonna work and it gets you down just trying.

Luigi, the guy that sang the national anthem at our Jamaican hockey game turned out to be a wedding singer and he closed the show with a great rendition of "It's a wonderful world". It was definitely Canadian Entertainment night in Jamaica.

That night the "Girls Gone Wild" as we were calling the Spring Break students from Ithaca, spend part of the evening throwing up in back of our hotel room. By this point, it didn't phase us. That was one of the few weird things about the resort, the fact that they had mixed families with kids with "Girls Gone Wild" in the same area of the hotel. For the most part though, the hotel managed to keep them all on one side where the hot tub and swim up bar was.

Our kids liked to go to the hot tub, but the first few times I accompanied them there, it was to watch them sitting amongst a sea of 19 to 22 somethings. In a couple of instances, I moved the kids along because of what was going on. Now I'm not a prude, and I can take a 3 woman(girl) "Love train" chugging along poolside with the middle one grabbing the first one's boobs and the last one slapping the middle one's butt cheeks, I just don't want to explain it to my kids.When I arrived back at the waterslides some other ladies were getting ready to take their kids to the hot tub and I kind of said "Uhh, maybe not..". One of the Dad's asked "What's going on at the hot tub?" and I said: "uhh, maybe you shuld go check it out first" (grin). ZOOM! Now my kids know that it is possible for multiple people to drink booze underwater using a funnel and bong device (thank you Georgia University!).

Actually my kids enjoyed watching their antics. I myself was reminded of competing tribes of monkeys in documentaries on the Discovery channel I've seen where male monkeys in the "Georgia" tribe would attempt to entice female monkeys from the "Ithaca" tribe over to their side. This action greatly upset the male monkeys in the "Ithaca" tribe who attempted to retaliate by trying to do the same with tribe "Georgia"'s females. This in turn had the effect of angering the females of tribe "Ithaca" who went out of their way to be receptive to the advances made by male "Georgians", and so on. Or sometimes the female "Ithaca" and female "Geogians" would turn to each other for comfort in this tense tribal situation causing all of tribe Ithaca and Tribe Georgia males to stop what they were doing and take photographs instead.

Only In Jamaica Mon!

All in all it was a wonderful vacation and we would go back to the same resort given an opportunity. We actually had 8 days there due to our early flight and late departure. It's a great setup for kids and they had a great time. I think next time we go though we'll try and avoid the three overlapping weeks of US spring Break! Maybe the Pirate ship will be open!

Woohoo!

Jamaica 2011 - Day 2-3

2011-03-23T09:55:00.000-04:00

On Sunday we played ball hockey with the Jamaican kids of the staff that worked at the resort. None of these kids had ever held a hockey stick before so it was kinda fun teaching them how shoot and not high stick each other and all of that. There were other Canadian families at the resort and we let some of the other kids play. We had one of our guys sing the Canadian anthem and someone in the Jamaican group sang theirs. We provided a goalie and one Canadian kid playing forward that was put on the Jamaican team was a real ringer. He scored all of their goals and it was great to see his team congratulate him! The kids from Jamaica learned quick by watching him where you go and what you do. Pretty soon we had cherry pickers all in front of the Canadian net but that left no defenceman at the Jamaican end (led to a few 7 on none breakaways). After the kids game and the handshake lineup and group photo the adults wanted to play us. Oh man, I was not expecting that.

Us older Canucks got together and decided that we would show them the passing game, pass 5 or 6 times before we took a shot. There were two guys from Toronto who were not part of our group and they wanted to play on team Jamaica. We didn't have enough adult sized sticks so I took the big one I had and gave it to someone on the other side and ended up with a kid's stick that came up to my waist (grin). That passing game went out the window real quick. I was at the side of the net and someone centered and I grabbed it and had two whacks at it before getting it back and hopping a lob over the pad of the downed goalie. Oops... Then it was a shooting gallery. Sorry guys, It's a Canadian thing. I'm not sure what happens when hockey sticks come out but national pride takes over and suddenly your only focus is putting that puck or ball past that line into the net as many times and as fast as humanly possible. It was a lot of fun. At one point one of our defensemen cleared and two guys on the other team sort of did a jump shot with their sticks and just about tapped the ball down from 15 feet in the air. I guess we didn't go over that rule, but no one got hurt and everyone still has the teeth they started with.They beat the hell out of us at beach volleyball afterward!

Our kids hit the waterslides and lazy river and pools after lunch and our group grabbed a big chunk of real estate at the bottom of the water slides which happened to be right outside our rooms. You could keep a great eye on the kids as they ran up the towers because eventually, depending on the lineups (sometimes there were none) they would come popping out of one of the two chutes. Our youngest daughter mostly traversed the lazy river in a tube and at 6 years old she could touch in all of the places in the water except one.

That night at the stage they had a fire eater and a guy on stilts that made balloon animals. The Balloon guy had made a pile of swords and all the kids were running around whacking each other on the heads with balloon rapiers. The Fire guy set fire to himself (including his junk at one point) and it makes you wonder how he learned to do that to himself. Being from Canada, it's not something we seem to be interested in here. Our eldest daughter wanted a bit of a break so we let her stay back in the room and we gave her an FRS radio and took one of the others and kept in contact that way (Costco man, set of three with batteries and a charger! we used those things the whole trip!). Unfortunately when she turned on the TV it was set to a Japanese sci fi channel that scared her a bit and when she couldn't figure out how to switch to the Cartoon Network she called us because it was freaking her out.

Luckily Empire strikes back was on! It was like being back at home in our own house!

The next day I borrowed a friend's underwater camera and went snorkeling in the coral reefs for a couple of hours. It was awesome! I saw tons of fish and crabs and brain coral and sea anemones and sea urchins and star fish. I was thinking of going on a dive while there but with this set or reefs just off our beach there was no need, I could get my underwater fix right here! I took some video but found out after that I had it set to low def 15 frames per second. I'll have to take it out again and ramp up the settings. As I was leaving I found a big 40 foot drop off on the far side which I wanted to come back and check out. There were some coral caves and there had to be interesting fish down in there at the mouth of those. At that point I looked out into the deep blue sea and felt a little like the clown fish in "Finding Nemo" in that anything big coming out that that open water would make me uncomfortable. Time to get back into the coral channels!

That afternoon the first of the "Spring Breakers" arrived from the US and spiced up our trip. At 5:00pm when the water park shut down they discovered the waterslide and spend some time running down it dry, drunk and screeching and yelling and then cannon balling into the shallow water at the bottom. Thinking they were going to kill themselves, or break the equipment and ruin part of my kids vacation, I called security. The line was busy. Apparently most people there were calling security. Before I got off the phone someone from the hotel was getting them all off the slides and shooing them all over to the other side. I found out later that the pirate ship play structure in the pool was closed just because of the Spring Breakers because they try to kill themselves on it doing drunken high-dive antics. As we went to dinner that day I saw nurse Ratchet again tending to some young ladies who had drank themselves silly a few hours into their arrival (I wonder how much that costs?).
We had dinner in the Italian restaurant that night and the waiter made up a table for the kids who ended up behaving beautifully. In the end it was the adult table that got shushed because we were getting out of hand. At the kids table once they finished eating they whipped out the Apple Itouches and Nintendo DS's and kept themselves entertained. That night Dan got dragged up on stage to be the entertainment in some kind of dance off/ drinking game. I ran up to the side of the stage and snapped a picture of him and the next thing I knew I was dragged up on stage as well (for taking a picture). Three other guys were chosen including "Mr Bacon", a portly gentleman from from the US who I recognized from the Breakfast buffet who loaded his plate up with a foot high of bacon each morning. We had to do a five step dance and at the end of the dance we had to run and get a shot of vodka from any of the nearby bars. The last guy up on stage got to drink all the shots poured into one glass. Newsflash, I don't drink so I was not gonna lose this thing. The bartenders are watching the show so they give you a bit of grief when you bolt to the table and scream at him for a shot of vodka. They take their time so you have to win it in a footrace back through a maze of chairs and then back onto the stage. The stage was pretty big and had two stairways on either side but from my former life I know that if a stage is just over waist high to me I can jump it safely. Mr Bacon went down first, followed by everyone except me and Dan so even though I made it back ahead of everyone each time, i didn't win because when it was down to just two of us they declared Dan the winner and he had to drink the Vodka. Oh well! Worked out for the best! I love how they take us vacationers and make us the entertainment! Before I go down again I have to enroll in Hip Hop Dance lessons (or maybe erotic pole dancing, it aligns more with what they make you do there BAM BAM!).

As we made our way back to our room we saw the moon. It was directly overhead. I'm talking smack dab in the middle of the sky. very cool. That night we were woken up by Spring Breakers at 3:00am returning from the bars. They kind of forgot what room they were in and were banging on doors when the key would not open. I went out to introduce myself real polite like and asked them to take it down a notch and met some lovely ladies from Ithaca University. The least drunk in her group (she was just swaying slightly side to side while her other friends needed to lean on the wall and or each other) was trying to shut her friends up because when you're that drunk in Jamaica you have a need to speak at full volume for some reason. One of the leaners looked at me and asked her friend-post "IS HE REALLY THERE?". I made a face and shushed her explaining that I have two kids and I do not want to have to deal with them waking up at 3:00am and she turned back to her friend and said "HE MUST BE REAL HE JUST SHUSHED US!" Her leaning post asked "WHERE ARE YOU FROM? WE'RE FROM ITHACA!".

They were polite and all, just drunk and loud. I'm going to get my kids to run up and down the terrace banging pots and pans at 7:00am tomorrow.

Jamaica March 2011 Day 1

2011-03-22T12:56:00.249-04:00

This March break was a first for us when we decided to join a hockey team headed to a Jamaican resort to with sports equipment and nets to play hockey with some of the kids who lived there. We were one of 15 families from the Ottawa area that descended on the Sunset Beach Resort in Montego Bay.

We hit the Ottawa airport wearing our black Leitrim Hockey shirts (there was probably about 65 of us) to catch our 6:00am flight. The kids were very excited, ours especially since they had never been on a plane before. Check in was interesting. Many thanks to the kind family who lent us some weight to get our hockey stuff through. We all had an extra 5 kilos and had to distribute it evenly among us to get the sticks and nets on the plane. In Canada they seem content to check for traces of bomb-making type stuff by dusting your gear with some secret powder which must show a reaction when it comes into contact with anything shady. Pretty high-tech! I didn't get the pat down but I took the longest in the x-ray line because I was packing so much tech (Iphones, netbooks, vid and still cams, media players, GPS etc.. ).

Speaking of Gps units, it's the first time I've been on the plane with one and after holding it up to the window I was excited to see how fast we were going (850km an hour) as well as our altitude (The 6791 is wrong in that pic, some barometric altimeter error due to cabin pressure? this screen shows 41,000 feet).

On the plane ride we were asked to complete a Jamaican customs paper for each family member. There was a shortage of pens but no worries, I had one in my favorite color, purple, and it took me about 30 minutes to fill them all in (what's this stuff! I'm on vacation mon!). As it turns out, this was bad as I had not noticed the note at the top indicating the use of blue or black pens only. So when we put down in Jamaica and went to customs, they told me my forms were NO GOOD, Purple ink and all that and that I had to go re-do them.

What kind of OCR software you got here Mon, Purple is the same as blue to the computers! In fact, my purple ink was better than the squeaky thin black pen I managed to scrounge from the tourist desk as me and about 30 other people spent 20 minutes refilling the forms and holding up the bus! Blue version in hand we got through customs and narrowly avoided the guys who hang out at the airport posing as hotel drivers trying to drive you to your hotel instead of your free hotel bus taking you. It helped that we were a big group and were dressed like a cult, all wearing the same black t-shirts.

The drive was pretty interesting as they drive on the left side of the road (a parting gift from the brits when they were here). Just when you think the oncoming truck will plow into you, it shoves over to the side and you barely scrape by. It's like every road here is one lane and we all "share" it. There is an awful lot of barbed wire here, the most I have seen, ever.. I'm not sure if it's for keeping people in, or out. At one point as our bus pulled up to a red light, a guy staggered into the road and dragged a dirty cloth across the windshield. He was a Squeegee guy without the squeegee!

We arrived at the hotel and because our rooms were not going to be ready for another 3 or 4 hours, the hotel arranged for us to get bracelets and go EAT right away. I was impressed with the way that went down, they even brought us kiddy drinks to tide us over as we re-filled in the Hotel paperwork we had already filled on the plane. Our fearless Leader, Dan, had arranged for this super quick check-in and he had asked us to fill in all the info on the plane but the authorities had held him up at the airport trying to get our hockey equipment through and he had everything with him. Because these sticks and nets were gifts he was planning on leaving behind, there was more paperwork to fill out! As we entered the resort there was a big banner as you came in with the hockey team's name on it, Neat-o. As the days passed, as long as you mentioned you were with the hockey team from Canada, and you wanted or needed anything, it happened fast with excellent service!

My kids wanted to swim in the ocean right away! They had never been in salt water and took to it readily, but we had one unfortunate incident. My 10 year old cut open her big toe on a rock in the water a mere 90 minutes after arrival. The beach shoes were in our luggage and since we had no room yet, we had not unpacked these. It was bleeding quite a bit when I carried her out of the water (almost slicing up my foot in the process) but the hotel staff got me the nurse who brought a wheelchair and we headed off to the medical station at the hotel. The nurse seemed very capable, and cleaned the toe up really good but she felt it needed stitches. My kid was against this, she has never had any. In Canada we have that second skin medical crazy glue stuff that doesn't involve poking holes in your skin and sticking needles through it with string on the end so she wanted that. Apparently, this technology has not made it to the island yet, or at least not our hotel.

Do you know that it costs between $500 and $600 or $700 US to get stitches in Jamaica? $150 for the doctor to come look, $150 for the stitches, $150 for the meds and $150 for anything else. When you pay the $150 he takes a look and totals up everything else and lets you know, it's a case by case thing (we are not in Canada anymore mon!). Even though we had vacation medical coverage this didn't seem right to me. The nurse asked my kid some questions and I went and answered for her and the nurse got angry with me and gave me the "talk to the hand" thing.

"Let her answer!" she barked.

Hmm. I was starting to get pissed here. Hey nurse Ratchet, I'm the parent and this is MY kid you are talking to. This isn't a child abuse disclosure interview, how about we knock off the tude a bit eh? The whole money thing pissed me off and I'm already starting to suspect your medical opinion is driven by greenbacks. So I did the typical Canadian thing and smiled and told my kid to answer her (she didn't at first, which was funny. She must have thought if she opened her mouth the stitches were gonna be going in right then and there. In the end nurse Ratchet wrote down what I told her in the first place). Before she cleaned and wrapped it I got a good look at it and it was not as bad as I thought. I told her we had a doctor in our travel group and I was going to get a second opinion. We had packed a ton of first aid stuff and could probably get through the week keeping her beach shoes on, her toe bandaged up and the salt and chlorine would probably keep it pretty clean.

The nurse was a bit angry at that point and asked me if I was not respecting her medical opinion and I lied politely and told her that I did respect her opinion and I was simply seeking a second one. What I really wanted to say was that I don't like getting reamed out by hotel medical practitioners in a foreign country because I'm a tourist and you have me over a barrel, but I kept that particular medical opinion to myself. I may need this nurse again soon and it pays to be nice! Then she made me fill out an incident report and she got very picky over my wording and handwriting and it took about 15 minutes to fill that out. All the while there were 3 other couples out front waiting to see the nurse. Thank god we were first. For the second or third time I was starting to get a bit flustered at her demeanour. As I was trying to fill the thing out she asked me a few times if I understood what she was asking me to do. I think what she REALLY wanted to ask me was if I actually understood English and if I was quite possibly illiterate. Yup. That's the impression I got. When she huffed at my wording I crossed out a word to chose another word and she just about had a cow. "NO!!! DON"T CROSS IT OUT!" Then she reached for a new form and I told her there was no way I was filling a new one out. I've been in your damned country 2 hours and I'm spending half of that time filling out damned forms. I thanked her for wrapping my kids foot and I asked her if I could wheel my kid out and bring back the wheelchair.

Nope.. Wheelchair stays. Your kid can walk if she doesn't need stitches. YEEHA! I'm having fun now! As I left I glanced at the peopel waiting in the outer office and said:
"Good luck folks!, you're not in Kansas anymore!".

The doctor in our group from Canada said that stitches would probably not do well in that area and just to bandage it and keep it clean. I told my kid we'll pass on the stitches and buy an IPAD 2 when we get home with the money instead, because the cost is about the same, and plus we can take pictures of her toe with the ipad!

We got our room a few hours after and we unpacked our stuff and headed out to explore the grounds. As we left our room I went to lock the back sliding door and noticed that there WAS no lock on it. Doh! No problem man, I had to go to the front desk to get a safe key anyhow, I'll ask them to fix the room door.

The hotel was neatly laid out and you could see how they attempted to separate the kids and families from the US spring break crowd that had also begun to arrive. All the kiddy stuff, water slides, lazy river etc was on one side, and the hot tubs, big pools and swim up bars were on the other. We caught the sun set right at 5:50/6:00 and explored the rocky outcropping that protected some of the swimming areas before hitting the evening dinner buffet. The food was very good. I will eat well over the next 8 days! We caught a bit of the night time show and turned in early to get rested up from the early start. On the way to our room we passed the water park in the night and took a picture. We'll be trying that bad boy first thing tomorrow morning! Whatever happens after today, it's all uphill!

Operation lose holiday fatness 2011

2011-03-15T19:00:00.007-04:00

Well, it was good eatin' this Christmas. I somehow managed to pack on 10 pounds of holiday fatness this year (actually I know exactly how) before the late October Halloween chocolate frenzy and the December holiday meal eat-a-thons. What I ussually do after increasing my mass like this is turn to project Ketosis for a two week period which nets me a damned near garenteed loss of 10-12 pounds. But... It sucks. Carbohydrates, bread especially, makes you as happy as a 13 year old boy in a Hooters reasturant. On project Ketosis, which is the same thing as the first two weeks of the Atkins induction diet, one is allowed 20g of carbs a day. Welcome to unhappiness-ville population me! It's a fad diet to be sure, altering one's food intake radically for a time with fast results which do not stay in place over time. I just go back to eating chocolate and pizzas afterwards and pack it back on in 3 to 4 months (just in time for summer!). It's like, eat like a freak for three months, diet like a freak for two weeks, it takes more time to pack it on than lose it, woo hoo! It's bad though and I've known it for years but never bothered to do anything about it.

Plus, with no sugar in your bod, your system manufactures it somehow to keep your brain going and doesn't do a bang up job of it. You get kinda loopy!

So. Radical departure! This time I tried something different. My six year old was watching "Hanna Montanna" over the holidays and there was Billy Ray Cyrus, the Achy Breaky Heart guy doing pushups in his living room. The full extension part of the exercise brought his eyes in line with the top of his coffee table on which sat a chocolate cake which he talked to as he exercised. He woudl do a push up and say:

"Ah' ma coming for ya!"

And another push up.

"You'll be mine soon!"

You get the idea. He's burning cals in order to make room for that 350 cal piece of choco cake! So this time, I tried just counting calories. Imagine that! You keep track of what's going in, create a 500 calorie deficit, and low and behold, stuff starts to happen! Burning 3500 calories will equal one pound of fat. Seven days of a 500 calories a day deficit gets you 7x500 = 3500 = a pound a week in weight loss. You calculate what you burn in a day just being alive and going to work (in my case it's like 2700 or so, -500 = 2200 a day) and I'll be darned. This approach actually works! One key is using an iPhone app called lose-it to keep track of what you're stuffing down your pie-hole. Carry it with you, plop in everything you eat that day and you're off to the races. I use it so much my wife calls my iphone my "Fat Pod" now. .

I went from like 215 Jan 01 and I'm 198.5 now mid-March. It's like a pound or two a week. When I get to where I think I should be (195, 190), I'll stop and add 500 cals to my day and I'll stay the same. Now my 2700 daily allotment is tied to my weight and that has gone down as well, (more you lose the less you burn just walking around because you're not as heavy) but not by much.

This is by far the easiest because it's slow and controlled and you get used to this way of eating and doing without food you don't need. AND YOU CAN SNACK! Just leave room or do a pile of pushups like Billy Ray Cyrus!

More Guitar Riff of the day for a year - Feb 2011

2011-03-04T20:36:00.002-05:00

I'm still slaving away at my Guitar Riff a Day project although I'm slow in getting them off my composing rig, onto the PC, into Soundcloud and up on the blog. So far it's still fun and the next time I need some music, I cam comb through 365 of these. There's bound to be a few keepers. It's the monkeys writing Shakespeare technique!

GROTDFAY 169 2011-02-02 by zartimus

GROTDFAY 170 2011-02-03 by zartimus

GROTDFAY 171 2011-02-04 by zartimus

Using the Guitar for evil!

2011-03-04T09:42:00.002-05:00

Funny because in a small number of cases, it's TRUE! When I was a youngster, a friend of mine was interested in learning the guitar and I had a longstanding offer to show anyone and everyone I knew how to play the wonderful things, so I started him out with the basics. Well, he met this girl shortly afterward who noticed the guitar standing in the corner at his place and she indicated strongly that she really liked the sound of an acoustic guitar. I was over a few days later and asked him how the guitar was going and he asked me if I knew how to play "More than words" by Extreme. As it turned out, GPFTPM had ran a transcription of it a few month back (this was in 1990) and I had learned it. I still remember taking the performance notes to heart. the first sentence was "Throw your pick down.. NOW! You have 10 seconds to comply!". Hehehehehe. (I still feel that way about most acoustic pieces).

So I ran through the intro and he goes "Hold that thought!" and phones up his girlfriend. She answers the phone at her place and my friend goes "Hey, check out this song I just learned.."and points the phone at me while I still have the guitar. So I get what he's trying to do and I flubbed the first few notes as a joke and he pulls the phone away and says to her "Just a sec, I'm not comfortable, let me sit down to play this." and he gives me a look and points the phone at me again.

This is going to be really funny, I thought, so I launch into Nuno Bettencourt's acoustic pop masterpiece full force embellishing all the arpeggios and full face guitar-slaps, bla bla and after about 15 seconds I can hear this girl screaming on the phone and my friend has this huge smile on his face. He starts talking to her so I stop because it's not easy to hold a conversation and play right? And she is telling him that she is coming over NOW! I wave at my friend and point at the guitar and make strumming motions and he gets the hint and says "Wait, wait, I got another one!" at which point I played the intro/chorus and verse to "Hole Hearted" (that month's GPFTPM had it). This time the scream on the phone was louder. I like girls that have an appreciation for the instrument!.

I left at that point, and I don't know how long he was able to keep his non guitar prowess a secret, but that was the last time I did that.Definitely using the guitar for evil there!

The great blue huntress

2011-01-25T19:54:00.001-05:00

What game is my kid playing? Phycho Smurfette on horseback has bagged a pile of Yoshie's and has crammed them all into
The basket of a hot air ballon to send them up to their doom in the stratosphere.

Seriously, I had nothing to do with it...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Peanut butter and chocolate sandwich

2011-01-20T21:03:00.001-05:00

Look what I caught the youngster making. Why didn't I think of this?

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Mistaken for a convict again

2011-01-18T18:10:00.001-05:00

Last week Jim and I bet our co-worker Jo-Anne that our parking was closer and therefore better than her parking. With the recent changes (privatization and increa$e$) , parking at Tunney's Pasture has become a giant free-for-all.
I sometimes even get the 'Quebec' parking now! These are the prime spots that feature mostly Quebec license plates thus occupied because the owner arrived in that spot at the crack of dawn (interesting stat that) and will depart between 2:00 and 3:00 pm.
Anyhow, to prove our parking was better, I took my GPS out, reset the track log at my car's door, and hoofed it to my building complex. I wasn't stopping for nobody! (I wanted an average walk time as well as distance).
I had gone about halfway when I spotted someone coming towards me in the distance I had taken a course with. She worked at Health Canada I think. As I neared, she stopped and said "Hi".
I didn't stop. I kept going and said. "Hey there! Happy New Year, I can't stop because I have a GPS attached to me and it's recording data and I can't deviate from my path.. Bla bla"..

Something like that...

She got a weird look and stepped back, gave me an up and down glance as I passed and said "Ohh. Sorry." and then "Uhh see ya!".. And turned and left. I waved.

When I got to my door and shut down the GPS (517 meters!), it dawned on my that my old French classmate was probably looking for the GPS I had mentioned. Most likely the ankle kind they give to criminals they let out of jail but still want to keep tabs on.

That explains it. Great.. Now there's a good chance the people she has coffee with think I'm a criminal.

I still haven't measured the distance to JoAnne's parking spot...

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Remove ads from RLSLOG.NET

2011-01-13T22:27:00.001-05:00

Tripper told me about WWW.RLSLOG.NET years and years ago. Since then it's been the place where I go to check out what movies, apps, games, etc, have hit "the Scene". It's great for keeping track of what's out there. That leaked work-print of Wolverine? They tell you where to get it, etc. Need to find a utility to convert .MOV to AVI? This is the place! They post an info article about it and then provide links. A review of some new album? They do that too. I check this site every day (I used to that is..)

Back in 2008 they had a bit of a revolt when one of the senior editors got tiffed off his lack of admin privs and left in a huff taking several editors with him. Afterwards everyone said that they left because the guy in charge of the site was all about money and was really piling on the ads to generate revenue. Most of the editors appear to work for free, just to be associated with a major scene blog and there's one guy pulling in all this ad revenue (at 200,000 unique visitors per day). Well I'll agree the ads had gotten WAY out of control. It used to be that you would look at the page and then when you clicked "NEXT" a full page ad would pop up to friggen annoy the hell out of you but you had the option of clicking "Continue to RLSLOG" to make it go away and get to what it was you came to see.l. I don't really give a CRAP about online poker or meeting a naughty friend or increasing the size of my manhood. I could deal with clicking a button.

Well, in the last little while they have changed the ad spam to a 7 second delay type ad. You get to stare at the ad for 7 seconds before you have the privileged of clicking next. Not to mention the fact that if you leave the RLSLOG.NET site up, eventually it pops you into an ad. For people like me whose PC's are on 24 /7 it's pretty annoying to wake up at night because a tab to RLSLOG has been left on and they sprung an ad on me and some girl is yelling at me about how I could meet new friends and change my life on "f&%kbook.com" or some such thing.

Well, I just stopped going to the site. Screw the ad spam. Not worth it. But the trouble was, I loved the information on the site! There had to be some way to block the ad-crap in Firefox. Ad-blockers didn't work, but I found a script that did! It's here:

http://userstyles.org/styles/3268

You install this add-on called "Stylish" and then load this user-style that appears to defeat the RLSLOG AD CRAP!

Happy days. I can go back and read the site without vomiting now! (in the meantime I also checked out http://www.scnsrc.net/)

Winter camping at Lusk Cabin Gatineau Park

2011-01-12T00:35:00.003-05:00

Halfway there!

The guys have been talking about doing this male bonding experience/adventure for awhile now, so in mid-December, the time seemed right. The cabin we got happened to be the farthest in ( I guess because we waited a bit too long to book it) but it was only $60 for the night and slept 6. We got it from 16:00 to 10:00 the next day. Since it is a day-use cabin when we arrived at exactly 16:00 the fire was already going and the place was toasty!

The first of many falls.

This was my first time cross-country skiing. I'm an intermediate downhill skier (I point the skis at the bottom of the hill and try not to fall down on my way there. To stop, I used to turn and ski back up the hill a ways until gravity took over. Later on I learned to do a side stop, like when you are on ice skates, which I did wrong by jumping up in the air and turning my skis sideways and then coming back down at an angle (plus I could only do it on one side.. ). Almost none of my downhill skiing experience came into play here. Cross country is a whole new ball game. I thought the downhill parts might be easier. They were not. You wear this shoe thing that has only the toes snapped into the ski instead of a full boot that immobilizes your ankle so you don't have the same stance you get on a downhill setup. It's a lot of walking uphill in a "V" too! I got into the ski skating after awhile and marveled at the design of these wax-less skis I rented at Trailhead. They are made kind of like snake scales. On the bottom they have ridges which slide effortlessly forward but dig in when they slide back so you really get great purchase and footing when you need it. Amazing innovation these, still, it did not stop me from falling backwards and forwards several times over the course of the day.

Tripper chopped that all while we weren't looking.

Of course learning to cross country ski while wearing a 60 pound pack is something fun as well. It really adds to the fun! I almost brought my travel guitar with me on this adventure but since I took a major backwards dump just coming out of the parking lot I'm really glad the guys talked me out of it. I could just imagine the "PATANG!" sound of the guitar being crushed to bits in my imagination had I actually brought the thing. I'll wait until I get better. Add to that my ridiculous Canadian Tire sleeping bag (pictured in the blue bag above). I packed it like I would a backpacker going on a hike. Lashed at the bottom. Bad idea. What it did was create a swinging pendulum of unballancement that put me on my keister another half-dozen times before Kenmore took it for me.

With all that said and done, we eventually arrived at the cabin just as the sun began to go down. Before we knew it it was 5:30 and pitch black outside (no city lights or electricity to give us that good old city light pollution!). The fire was stoked and the wood is all chopped for you but they kindly leave you an axe outside to chop more or murder your bunk mates (did I say that?). We broke out the foodstuffs and ate for a few hours but at 7:30 it felt like fricken bedtime! We did manage to stay up until 11:30. We listened to tunes, Shot the Marde, watched some movies on Tripper Itouch and powered speakers. All the time being roasted to death by that awesome fireplace.

Tripper had brought some episodes of "Life and Times of Tim". This is a crudely drawn animated series GWilliker emailed me about a few months back although I fail to see how the trouble the character gets into mimics my life in any way shape or form. I haven't ever had a pimp come to my house and take my clothing in exchange for sex with a prostitute but I could foresee a situation where I might lend my guitar to someone who had just mugged me so they can turn their life around singing tunes down in the subway instead.

For bathroom breaks they had this outhouse a few meters away from the cabin. This lets you experience a new kind of cold when you visit it at 3:00am. They are pretty clean though and they leave a bottle of alcohol-based hand-cleaner by the toilet paper. Very thoughtful! At night I had my headlamp on and the guys took my picture trying to do a slow-exposure light trail as I was walking back from a trip to the outhouse office. Of course it didn't work the first time, but it did on the 11th! I like the axe in the stump on the side in that pic.

Everything came out OK!

And my stupid sleeping bag? I didn't even USE it! Much to toasty in there. Much better to pack some thin space blanket next time, leave more room for food.

An added tip. It is far easier to carry food inside your body than outside of it. All and all, an excellent adventure, things got weird in the cabin that night, but we won't speak of it ever again, and no one lost any body parts. We'll be back next year!

Heeeeere's KENMORE!

Jumping to a specific time in a posted youtube video link.

2011-01-12T00:30:00.001-05:00

It seems you can now link to a youtube video and jump directly to a point in the clip you want by adding a tag at the end of the video URL string. Putting "#t=0m6s" on the end starts the video at the 6 second mark.

Like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cxkp_r8kscM#t=0m5s

Very cool!

John Mayer - Live Intro to "Neon" from Where the Light is Tabulature

2010-12-30T21:35:00.004-05:00

I heard this tune in a cabin with a wood burning stove and no electricity last week and the jazzy intro he did really clicked with me. I went googling this week to see if anyone tabbed it but found mostly well-intentioned but incorrect versions penned by the tone deaf Internet masses. Youtube was worse. There was some guy who had somehow managed to record himself playing the bass riff with the timing backwards. No one was doing the triplets, no one was doing the muted ghost notes.. So...

I went into Guitar Tabulature Obsessive Compulsive Disorder mode and bend my ear around it for a few days. I just submitted it to a John Mayer discussion group to chew on. This is a pet peeve of mine, nice people who post tabs and videos of themselves showing others how to play something totally wrong so that it propegates like a virus and then they make videos and it gets worse. That is kind of why I named my Blog Purple Monkey Dishwasher. It's like rewriting Shakespeare in Pig Latin and telling everyone that is how you perform it. Well UCKFAY ATTHAY!

Here's a link: Neon live intro from WhereThe Light Is.PDF

PERFORMANCE NOTES, TAB explanations.

- In measure 1, he plays all those bass runs with thumbed downstrokes.
- In measure 4, he starts the first chord snatch with a slide in. He only does this once (neat).
- Also in measure 4, the (0) on the 4th string and all that follow from time to time on the 4th and 5th I'm pretty sure are missed muted notes, but they sound cool open like that so no worries. In fact I'm glad he missed a few because that was the clue that he was doing those "muties" on the 4th and 5th strings.
- In measure 6, the (0), x, x, is an example of how Mayer uses his thumb for these "muties" and slaps. The first (0) he misses the mute and plays the 4th string open, the next "X" is a slapped with the thumb and the second "X" is a muted ghost note. The guy is all thumbs man!
- A note on muted slaps or clicks, most people seem to slap the whole face of the guitar (A la "More than Words") or they just slap the low E. A great thing to get into is slapping the wound bass string you are going to play next. It's a great time saver (Antoine Dufour taught me that one).
- In measure 7 he frets the 3 note chords (and almost all that follow) by barring with his pinky on the 3rd and 4th strings
- In measure 8 we get the first of many OPEN 6th string thumb slaps. He slaps some and just plucks the others. Mayer has huge thumbs and this is a skill to learn. Go watch some bass vids on youtube if you don't get the sound you want. You can hit all of these first note in a measure low C's with a slap and it would sound great.
- In measure 9 we get into the triplets that I love (that everyone misses). I believe he plays these T(humb) I(ndex) T(humb) but there are many different ways to achieve this. I even tried a left hand slap but the way I've written it seemed to match the recording the best.
- Just to be sure the Triplet things are preceded by a "T" (mute with thumb on 5th string) and then "T" slap with thumb on 5th string - "I" mute with Index on 4th string - "T" Mute with thumb on 5th string).
- Halfway through measure 11 he changes the 3 note chord slightly. It may have just been a great sounding mistake. I'm keeping this in the version I play because it sounds cool.
- After measure 13, the chord snatches after the first open "C" are all slightly different. These could be simplified if you don't want to sound like a MP3 player and play every variation.
- Halfway through measure 21 he hits the open 5th string instead of the 9th fret on the 6th. You could play it either way.
- Also in measure 21 he hits some harmonic by mistake sliding down the 6th string from the 12 fret. I make it by the 6th fret.

So it's what I heard on the recording, you may not wish to reproduce all of the gory detail. I'm happy with this tab.

And if you want to see WHY I tabbed it. It's mostly because of all these videos below. Watch the real one on top for about a minute and then check out these guys. I thank them for sharing and I'm sure they were all well intentioned. The last one is not to bad. I especially l love some of the comments in their channels, both positive and negative.

(backwards guy, I just notices he plays it right the 1st time and backwards almost every time after that)

Hey, he's giving me the finger!

This guy has slowed it down to teach people his version. He seems very nice.

This guy was they closest..

They keep coming!!!!!

Gloucester Battle of the bands 1986

2010-12-21T22:52:00.003-05:00

My recent re-viewing of Scott Pilgrim vs the World brought back memories of Gloucester Teen Talent Battle of the bands. These are one of those rare times where you wish ill will and heaps of misfortune on your co-competitors. Something bad happens to some band during their act like some amp going down or someone breaking a guitar string and you are like "Yeah! Turn up the 'suck-o-meter'! Let's have more of that!".

I guess it's like watching Olympic figure skating and you're screaming at the non-Canadian skaters to fall on their asses or for some trailer-trash husband to come out of an alley with a lead pipe to the knee(or whatever it was in the Kerrigan affair).

The first year we did it in 1986 we had auditioned with one singer, landed a spot and then had to switch singers for the competition (long story). So we had a new singer and only one song we all knew, a cover of 'Everybody wants to rule the world' by Tears for Fears. We were up against 3 or 4 other bands but the one we thought was the best were a group called 'The Related'. Apparently most of them were all actually related somehow, cousins and so forth. We secretly believed the relations had to do with inbreeding and affectionately referred to them as "The Retarded" (political correctness being non-existant in 1986), because we hated them for no reason. We were called 'After the Fact' and they apparently had a nickname for us involving a slang for homosexuals.

Truth be told they were a better band than us. They had a horn section and everything. They also understood about image. They showed up to events (movies, rock concerts they were not playing in) as a group and were kind of all wearing the same clothes (Duran Duran suits of different pastel colors. The guitarist had a 'duster' remember those?) so they beat us handily. I'm not sure what happened to the band but their football linebacker drummer showed up at my door once sell me a vacuum cleaner. If he sold another two he was going to win a trip to Disneyland (we did not buy it). My friend Mike's mother made the guy clean half the house as part of the demo and didn't buy it either! Muhahahahahaha!

The next year we were much more polished and stood a good chance to win but our main competition was a great band called "Back to Front". They had a sampler. GAME OVER! (Ooh my god they have a sampler!). They had a great song called "I'll Wait" and they started the song with the sampler going "I"ll Wait.. I' - I' - I'll Wait!". It was pretty awesome. It looked like they were gonna beat us too, but on the second night, their sampler broke down and the guitarist blew something in his amp and the whole song had no guitar. He basically air-guitar-ed the song. HAHAHAHAHA! There's hope! We went out and nailed a great performance but WE STILL LOST!

Our drummer went out and bought a sampler the next week.

When guys kiss & the Victoria Secrets fashion show on TV

2010-12-06T21:20:00.000-05:00

The other day at break one of the guys was discussing the Victoria Secrets Fashion show on TV. This was a TV special where all of the VS models paraded down a big runway on TV in the latest lingerie fashions accompanied by live music from various artists. I missed it because in the same time slot, Bog Sagget was on TV looking for Bigfoot (ok, I forgot Victoria Secrets was on).. This year, Katy Perry was one of the musical guests. I like Katy Perry. I really like the middle 8 section in her Teenage Dream song. Nice lines and hooks in that one (the models too).

I asked if she did her 1st hit "I kissed a Girl and I liked it", considering the event, and the circumstances, they could have had some fun with that one, but alas.. No.. It was not to be.. At this point one of the guys chimed in with a tidbit of information gleaned from his niece in Calgary Alberta. Apparently word is that in the dance clubs, girls kiss each other to freak the guys in attendance out and garner their interest. Ok. I can see how that would work - then suddenly I was reminded of something from my childhood.

I was in a band at the time, probably 16 or 17 years old, and the drummer and the singer (both guys) were really close friends and they had this bit they would do where they would fake kiss sometimes (another funny tidbit is that their names were also girl names, Like Sandy and Leigh (Lee), but I digress). The trick involved one of them placing his thumb on the other guys eye teeth and then planting his lips on his own thumb. It looks like you are holding the other person's face and the hands hide the fact that there is no touching of the mucous membranes..

I was never comfortable when they'd do that to each other back then. Maybe if it was two Victoria secret's models I would have felt differently.. . ;-)

Eddy Van Cockroach

2010-12-06T20:31:00.029-05:00

GROTDFAY 104 2010-11-29 Eddy Van Cockroach by Zartimus

Eddy, my friend Lisa's Madagascar Hissing cockroach (she is into bugs) died last week. She posted something to facebook and condolences poured in. Some guy said he was going to dedicate a poem to Eddy. I thought I'd dedicate a guitar riff of the day to him.

Eddy reminded me of Eddie Van Halen , whose music and guitar playing I grew up with, and so it's something in that style. Eddie has a formula of sorts. Start off with a fast shuffle double-bass drum-beat. Do a pick slide/scrape into a two-handed hammer-on lick on the bass strings, insert wacky verse riff, noodle with pentatonic box patterns low on the neck, throw in some three note per strings scales that make no musical sense but still sound good for some reason. Kick the whole thing up an octave 12 frets and do more pentatonic box licks with more bends this time, Insert more two handed tapping and do some tremolo picking followed by random whammy-bar action. Dive-bar harmonics and artificial pig squeal harmonics go here. Lather rinse repeat.

Recorded on a Line 6 pod X3 Pro with my Kramer Pacer Deluxe 2.

The People of Walmart

2010-12-04T02:13:00.001-05:00

Scary SCARY site I stumbled across. These are scary frickin' people that shop at Walmart wearing clothes that should have been thrown out after Halloween or burned after the wearer was processed at the police station/shelter/mental hospital. And the bodies make the clothes in this case, not the other way around. Holy Crap! Whoever supplies the captions should be writing for David Letterman...

Check it out in all it's ghastly glory... http://www.peopleofwalmart.com/

Here are a few of my favorites with photo and captions taken from the site.

Trashy

He is wearing… a trash bag… as a skirt. I can’t even fathom a reason why! – “Well maybe it was some sort of an emergency.” Who knows what he is going to use the Tupperware for.

Oklahoma

Flannel Pimp

(1) Sweet hat. (2) Sweeter sideburns. (3) Yes I believe it Voodoo.

Florida

The Incredible Jorts

Let’s hope this new Incredible Hulk style of wearing your jorts doesn’t catch on….or if it does that it at least comes with less fupa.
California

Hairy Situation

Ughhh, it looks like you got into a fight with a stubborn octopus like 12 years ago that wouldn’t let go. Knock him off already will ya?

Iowa

Animal from the Muppet Show

Now all we need is Dr. Teeth and the Electric Mayhem for a reunion tour.

Texas

I see blue! He looks glorious!

Oh damn, Santa is workin’ it!
Florida

Acoustic Fingerstyle Guitarists I really dig!

2010-12-04T00:58:00.003-05:00

Here's my who's who of extreme acoustic fingerstyle/body percussion/Heavy Wood guitarists who use alternate tuning.

Thomas Leeb. http://www.thomasleeb.com/ Discovered him quite by accident by word of mouth at a guitar seminar. Got to meet the man a year later at a Cannington guitar weekend seminar thingy. Amazing player. I love his blend of slap and tap. Wonderful sense of timing and I love the Scratch pad he has taped on the lower bought to get some of his funky sounds! I taped one on my guitar shortly afterward. Here is a vid of "Desert Pirate", one of my faves. You have to see his version of "No woman No cry" and he can get quite mellow too, check out Akaskero.

Andy Mckee. http://www.andymckee.com/ Andy is an awesome guy from Kansas who I got to know through Don Ross's yahoo group and email list. It wasn't long before people on the list began talking about Andy's playing and I soon found myself ordering his latest CD and being blown away by his cover of "Africa". So good were his compositions that pretty soon I had all of his stuff and TAB books from Taiwan. Apparently Taiwan discovered what we would all learn later. Andy ROCKS! They love him there. I also had the occasion to study with him a few times over the years (Big hair Andy and short hair Andy). It was wonderful to be able to sit down and ask him exactly how he did what he did, and to have him show us, and me video it so I could take it back to the woodshed to learn later. A fellow video game-aholic as well. My favorite tune if his has to be "Keys to the Hovercar" (below). He is famous for Drifting and be sure to check out Africa (he is definitely using all the parts of his brain on that one) and his cover of Everybody wants to rule the world.

Antoine Dufour. http://www.antoinedufourmusic.com/ Antoine is the most technically gifted guitarist I have ever met and seen play up close.Every thing he does with his fingers has a purpose and fngering and fretting selection has been so well-thought out in advance that he always plays his tunes in the most efficient way possible. When I learn tunes like these, I always second-guess the fingering when indicated. EXCEPT for this guy. Just do what the master says an, and you'll be ok. He taught me to do dampened thumbslaps on the bass string you are ABOUT to play. What a good friggin idea! He plays ahead! he also made me re-think fast alternating lines, borrowing right-hand technique from banjo players because the anatomy of the hand is made such that adjacent fingers are not as fast as opposing digits. BOOYA! One of my favorite songs of his is "Song for Stephen" (below) because it is a perfect analysis of his fingering construction. Check out Spiritual Groove, his mellow Catching the Light, and my new favorite "the Drive within".

Preston Reed (http://www.prestonreed.com/) is a guitarist I found out about through Andy Mckee as he is one of his guitar heroes. Preston kind of pioneered the "Over the top" body percussion I think, although many guitarists do a form of it. Preston takes it to the next level. My favs in his roster include "Ladies Night" (below), Slap Funk, and Tribes. One my other favorite Preston reed song is Accelerator, but there's no vids of him playing it, here's a link of an awesome cover by someone else.

Erik Mongrain http://www.erikmongrain.com/. I only like one song from Erik, I'm not really into his other stuff, but his one song, Airtap, is such a monster awesome tune, that all you really have to do is stand back and just watch the video. I got the music to this last summer (a guitar buddy transcribed it) and I hope to play it one day. Funny story about when I I met Erik at the Canadian Guitar festival a few years ago. I help film these events and when I was between shoots I spotted him on the side stage and walked up to tell him how awesome I thought Air Tap was and his handlers started piling press-kits and CD's in my hands because I was wearing a pass and big can headphones and they thought I was someone important. Doh!

Michael Hedges http://www.nomadland.com/ is a pioneer of finger-style alternate tuning. Before his untimely death in 1997 he helped bring it into the mainstream a bit. He was kind of weird and would do yoga onstage and stuff, and his onstage presence was that of a Stephen Wrightish comedian. he also did strange covers, which was very neat. Buffalo stance by Neena Cherry. Go figure. Jitterboogie is one of my favs, along with Sofa number1 (a Frank Zappa tune) and Layover. Also, Eleven Small Roaches! He has a great bunch of dedicated fans who have tabbed all of his stuff over at http://www.rootwitch.com.

Don Ross http://www.gobyfish.com/ is the big guy on my list. Way back in the early 1990's, I had just kinda quit the music scene and was starting college, I happened to encounter a late-night radio program in Ottawa called open air. The DJ, Mike Juunta played a tune by Don called First RideCD's and sent away in the mail for the 3 tabs he had at the time and holed up in a hotel room in Montreal for three days and learned it. I had not dabbled in alternate tunings at all and it really kicked my butt.Check out The First Ride, Dracula and friends, Afraid to Dance, Thin Air , Robot Monster, and Catherine.

Since hearing that tune all those years ago I've been fortunate enough to become a student. Don is Da man when it comes to this kind of guitar playing and he's still cranking out tunes!

There's many more out there, but these guys are my favorites.

Cheers!

Guitar Riff a day for a year - September ones I like

2010-11-28T23:32:00.004-05:00

I've been doing a Guitar Riff a day since mid-august at this website. I popped over 100 of them the other day so I thought I'd go back and check out the ones I liked from each given month.. This was September. As long as I don't repeat myself, I'll be happy.

I like where this one ended up.. Nice and airy..

GROTDFAY 028 2010-09-14 by Zartimus

This was a slap thing, something I'm trying out on the electric. Needs work!

GROTDFAY 032 2010-09-18 by Zartimus

A laid-back thing.

GROTDFAY 038 2010-09-24 by Zartimus

A country thang..

GROTDFAY 042 2010-09-28 by Zartimus

Fast picking. reminds me of a GooGoo dolls tunes.

GROTDFAY 044 2010-09-30 by Zartimus

You should buy Mark's house.

2010-11-24T19:13:00.001-05:00

Buy Mark's house in Barrhaven Ontario, Canada, Planet Earth. It's very roomy. Free disco lessons.

Love and war: Should a married couple be allowed to sleep together in a war zone?

2010-11-24T13:47:00.000-05:00

I was just reading an article on Canada's Brig.Gen Menard in Afghanistan facing a court martial over hanky panky with a lower ranking forces member and came across the line "Military regulations prohibits soldiers, even married military couples, from having sexual relations while on deployment".

What? Really? Man. That is harsh. Good thing I never joined the Canadian Military! I'm pretty sure I'm not supposed to have sexual relations (we talking Bill Clinton's definition?) at the workplace with my spouse, but hey,after a day's work, when one is off the payroll, what business does anyone's employer have in trying to control that particular aspect of one's life? Who's to say that a married couple can't co-habitate when deployed to the same theater? This doesn't happen in the US or Canadian Navies apparently, they split them up, but in the army, it seems to happen and the couples are not allowed to touch each other, or acknowledge that they are even married. I find certain military and para military organizations have way too much control over your life. It appears they can uproot you whenever they want and ship you halfway across the globe and if you don't like it you can quit. Controlling your sex life is just a whole other level. Work should have no place in your damned bedroom. I've heard military people say that it would not be fair across the board for certain members to have date nights while others are stuck far away from their spouses for months at a time but I think that is petty. I'm sure military couples have lots of drawbacks they have to deal with and they should take the good with the bad. We're not talking on a Submarine here, if it's not in your face and other people don't like it they should learn to live and let live.

To be fair, there are probably a good many reasons to split couples up in time of war. God forbid that a spouse get injured in combat in front of their partner and the other individual is not able to grieve and has to keep right on working, all the while absorbed in the loss of a loved one, but it's nothing that isn't happening all over the world as I type this, with bands of guerrilla fighters in dictatorships who are going through much worse things than we can possibly imagine.

The ancient Greeks used to have groups of soldiers who were all sexual partners (the Sacred band of Thebes). They were apparently very bad-ass and if one of them was killed the partner fought savagely to avenge that death. Interesting if you think about it. During the second World War the US appeared to group soldiers together from the same neighborhood, in the thinking that you would band together quicker with people you knew, and had a genuine like for, as opposed to Vietnam, where groups of strangers wouldn't even bother to learn your name unless you could last at least 30 days first..

The US military has recently lifted the no sex thing while in a combat zone in Afghanistan and Iraq. Maybe the Canadian military will follow suite. It kind of reminds me of when I was a teenager and I had a friend who worked at McDonalds and they told me of the "No Dating" rule they had there. Staff were not supposed to "hook up" and I guess they fired one or both of you in that case.

It's pretty hard to control human nature. That's millions of years of evolution they're going against..

Jimi Hendrix Experience Tour 2010

2010-11-10T20:07:00.000-05:00

I attended the Ottawa leg of the Jimi Hendrix Experience tour last week at the NAC. The two guitarists that got me there were Eric Johnson and Steve Vai respectively but I was pleasantly surprised with the other guys playing on the night. "Burnin" Vernor Reid was there. Remember him from "Living Color"? They had that hit "Cult of Personality" back in the 80's? I never liked him much. I found his lightning fast solos to be nothing more than him tremolo-picking 124 and 134 fingering patterns up and down all six strings in areas on the neck sort of relative to the key of the song. He doesn't really worry too much about being "in the key of anything".. Still, his bass player was great and the singer has a great voice. He reminded me of "Re-run from the TV sitcom "What's happening" though. (this is not a good thing).

Jimi's original bass player was there. He opened the show with this pirate guitarist, one of the Isley brothers. He can still pound out a baseline and sing!

Eric Johnson came out and did some obscure Hendrix tunes. His sound was awesome as always and his clean sound on the ballad he did killed. I wonder if he drove up to Ottawa (I hear he doesn't like to fly). Eric's not as animated as the other guitarist on the ticket but he lives and breathes Hendrix and I don't think anyone else on the evening got it as right as he did.

The biggest surprise for me was Kenny Wayne Sheppard. he was the one who channeled the spirit of Hendrix that night. He was awesome. He got to do a 15 minute rendition of Voodoo Chile and really did Jimi justice. I'm going to check out some of his stuff now. Also on the bill was Johnny Lang, whom I mix up with Kenny Wayne Sheppard, so know I know the difference. (Kenny Wayne is much better!). Lang seems to play with his fingers and no pick which has always bugged me unless you're Jeff beck or that guy from Dire straights. You limit yourself in this style when you don't use plectrum.

There was a very Interesting Hawaiian guitar`lap steel player who did a great version of Purple Haze with two other guys. I forget his name but he was very cool.

By the time Steve Vai came on i was quite tired of the Pentatonic orgy that had been going on and was looking forward to someone who could play full linear scale melodies for a change and Vai did not disappoint. he was his quirky self and this is the first time I have ever seen him play without his big fan down by his pedal board blowing his hair back like some hooded cobra snake guitar god..

He did things with his guitar that night that I am still trying to figure out..

The sold-out crowd was also impressive. I could not get over how the 16 year old girl next to me knew all the words to some of the obscure Hendrix tunes I had never heard of. Go figure. Too bad that guy died young. I would have liked to have seen the further pinnacles of guitardom he would certainly have achieved.

The Chicken shit mix

2010-10-19T00:28:00.000-04:00

Hypo Luxa is the "producer" secret identity of Al Jourgensen of Ministry. In 1991 he was called in to do a re-mix of the Red Hot Chili pepper's "Give it away", the first single off Blood Sugar Sex Magik. It was not going well and depending on who you talk too, he brought a chicken into the studio to help make it right. There's a Cuban superstition where you kill a chicken and it absorbs all the bad spirits, but he kept this one very much alive and simply blew pot smoke in the chicken's face and set him down on the mixing board where it proceeded to crap all over the channels and everywhere it crapped they either erased that track, or emhasized it in the mix. Thus, it became known as the "chicken shit mix".

I love random acts of music production like that. Not only is it a great story, but I'm sure you get a 50% chance of improving the mix by taking it out of human hands in certain places.

"The chicken was put on a podium with a strobe light between two speakers, and it started going to the beat, that's when they knew the mix was done. (Al also claims to have driven motorcycles around in the studio)"

There's a small blurb about it here in a Ministry faq (search for "the chicken incident"), I first heard about it on Alan Cross's radio show.

Awesome!

120 pound journey

2010-10-05T20:04:00.001-04:00

Great vid someone posted on Facebook. Hats off to the guy! Awesome! His vid's well done too. I had me a 60-20 pound journey once ;-). (I hope Coldplay doesn't sue him - they should pay him, he's about get one million views)

My 120 Pound Journey

New (custom) Ibanez Plexi Jem style guitar (I'm keeping my tele)

2010-10-04T22:25:00.086-04:00

Some things are just meant to be. I've been thinking about a new guitar building project for awhile now, initially thinking about selling the natural wood custom Tele I built in 2001 (my 911 guitar, I ordered all the wood and parts online from Warmoth.com the week before the towers fell and it was held up for weeks while the border was shut down). I was gravitating towards a solid blue color hot-rodded tele in it's place. I certainly wasn't playing it so I dragged it out of storage, fixed up a wiring problem and tweaked the neck a bit to clean it up and sell it. Then a funny thing happened. I forgot what a nice guitar it was! I can't sell this! I built it! It's like a beloved pet or kid or something!

So. I'm keeping it. I'll find a place for it!

I went online (Kijiji) to check some woods for a new build anyway and found someone right down the road from me selling some Ibanez Jem Style bodies with the monkey grip along with some 24 fret necks. THAT was interesting. I was learning a violin piece arranged for a 24 fret guitar and cursing the guy who put it in that key, because the most frets I have on any of my electrics is 22, and I had to play the thing an octave lower in one spot (why didn't he make it for a 7 string guitar while he's at it, everyone has one of those lying around! Meh!).

So, kill two birds with one stone! Get a new guitar build going, gain a 24 fret guitar, play the 5th Caprice the way it was meant to be played, it's a win win! So I emailed the guy. And heard nothing for a few days... I checked his other ads to see if he had been online recently and WHAMMO! I saw THIS!

HOLY CRAP! It's one of those See through jobbies like the one Steve Vai plays in Bad Horsie! (well not exactly as it turns out!!) It's got a blue headstock and semi transparent pickguard. man, that looks coool. I wonder how it feels? So I emailed the guy again "Hey I'm interested in those woods AND do you still have that plexi guitar! Tell me about THAT!" And I heard nothing...

So I emailed him again just in case the first two emails didn't go through, and I waited like 4 days. This was getting to be like a bad 1st date or something (should I call? is that bad? is it too soon? is he on vacation? ). Every day the hit counter on the guy's ad would go up,
"CRAP! 500 people have looked at it! It's got to be gone by now!".
It's always a bad idea when buying something to appear as if you really WANT it badly. No room to maneuver price-wise, but it was too late. I was thinking about this damn thing all the time now. I had to play it and see if it felt any good. Maybe it just LOOKED good and that's why the guy was offloading it. Maybe it was some flashy experiment gone wrong. The thing probably weighs a ton (it does)!

After a few more days I couldn't take it any more. All the guy had was an email address and that wasn't working so I went digging around on the net, all over the place (how many guitar builders can there be in Orleans? he must hang out on the Jem site) and I lucked out and got some possible phone numbers. I hit pay dirt on the first one and got the guy who was selling the thing. Turns out, when it comes to the Internet, he doesn't live on it like the rest of us, and hasn't checked his ads since they went up.

WOOHOO! JUST MY LUCK! AN INTERNET CAVEMAN! HE DIDN'T LIST A PHONE NUMBER! HE STILL HAS IT!

I went over and played it and the thing feels phenomenal. Sound isn't as big an issue with me as feel because you can do quite a bit to change and tweak the sound but as luck would have it.. IT SOUNDS GREAT TOO! I have never had a humbucker in the front like this, always Single coil single coil humbucker, but maybe Steve Vai has something here. I quite like it!

I bought it at the asking price. I have no idea why he parted with it, other than he told me he had too many guitars and just couldn't give it the love it deserved. Well, no problem here. I love it! This quirky guitar is now my favorite electric in the bunch, and the fact that you can flick a switch and make it glow in the dark is just icing on the cake! It's looks pretty and it feels pretty and it sounds pretty. It's like a playboy Bunny kinda! But LOUDER!!

What am I going to name it?

I also picked up a body and neck so they'll be a new guitar down the road (if I can get to it before winter). It's going to be a swirl guitar!

Woohoo!

How to figure out fast crazy guitar $hit

2010-10-01T17:44:00.001-04:00

Most guitar tabs suck. If you've ever found yourself looking at a tab and scratching your head because there's no way in hell it's right then welcome to my world. Free Internet tabs especially suck.Transcriptions done by people who are good at it can be great, artists that help by sending video of themselves playing the tune to the transcribers help immensely. Tabulature can start you off, and save you some time, and give you some choices, but if you want to play that thing right, and you suspect it's wrong in the tab, then you gotta figure it out yourself.

1. Find some fast crazy semi-impossible guitar lick you want to play in MP3 format.
2. Get ahold of some slow-down software for the PC like Transcribe or The Amazing Slow-downer that allow you to slow music down but keep the pitch. Regular audio programs lower the pitch when they slow a waveform down, kind of like playing a 45 on the 33 LP setting of your record player(gee what's a record player?).
3. Using the slow-down software you've loaded your MP3 into, isolate and loop a 1 to 2 second manageable lick that you can keep in your head and eventually hum to yourself. You have to be able to recreate it by hearing how it goes in your head and keep it there.
4. To help do this SLOW IT DOWN but maintain the recorded pitch. Select a section and loop it.

5. Listen to it until you can hum it to yourself. If you can't slow it down some more or shorten the length of the snippet of the lick you're listening to.
6. Identify where it's being played on the guitar neck. If it's high or low, that's easy, if it's mid range and you can do the same lick on several spots on the neck, listen for wound strings verses unwound. Check for ringing open strings. Look for areas in the minor pentatonic scales where it is easiest to play. Get a live video of the artist and watch the hand position at the part in question (music videos are not good for this, the video is often used out of sequence and shows the guitarist's hand down at the nut when he is playing some wailing note high up the neck - IDIOTS!). Identifying where the lick is played eventually becomes second nature, but it's the hardest thing when you're starting out. Sometimes the easiest way to play it is not what is on tape (like the rhythm part for Eric Johnson's Cliffs of Dover, most misplayed thing on the planet).

Here's a bit I'm trying to learn. It's the start of the second set of solo breaks from "Juice" by Steve Vai. It's a fiddly little bit and I want to nail it.

Here it is at 100% speed, looped 4 times.

02 Juice Lick 100 by Zartimus

Here it is at 50% speed. Now you can see where everything goes

02 Juice Lick 50 by Zartimus

If you're still stuck, check it out at 25%.

02 Juice Lick 25 by Zartimus

You can hear the pick scrapes indicating picked notes. No pick scrapes and the general direction of the notes (up or down) indicate pulls offs and hammer ons. Bends are easy to hear. Right hand tapped notes have a weird attack overtone to them and become easy to hear after awhile. Same for slides and other types of slurs. Note groupings with bends and pull offs are dead giveaways to position.

If you want to be really cool, get a free tab program and write it out, so you don't forget. plus it will give you something to upload to guitar forums and get made fun of by people!

I don't know what I'd do without slow down software! When I was a kid I remember learning Hot for Teacher (Tab Mags were just starting out i the early to mid 80's) by putting it on my turntable and adjusting the speed until I got it running an octave slower. ACK! Later on I had a fostex 4 track which could do analog pitch shifting. Thank god for computers!

Here's a vid of Steve Vai playing it. He hits it at about 2 minutes :20 seconds.

More Funny Avatars #2

2010-09-29T00:59:00.004-04:00

Avatar (computing), the graphical representation of a user. So, these weird websites I happen to go to that have weird forums with weird people and most of them have weird avatars. Cool little thumbnail graphics standing in for a picture of themselves. I always snag the funny ones I see, and it's been a few years since last I blogged a set of them. Here goes!

Paranormal activity in the 6 year old

2010-09-23T19:52:00.000-04:00

Last night at 23:30 as I was climbing the stairs to bed (yeah I know, early for me!) I smelled something burning in the kitchen and went to check on it. No worries, my wife had started the auto-clean program on our oven so the house sort of smelled like the gates of hell (well, not that bad, maybe like the doggy door to hell). I put the hood fan timer on and went upstairs to check on the kiddies before retiring. The ten year old was snoozing away upside down in her bed and I threw a glance into the six year old's bedroom as I made my way to ours and saw a dark shape swaying upright in her bed and a strange chanting sound of someone saying something backwards over and over again.

All's well! G'night!! (Uhh no...) So, I did a double-take. Steeling myself for a possible ghostbusters sliming I opened the door and crept in. My kids have lava lamps they use as nightlights (I usually shut them off when they fall asleep) and this one was casting erie bulbous red shapes against the walls and the backwards chanting was very loud. My daughter was kneeling in the middle of her bed half asleep and her CD player, which had started out the night playing the "Fantastic Mr Fox" audiobook, was skipping madly over a scratch in the disc at some dialog which sounded positively satanic. . So, that explains that. I shut it off. Maybe that horrible sound, in addition to the gates of hell smell woke her up and had her semi-consciously wondering what the heck kind of sleep deprivation experiment she was being subjected to. I put her back to bed.

I threw out the disc (It was a CDR copy of her sister's disc). We don't need any more paranormal activity!

Zombie Roadkill

2010-09-21T09:18:00.000-04:00

Man, zombies everywhere! Looks like a new interesting show starting October 4th. The teaser showed a park ranger getting mowed down by some zombie squirrel. How awesome is that!

From the Site:
"Academy-Award nominated actor Thomas Haden Church co-stars as a tough as nails Park Ranger who teams with an unsuspecting teenager, played by David Dorfman, to escape a cursed stretch of highway that resurrects roadkill in the form flesh-eating zombie animals. This new breed of terror is not just playing dead.
Zombie Roadkill centers around a group of college kids as they are driving on an unfamiliar road. Everything seems fit for a road trip to the lake, but when the group accidentally runs over an unsuspecting squirrel, they quickly realize there will be a price to pay. The cursed road brings the zombie squirrel back to life to haunt the kids. After the kids crash and everyone is injured except the younger brother, he is forced to set out on a journey to defeat the ancient curse and save his brother and friends before it is too late. Zombie Roadkill is scheduled to air spring 2010 on FEARnet.com and the FEARnet On Demand VOD network.
The series’ claw-scratching and spine-tingling action unfolds over six, four- to five-minute episodes. David Green will be directing the series penned by Henry Gayden. Aaron Lam of Ghost House Pictures will be producing with FEARnet’s Jim Burns serving as executive producer. Frank Langley and Tom Bacho of Quantum FX (Where the Wild Things Are, Star Trek, Watchmen) have come aboard to bring all the terrifying creatures to life."

Zombie study in Ottawa

2010-09-21T00:36:00.000-04:00

A graduate student at the University of Ottawa published a paper featuring a mathematical model of the possibility of a fictional city of 1 million surviving a zombie attack. It doesn't look good people! After 7 to 10 days, everyone was dead or undead.

Am I naive to think that everyone's read the "Zombie Survival Guide" by Max Brooks? Doesn't everyone know what Solanum does to your brain? Get yourselves a copy before it's too late!

African rabies is no fun!

The 2nd time "Big Mike" tried to kill me in ECMS grade 7

2010-09-16T20:53:00.002-04:00

My wife asked me tonight if I knew her new Director, because he grew up in Blackburn Hamlet, and went to EMCS (Emily Carr Middle School). Alas, I did not, but for some reason I was reminded of the 2nd time "Big Mike" tried to kill me at that school. It was 1981 or so and "Big Mike" was about 6 feet tall back then (he'd probably have been 7 feet tall if he hadn't smoked so much). He was huge, with facial hair and he always wore the same jean-jacket and blue t-shirt, which was a real help because you could see him coming from a mile away and could get the hell outta his way! I suppose he was in the eighth grade again, possibly for the 3rd time, and I was in grade seven.

It was a Friday and my fellow student and arch-nemesis Peter Huckalak and I had gotten a detention again. The way it usually went down was that he'd start something (he'd test how gravity worked by pulling my chair away as I was in the process of sitting down), and I'd retaliate (drawing a naked woman on the cover of his math notebook) and we'd both get a detention. Sounded fair to me although I'll always wonder what the hell the teacher thought I was doing on the ground with my chair in Peter's hand. It's not really my fault I sit next to a sociopath.

When detention was over, we went to our lockers. The school was pretty deserted except for the odd teacher and school custodian. At Emily Carr the lockers are located just as you exit the building slightly below ground level, that is to say, the windows in the locker room are like, 8 feet off the ground and end at the ceiling. Outside, the windows start at ground level and look out onto a grassy hill of sorts. It has a weird effect such that, if you are inside the locker room looking up out the window, and another student is outside, sitting on the hillock leaning against the window, you see their butts, backs and upper torsos. A lot of students sit against these windows and pay almost no attention to the people inside.

So, as we were getting our Adidas(tm) bags out of our lockers Peter taps me on the shoulder and points up at the window near the ceiling. My Lizard brain gave me a start as I caught the distinctive shape and color of Big Mike and his nicotine encrusted jean jacket. He was sitting outside against the window with a girl, making out with her. I noticed that his hand had made considerable mileage up the front of her shirt. I grinned at Peter. It was the thing to do when you're 12. They didn't seem to know we were there (school had been over for almost 45 minutes). Peter was a lot of things back then. I wouldn't call him my friend because we fought so much (fisticuffs), nemesis was a better word, but he was extremely intelligent and a hell of a funny guy, and I respected that. So it didn't surprise me when Peter made an animated shushing motion, picked up a nearby chair and carried it over to the lockers on tiptoe, directly below where Big Mike and the object of his affections were seated outside on the other side of the window. .

He climbed up on the chair quietly and leaned over so his face was almost touching the window. He looked back at me and stuck his tongue out and pretended to lick the window right behind the young (13 year old?) girl. Baaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa! I almost killed myself trying to keep quiet and not break out in gales of laughter. Then he started to make make-out faces on the girl's side, pretending to grab her butt through the glass while giving Big Mike the middle finger with his other hand behind Big Mike's back. I was ready to pee myself! Big Mike and his "date" were so busy doing what they were doing they had no idea they had an audience.

At this point I picked up a chair and quietly set it down beside Peter's and stretched up to the glass to watch this freak show. Man, they have no idea we're here! Crap Mike looks like he's in his 20's. What's this girl see in him? How can she suck on his face like that when he has that frickin Zombie case of acne (yes I was that close). All of a sudden I heard a super-loud "WHAP!" and time slowed down like it does in the movies sometimes.

I turned around and the thing I noticed in the first millisecond was that Peter was no longer perched on his chair beside me. In fact I saw him disappearing around the corner back into the classrooms in a blur of motion. Near the edge of my field of vision I saw something spinning around on the ground like a top. It was a tiny bottle of liquid paper. My Lizard brain roared! Peter had snuck off his chair while my head was turned towards the action and whipped a bottle of liquid paper at the window so it would make a loud noise and he took off so that.... My head snapped back..

Face to face with "Big Mike" and the girl on the other side of the glass. He did not look happy with me at all. In fact, he looked quite cross. I can still recall to this day his purple-faced rage and the slow motion movements of his lips as he formed the words "You're &$%&* DEAD". At this point, the absolute worst time actually, my STUPID sense of humor caught up to the lighting fast situation and I actually cracked a smile at that point and thought
"You know, that was really funny! Peter got me goooooooood!".
I guess that didn't look so good on the other side of the glass because Big Mike appeared to take this badly and shot up in a Beserker rage and ran around to the locker room entrance to make good on his declaration to KILL ME!

I jumped/fell off the chair and ran back to my locker (whose contents where strewn across the floor, Peter wanted to make my escape more interesting by increasing the level of difficulty! (the fucker!). I was all set to leave all that crap on the floor and just disappear - maybe into the ladies room (he's never look there would he?) when I heard Big Mike outside raining fists on the outside doors which lock after the school day is over THANK GOD! I looked at my books and notebooks on the ground and realized that MY NAME was in most of them. Can't have that sitting there for him to find!

It was the fasted locker clean up in ECMS history. Big Mike stopped trying to punch the doors off their hinges and it was quiet all of a sudden. I once saw Big Mike put a roll of pennies in his fist, wrap his fist up with black electrical tape , and punch out a bunch of portable windows one lunch hour. I honestly wondered if he carried stuff like this with him and was gearing up. I grabbed my gym shirt, closed my locker and ran into the inner classrooms to leave by the front of the school where there may be teachers or police or national guardsmen or something. I pulled my glasses off, put the white gym shirt on, tried to frig my hair up and left by the front of the school as nonchalantly as I could. I made for cover and took a round about way home (you never go straight home after a death threat).

Turns out Big Mike didn't recognize me as the idiot behind the glass that day (not that I gave him the chance) and I managed to keep out of his way for the rest of the school year.

What? You don''t remember my staples?

2010-09-16T00:51:00.001-04:00

Tonight was "Meet the Teacher" night at school for my kids. This always turns into a High School reunion of sorts because the majority of my old high school classmates live 5 minutes away from where they grew up in Blackburn Hamlet(myself included). I ran into Carrie-Anne whom I sat beside in Law class in the 12 grade and was immediately reminded of the time I got staples in my leg.

It was AGES ago, I was 17 or 18 years old and I was playing Rugby for the first time on a Saturday. I still have no idea how to play but they have a position called "Hooker" in Rugby which is funny ( I told them I'd play as long as I got to be the hooker). There was this guy there wearing cleats. He was wearing these cleats because they were new and he found out that he could not wear them in his Rugby league because they were metal and spiky and illegal, so of course he chose to wear them on the weekends around people like me who don't even know how to spell Rugbee. The object in Rugby seems to be about running and smashing into people and pushing each other a lot, and when you have the ball, and someone gets you down, you have to drop it (that part never made sense to me).

In one of these scrum things I felt something slice across my shin and the next thing I knew I was bleeding like a stuck pig. I had a long, clean slice down the front of my leg and the skin was pulling away from it. I had never been cut open to that extent and up until that point I had never had stitches in my life (that huge bear dog hadn't tried to kill me yet) and frankly, I was a bit chicken. I remember shoving the two sides of the cut together and asking everyone.

"Is that going to need stitches?"

DUH! I was wearing a hospital shirt someone had stolen for me once (I loved hospital shirts, blue or green, no fuss, no muss, no such thing as inside out, they wash great!) and i took it off and wrapped it around the leg and proceeded to bleed all over it. Someone drove me home and I hobbled in the front door to find no one home. ACK! Eventually my friend's Mom drove me to the hospital where they froze it and basically took a cheese grater to it to clean it up, then a med student tried to stitch it closed. For some reason, they kept having trouble. I dunno what was going wrong but after about 10 minutes he left and came back with a medical staple gun. "Kachunk Katchunk" and he closed it right up. I looked like Frankenstein!

COOL!

On Monday I went to school and in Law class Carrie asked me what was up with my leg so I unwrapped it to show her and she got all grossed out. Everybody did. Something about bits of metal stuck in your skin holding your leg together. It must have been bad because she obviously blocked it out of her memory. I went to work at the Cineplex that night and had the Candy Bar girls convinced that I had ripped my leg open minutes before and one of the guys had stapled it shut in the office. ;-)

Two weeks later i went to my GP to get them taken out and the nurse was grossed out! She made me cover it back up. They didn't know how to get them out so they sent me to emergency and someone went over to the baby ward and got the tool to open them up and take them out. It was this stainless steel medical staple remover and it had been made in Germany. That's also when I learned that they threw stuff like that out to stay clean and avoid germs. I was a bit shocked the thing was made of high quality metal and probably cost $20! They gave it to me as a Souvenir.

While I was in the hospital I ended up in a triage room with a senior citizen who had tried to beat up a cop... I got to listen as he explained his story to two different doctors. They gave him a new one after they heard what he had done because they appear to have one or two doctors who make themselves available to go to court to testify if needed, but that's another story!

Kitten rescue.

2010-09-15T00:04:00.000-04:00

Re-posted from http://www.dontevenreply.com/view.php?post=95 . Hilarious. Thanks Gwilliker for this gem of a site. The guy emails unsuspecting people on Kijijji or Craig's List type sites and screws with them (or he makes it all up, in any case, he's funny as hell!). I find this extra funny because I own one of those..

----------------------------------------------------------

Kitten Rescue

Posted at: 2010-08-12 14:37:56

Warning: The following post contains graphic images. If you are offended by the sight of food-dye, corn syrup, and ground beef, you may not want to read this.

-------------------------------------------------------------

Original ad:
Humane "hav a heart" traps for kittens needed
There are some kittens in my neighborhood that need to find good homes. I need a trap 4 the cats to help bring them in. Please email me if you have a trap (and a heart)!

From Me to *********@********.org:

Hello,

Are you still looking for a trap for cats?

Mike

From Deb ******* to Me:

Yes I am can you help me?

From Me to Deb *******:

I most certainly can! I believe this trap is for those who want to "have a heart." I used it to catch a stray cat that kept coming into my garage. It is called the KittyHugger. All you have to do is put some cat food on the trigger, and when the cat comes to eat it, the trap gently contracts into a hugging position and comfortably hugs the cat until you come back to deal with the little guy. Please let me know if this will work.

Mike

From Deb ******* to Me:

Mike- I have never heard of a trap like that. I was referring to the "Havahart" traps...you know like the cages for animals?? Do you have any pictures of the trap? I'd like to see how it works before I get it. Thanks.

From Me to Deb *******:

Absolutely. I've attached a picture of it. Sorry if it is a little messy; I haven't cleaned the trap in a while.

Attachment:

From Deb ******* to Me:

YOU'RE SICK!

From Me to Deb *******:

Excuse me?

From Deb ******* to Me:

You killed that poor cat OMG

From Me to Deb *******:

I didn't kill the cat. I told you it was a little messy. The last cat I caught knocked over the bowl of juice I gave him so he wouldn't get thirsty. As you can see, it made quite the mess. I assure you this trap is 100% safe and humane.

From Deb ******* to Me:

IT OBVIOUSLY IS NOT SAFE. IT IS COVERED IN BLOOD

From Me to Deb *******:

You've clearly never seen a juice spill before. You have a twisted imagination if you think that is blood. I guess you don't want the trap.

Before you give up on me, I have one more trap you may be interested in. I actually think it is one of those Have a Heart traps you were talking about, though I've never heard it called that.

Please see the attachments. As you can see from the pictures, the kitty will have plenty of room to be safe and comfortable. It comes with a black tube at the end that is used to pump warm air into the cage to keep him warm while he waits to be released.

I'm sorry I didn't have time to clean the trap. It is still a little messy because the last cat I had in there spilled his bowl of juice and his cat food. It went everywhere!

Mike

Attachment:

From Deb ******* to Me:

Wow can't you read the ad you sick jerk? I DON'T WANT TO KILL THEM

How you managed to turn that trap into a bloody mess is a mystery to me but keep the hell away from me!!!

Testing the Go Pro cam by Hero underwater

2010-09-06T23:53:00.000-04:00

My friend Cim bought this cool camera. I'm always looking for things like this so he lent it to me to try out and I'm SOLD! This thing is FREAKIN' FANTASTIC! It has a waterproof housing as well as a water resistant one (better sound in that casing), it's shock-proof, records to a mini-SD card, tons of recording length. It has some 60 frames per second slowmo settings (I haven't played with them yet, but the examples on the website look great!). It comes with all kinds of mounts and harnesses. This thing is perfect for just about anything! The frame is real wide so you can pretty much capture what you need too (I'm not sure what fixed mm the lens is, but it's wide enough and gives you a great all-around view.

Here are some underwater shots I did with it on the weekend.

Interesting car decal

2010-08-27T15:23:00.001-04:00

I should really get one of these..

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Magadheera - One of the best action scenes ever?

2010-08-27T15:02:00.001-04:00

This is just about the most action packed scene I've seen in a long time. Check it out, from the 2009 film Magadheera. Thanks to Donnie Ross for that link.I'm not sure if a big group dance number starts up right after the clip ends, ( "I will kill you, BUT FIRST WE DANCE!") but I suspect so..Hollywood could learn a thing or two from these guys!

Guitar Riff of the day for a year 001-007-Week 1

2010-08-26T18:57:00.001-04:00

First week's riff of the day snippets.I really like how 2 and 6 turned out.

GROTDFAY 001 2010-08-18 by Zartimus

GROTDFAY 002 2010-08-19 by Zartimus

GROTDFAY 003 2010-08-20 by Zartimus

GROTDFAY 004 2010-08-21 by Zartimus

GROTDFAY 005 2010-08-22 by Zartimus

GROTDFAY 006 2010-08-23 by Zartimus

GROTDFAY 007 2010-08-24 by Zartimus

Scot Pilgrim VS the World.

2010-08-22T13:12:00.001-04:00

This is my favorite movie of the summer so far. It has everything. Guitars, groupies, Battle of the bands, video games, kung fu, romance, teen angst (it's just missing zombies). The editing style in the action scenes uses comic book panels and Anime style cuts which I love. They use a lot of captions, titles and onscreen labels which are way comical (think Fight Club, Zombieland,, Watchmen). I espeially loved the the one that explains the partitioning of his aprtment and what he shares and does not share with his gay room-mate ( Scott's gay room-mate, Mcauly Culkin's brother if I'm not mistaken, steals lots of scenes in the film).
The numerous video game references scattered throughout the film are also hilarious, from the totally recognizable Windows OS and Nintendo sound effects to the Sims style "Pee meter" hud displays when Scott goes to the can. His collection of stupid t-shirts is as impressive as my own. They make fun of a lot of stuff that bugs me personally, like pretentious Vegans (so hey, that must bug other people too!).

All of the battle of the bands scenes harkened back to my high school years. Being a guitar player, I was actually in a few of those, and never won! It's no wonder I liked this film. It's filmed in Toronto where the comic book on which it is based is from and it's great to see familiar locations in a cool film such as this. I'm constantly amazed at how the lead actor Michael Cera manages to play the same character in different films, ( Superbad, Youth in Revolt , etc ). It's not for everyone though! Give it a shot!

Guitar Riff of the day for a year Blog

2010-08-22T12:20:00.001-04:00

After catching a story about a local musician who's embarked on a project to write a song a day for a year I thought I'd try the same thing! A Riff a day for a year!! I tend to do this anyway (I probably have 800 snippits kicking around on old tapes and Compaq flash and SD cards), but the regularity of it will be a challenge.

If I get any really good ones I'll make them into proper songs!

**UPDATE*** I moved the guitar Riff a day for a year posts to their own blog since daily posts of the same type are going to clutter up this one. They can be found here. I'll post a weekly recap.

I'm using Soundcloud to host them but I'll run out of free space eventually. It's a great site to host music though, with a nice built-in player.

As i was creating the guitar riff site I mucked around with the new Blogger template builders and reverted to their tools. Time for a template change. I'll customize it up again when I have time. I really like the GUI though, great color picker.

Eric Johnson Chiming G delay hold trick on the Line6 Pod X3 Pro

2010-08-17T10:26:00.003-04:00

I was mesmerized when I first saw Eric Johnson do this on Austin City limits back in 1990. It was so simple yet immensely effective. At the time I was (and still am) running a rack, being from the 80's and all, and was unable to rig a sound anything like this. He was using foot pedals and I was a foot pedal snob. Back then i thought, if I can't do it with a rack then I'm not gonna do it! Over the years I've added rack-mountable Loopers like the Line6 Echo pro, different Delays, units with pseudo sample/loop effects like the Freeze function in the Yamaha SPX 90 (and today the SPX 2000). I've bought and sold some foot pedal loopers like the Boss RC-20, RC-50 (and now the Line6 JM-4). The old green wonderful Line6 Echo Pro (gee I wish I had that one back,) The Boss DD-7 foot pedal does a nice job but they all have issues. They ain't a rack-mount unit, they don't have dual stereo in's, they don't save the loops for later recall, they don't take an SD card, they don't have a software GUI you can deep edit with via USB on your PC, they aren't MIDI-able.

They just don't make a rack-mount looper with all the stuff I need above. I just have to wait for someone to make one (well there's the Looperative LP1 unit but there's NO WAY I'm paying $1700 US for a friggin looper). I my hope is that Line6 will make one for me with all the crap I need, they come a bit closer every time they release a new one. here's a great site for info on real-time looping devices, http://www.loopers-delight.com.

Turns out when I was playing with my Pod X3 pro while on vacation, I flipped around a few settings and found you could toggle between dual tones and still have the delay of the old one sounding in the background. Once they were separated from each other, and the foot controller assigned to toggle a few items, the trick worked. He's a video showing the effect I'm trying to reproduce and how it was done on the Line6 X3 series.

Time for a new blue telecaster guitar build!

2010-08-10T01:13:00.000-04:00

Hmm. It's that time of the decade again.. I have a hankerin' to build a new guitar. I'm a strat guy, but who doesn't like Telecasters. they're like the Stratocaster's in-bred Hillbilly cousin. My favorite guitar these days is my Lake Placid blue strat with the rosewood fretboard and white pickguard. What better compliment than to make the same damned thing in a tele. I just have to decide on a maple or rosewood fingerboard. I'm going to go obscenely thin on the neck, something in the Ibanez Wizard style which is .750"on the 1st fret and .820" at the 12. Thinnest neck style on the market. You can FLY on that neck and the tone sacrifice is negligible.

So I looked around on the net, found some pictures and photoshopped them the way I want it to look. Mmmmmm looking good. I'll really do research on the pickups this time around because that's the real hit and miss part of any guitar. You never know how the damned things are going to sound until you slam them in there. I have almost always bought on verbal recommendation from people I hope know what they are talking about. Seymour Duncan has a good page (I've had great luck with their stuff) where they try to give you an idea of what the different models will sound like, but again, different neck, different guitar, different wire and schematics, pots, whatever.. ALL DIFFERENT! So good luck getting that similar sound. Every beast sounds a bit different.

First off I have to sell a guitar to make room for this one. The first guitar I ever made was a tele , a monstrous natural flame maple with an SRV neck and Nashville 5.2 pickups I started right around Sept 11th 2001 (I remember because it got held up in shipping at the border because of the towers getting hit). Very nice but overkill for me. I don't play it very much and it's wasting away in it's case. I'm not sure why I'm even thinking of parting with it, maybe it's just the itch to slap a new one together again. One thing I've learned is the telecasters I liked as a kid where the beat up ones Prince or Bruce Springsteen used to play. The ones that look like they've been thrown in the back of a pickup truck. My nice natural flame maple one is far too pretty...
Anyone want to buy a used custom telecaster? Muhahahahahahaha!

The Walking Dead - Excellent Zombie fare

2010-08-05T22:13:00.002-04:00

Nothing like a good Zombie comic! I have a colleague who is leaving my office to start another assignment within the department but of course they don't have an office ready for her. She's been squatting in her old digs reading documentation the last few days and it looks really boring. So, on my way to a meeting in another building, I dropped off my copy of "The Walking dead - Volume 4" and said, "Check this out! It's the best zombie graphic novel you'll ever read! (actually I said "Tiens, c'est la meilleure bande dessinée de zombie que tu jamais lu!" because she's French). She sported me a weird look and I left before she could protest. An hour later on the way back to my office I stopped by to collect it and she indicated that she had already "dropped it off" because we don't share the same taste in reading materials (she really didn't like it, I think she may have carried it back with metal tongs).

"What's not to like?" I asked. "Did you see the part about the girl in the raincoat with the Samurai sword who walks through the zombie-infested areas hunched over pretending to be a zombie, completing the ruse by leading two zombies around on leashes like pets (whose arms she has cut off so they don't give her any trouble)?"

She shook her head. I continued.

"They're her boyfriend and his best friend who got turned into zombies early in the story . Oops, ex-boyfriend I guess.."

Blank stare...

"Hey in October they're airing it as a TV miniseries, you can catch it then!"

Oh well. Not everyone loves Zombies. Muhahahahaha!!

I'm just finishing up issue 4 where a group of survivors in have discovered a max security prison that turns out to be a great place to hole up from the Zombie hoards. The series is awesome, if you want to pick it up, use the best comic supplier in the universe - Dark Age Comics http://www.facebook.com/?ref=logo#!/group.php?gid=61008535645&ref=ts

Here's a TRAILER for the upcoming TV miniseries!

Olivia Newton John

2010-07-24T02:01:00.002-04:00

I was looking for something on SPIKE TV's website of all places and ran across a link they had featuring Olivia Newton John. Remember her? As a 41 year old, let me tell you, she featured large in my childhood (she got me through puberty ;-). In 1981 she was all over the radio and TV, the latter due to a one hour video special that featured all of the songs off of her "Physical" album. I remember being 11 or 12 and making time in my busy "Empire Strikes back" world to catch this thing on tv. It featured her rolling around on a beach in a t-shirt and bikini bottom and swimming with dolphins and exercising in a gym clad in spandex with a bunch of fat guys. The videos themselves were pretty freaky for the time, typical 80's, interesting for the most part with a few lip synched live pieces. The keyboardist in a few of them I'll always remember. I don't know what he was on, but he's sure hamming it up for the shoot!

The dripping sex appeal aside, I was amazed with her voice. (Amy Grant's voice does it for me too, as does Karen Carpenter's amazing vocal chords ). I was rebooting my attempts at the guitar and all her studio stuff had great strat sounds, the "Chucka Chucka" spanky skany comping stuff the studio rats do I'm still partial too this day.

So, in a throwback to my youth, check Olivia out. I always dug this song Make a move on me and was hopelessly in love with her in the early 80's (that dancing 2 step she does in the chorus slays me). All the current crop of female singers, from Lady Gaga to Fergie to Beyonce to Agulera(sp?), whoever. Newsflash. You don't have to take all of your damn clothes off and swear like a trucker to make a powerful visual statement in a musical context. None of them have anything on her (and she's gonna be 62 this year, imagine that!).

When Atheists go door to door

2010-07-23T00:28:00.001-04:00

Ahh, the Mormons, to whom I say, when they knock on my door on Saturday morning,

"Hey, I love your commercials!"

"Dad, dad, I got an A!"
"Billy! Don't slam the damned door!"

That's a great one. Ok, he probably doesn't say 'damned' because he's playing a Mormon, but the kids' all excited about doing well in school, wants to show Dad, but he runs inside the house and slams the front door and Dad yells at him, crushing the proud moment he wishes to share.

What that's got to do with being Mormon I have no idea, but I can be nice to my kids and still cling to my world of logic and scientific fact.

It's about that time, after I listen to 20 seconds of their spiel that I start talking to them about Bigfoot, the Patterson film, and I go and get my plaster castings from Bluff creek and see what they think about that... Always fun.

Anyway, this video is bloody hilarious. Thanks to Brooke for sharing..

Did you know your relatives were monkeys? God apparently used 98% of the same DNA (probably to save time on day 5 or 6)! Freaky!

The 2011 Census debacle

2010-07-22T07:08:00.001-04:00

This is Tony Clement. He is the Canadian minister of Industry and oversees the department I work at. Normally I don't concern myself with politicians because everything they do is geared to pleasing someone of influence and trying to get re-elected so they can stay in power, but once in awhile you read about, or are affected by some boneheaded, short-sighted move on the government's part that just make you shake your head. The proposed change to the 2011 Census is one of those for me. Regardless of if you understand the issues and problems with going to a voluntary form versus a mandatory one, just consider this:

The last Chief Statistician of Canada, Ivan Fellegi, spent over 50 years with Statistics Canada (no, that is not a typo, he started there in 1957 and spent the last 23 as Canada's Chief Statistician before retiring in 2008). He says scrapping the long form is a bad thing and if that guy says something about statistics the government should bloody well listen.

Munir Sheikh, his replacement in 2008 had been very quiet on the issue until tendering his resignation yesterday. He said in part:

"I want to take this opportunity to comment on a technical statistical issue which has become the subject of media discussion. This relates to the question of whether a voluntary survey can become a substitute for a mandatory census.

It can not.

Under the circumstances, I have tendered my resignation to the Prime Minister."

When someone resigns a post a day after their boss says they have their support, it's saying something. So it seems like he thinks it's a bad thing as well. For the record. I think it's a bad thing too (although I can't afford to quit over it). I hope to hell other people who can make a difference join these guys and step up to the plate on this one. A lot of people who work there care about the data, and doing the best job they can, and preserving this time series.

So I guess what I'm saying is, if one doesn't understand the issues, it helps to seek advice and council from those that obviously do, and digest what they have to say before thinking you know everything like our politicians. And if the government should make a mistake, own up and reverse it and move on. We all make them. Saving face is dangerous.

What really burns me is that Clement acted like Statcan was endorsing this whole deal, which it did not. What appears to have happened is that our government decided to cancel the Census without any thought or foresight, consulted Statcan at some point after the fact to see what the replacement options were, disastrous as they may be and picked one. Also, as he says in this interview, the fact that he's using Twitter to measure his support on the issue is moronic! In fact, that's exactly like a volunteer census. You only get a minority of biased people who feel strongly about the issue that way, not to mention the fact that non-technical people won't be able to contact him there. Incidentally I read up on him for the first time today and found it interesting that he won his riding by only 28 votes.

Hey, probably it's just his boss (our prime Minister) making him do it. I hear that happens sometimes.

I hate Earwigs

2010-07-16T18:35:00.001-04:00

Mr Earwig. My BBQ is a horrible place to park your sorry carapace. Make with the fire!

Mmm. Crunchy!

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Can you make me a Missing Cat poster?

2010-07-14T19:38:00.000-04:00

I got this email today. I was too damned busy to read it but it looked funny so I forwarded it to myself at home. This is just about the funniest thing I have read this quarter! Any of us in a computer service job will feel David's pain. I know I did.

Muhahahahahahahahaha!

Reproduced from http://www.kevmo.net

----------------------------------

From: Shannon
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 9.20am
To: David
Subject: Poster Hi
I opened the screen door yesterday and my cat got out and has been missing since then so I was wondering if you are not to busy you could make a poster for me. It has to be A4 and I will photocopy it and put it around my suburb this afternoon.

This is the only photo of her I have she answers to the name Missy and is black and white and about 8 months old. missing on Harper street and my phone number.
Thanks Shan.

From: David
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 9.26am
To: Shannon
Subject: Re: Poster
Dear Shannon,
That is shocking news. Luckily I was sitting down when I read your email and not half way up a ladder or tree. How are you holding up? I am surprised you managed to attend work at all what with thinking about Missy out there cold, frightened and alone… possibly lying on the side of the road, her back legs squashed by a vehicle, calling out “Shannon, where are you?”
Although I have two clients expecting completed work this afternoon, I will, of course, drop everything and do whatever it takes to facilitate the speedy return of Missy.
Regards, David.

From: Shannon
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 9.37am
To: David
Subject: Re: Re: Poster
yeah ok thanks. I know you dont like cats but I am really worried about mine. I have to leave at 1pm today.

From: David
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.17am
To: Shannon
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Poster
Dear Shannon,
I never said I don’t like cats. Once, having been invited to a party, I went clothes shopping beforehand and bought a pair of expensive G-Star boots. They were two sizes too small but I wanted them so badly I figured I could just wear them without socks and cut my toenails very short. As the party was only a few blocks from my place, I decided to walk. After the first block, I lost all feeling in my feet. Arriving at the party, I stumbled into a guy named Steven, spilling Malibu & coke onto his white Wham ‘Choose Life’ t-shirt, and he punched me. An hour or so after the incident, Steven sat down in a chair already occupied by a cat. The surprised cat clawed and snarled causing Steven to leap out of the chair, slip on a rug and strike his forehead onto the corner of a speaker; resulting in a two inch open gash. In its shock, the cat also defecated, leaving Steven with a foul stain down the back of his beige cargo pants. I liked that cat.
Attached poster as requested.
Regards, David.

From: Shannon
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.24am
To: David
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster
yeah thats not what I was looking for at all. it looks like a movie and how come the photo of Missy is so small?

From: David
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.28am
To: Shannon
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster
Dear Shannon,
It’s a design thing. The cat is lost in the negative space.
Regards, David.

From: Shannon
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.33am
To: David
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster
Thats just stupid. Can you do it properly please? I am extremely emotional over this and was up all night in tears. you seem to think it is funny. Can you make the photo bigger please and fix the text and do it in colour please. Thanks.

From: David
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.46am
To: Shannon
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster
Dear Shannon,
Having worked with designers for a few years now, I would have assumed you understood, despite our vague suggestions otherwise, we do not welcome constructive criticism. I don’t come downstairs and tell you how to send text messages, log onto Facebook and look out of the window. I am willing to overlook this faux pas due to you no doubt being preoccupied with thoughts of Missy attempting to make her way home across busy intersections or being trapped in a drain as it slowly fills with water. I spent three days down a well once but that was just for fun.
I have amended and attached the poster as per your instructions.
Regards, David.

From: Shannon
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 10.59am
To: David
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster
This is worse than the other one. can you make it so it shows the whole photo of Missy and delete the stupid text that says missing missy off it? I just want it to say Lost.

From: David
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.14am
To: Shannon
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster

From: Shannon
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.21am
To: David
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Poster
yeah can you do the poster or not? I just want a photo and the word lost and the telephone number and when and where she was lost and her name. Not like a movie poster or anything stupid. I have to leave early today. If it was your cat I would help you. Thanks.

From: David
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.32am
To: Shannon
Subject: Awww
Dear Shannon,
I don’t have a cat. I once agreed to look after a friend’s cat for a week but after he dropped it off at my apartment and explained the concept of kitty litter, I kept the cat in a closed cardboard box in the shed and forgot about it. If I wanted to feed something and clean faeces, I wouldn’t have put my mother in that home after her stroke. A week later, when my friend came to collect his cat, I pretended that I was not home and mailed the box to him. Apparently I failed to put enough stamps on the package and he had to collect it from the post office and pay eighteen dollars. He still goes on about that sometimes, people need to learn to let go.
I have attached the amended version of your poster as per your detailed instructions.
Regards, David.

From: Shannon
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.47am
To: David
Subject: Re: Awww
Thats not my cat. where did you get that picture from? That cat is orange. I gave you a photo of my cat.

From: David
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 11.58am
To: Shannon
Subject: Re: Re: Awww
I know, but that one is cute. As Missy has quite possibly met any one of several violent ends, it is possible you might get a better cat out of this. If anybody calls and says “I haven’t seen your orange cat but I did find a black and white one with its hind legs run over by a car, do you want it?” you can politely decline and save yourself a costly veterinarian bill.
I knew someone who had a basset hound that had its hind legs removed after an accident and it had to walk around with one of those little buggies with wheels. If it had been my dog I would have asked for all its legs to be removed and replaced with wheels and had a remote control installed. I could charge neighbourhood kids for rides and enter it in races. If I did the same with a horse I could drive it to work. I would call it Steven.
Regards, David.

From: Shannon
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.07pm
To: David
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Awww
Please just use the photo I gave you.

From: David
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.22pm
To: Shannon
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

From: Shannon
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.34pm
To: David
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww
I didnt say there was a reward. I dont have $2000 dollars. What did you even put that there for? Apart from that it is perfect can you please remove the reward bit. Thanks Shan.

From: David
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.42pm
To: Shannon
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

From: Shannon
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.51pm
To: David
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww
Can you just please take the reward bit off altogether? I have to leave in ten minutes and I still have to make photocopies of it.

From: David
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 12.56pm
To: Shannon
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww

From: Shannon
Date: Monday 21 June 2010 1.03pm
To: David
Subject: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Awww
Fine. That will have to do.

My Jesus isn't sticky

2010-07-13T17:49:00.001-04:00

Due to the recent heat-wave, the double sided adhesive base of my dashboard bobble-head Jesus lost it's stickiness! It just plain melted away (like scientific fact in a bible!)

We have a Jesus down! I repeat, JC is down!

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I wonder what this guy does for a living?

2010-07-09T17:17:00.001-04:00

Dr. Bum I presume?

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Combination bird-feeder/bug-zapper

2010-07-02T16:53:00.001-04:00

I was over at my parents place for a swim and noticed they got rid of their bug zapper. You know, those wonderful blue glowing cages of electric bug death. The sound of one frying an insect brings back childhood memories of when I was 8 and would fall asleep to the neighbor's taking out insects into the wee hours of the night. It was always exciting when a junebug would get stuck in one. It sounded like someone trying to bring Frankenstein back to life.

So back to my parent's retired bug zapper. They have attached a bird-feeder in it's place. Which gave me an idea. They should make a combination bird feeder/bug zapper.

Only the "brave" birds get something to eat! (it would take care of the squirrel problems at the same time).

Canada day cake (sorta)

2010-06-30T19:31:00.001-04:00

Kinda.. Heheheh. The red splotches are supposed to be Maple leaves.

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Pool games

2010-06-29T16:01:00.001-04:00

It's funny how the pool games changed after the Kids and I watched Titanic.

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The midnight cookie bandit strikes again!

2010-06-28T00:19:00.001-04:00

I thought I heard something around 11:00pm.

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RCA SPS 3600 - How to set the damned clock when you've lost the manual.

2010-06-27T10:55:00.003-04:00

RCA SPS 3600 Kitchen Radio with CD Player and MP3 Docking Station

We bought one of these things last year. We needed a under-shelf mounting radio/CD/MP3 player for the kitchen and this fit the bill. The manual got eaten by wild Jackalopes and the clock has been wrong for ages since our self-induced power failure last month so I went online to look for the manual in PDF form. NADA! ZIP! RCA's web site doesn't have it. The Yahoo site that stores manuals has a broken link and I don't trust that instruct2 site that promises to send you a link to the manual after you provide them your email address and other stuff.

So I looked for the previous model (3200). Same deal. Nothing. Why every company in the world doesn't put all of it's manuals on the Internet in PDF form is beyond me. Then it was time to revisit the first option I had tried and failed at, trail and error. Push every combination of buttons on the thing alone and in series, powered on and powered off until you magically stumble upon the combination you need. In most cases they are spread apart so that even client's with ham hock fingers can do it! And after a few more minutes, here's how you set the damned clock when you've lost your manual (posted here for all the other poor consumers who need to know).

Turn the unit off by the console (display will dim but you can still see the time) and hold the MEM button for a few seconds. Display will flash and then you can change the Hour with the CD Track Reverse button and change the Minute with the CD Track Advance button (those are the controls to the right of the unit between the "+" and "-" volume buttons). Then Press the MEM button one last time to lock in the setting.

Enjoy!

RCA sucks for not PDF'ing this manual online.

The Skeeter Vac

2010-06-26T14:03:00.001-04:00

I bought a second-hand Skeeter vac a month ago. They are those magic things hooked up to propane that reek of deer breath and does a uv lightshow inside to lure biting insects to their deaths. It's not a zapper but more of a giant mosquito sucking device. The thing works like you wouldn't believe! I emptied it a week ago and I just checked the thing today and it was so full, no more Mosquitos would fit! When I popped the tray open the compacted bug bodies sprang up and went everywhere but the tray was still packed full!

I'm not sure of the range of the thing but I'm pretty sure we're doing all the neighbors a huge favour!

Death to Skeeters!

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Death by Crocs

2010-06-24T22:36:00.001-04:00

I love those stupid lookin' shoes. They is ugly, but they shore is comfortable!

Trouble is, I wore the soles down so smooth, every step on slippery surface is a death wish. Last week I was out on my deck after the rain and I accidentally went skiing down the wet stairs in my old crocs. I managed to stop before hurtling through the 2nd floor deck posts and falling to earth and I vowed to chuck them and buy a new pair!

I had my chance a few days later on movie night. I was meeting the guys at la red stick in Kanata and there was a sports experts just across from it. I popped into the reasurant, saw one guy had arrived and grabbed a table so I told him I'd be back in 5 minutes.

I was going to pull a Jack Reacher. Buy new and leave the old ones on the floor of the store. Well, all they had were stupid leprechaun green crocs with racing stripes, not the nice brown ones I was sporting, so screw that noise! I went back to the reasturant. The guy holding our table had an interesting suggestion for me when he heard my dillema. His idea was to heat up a fork and dig it into the soles to make new thread marks (not a bad idea!).

On the way to the movie, it rained and every second paving stone in Centrum is smooth and my crocs skitter across them like I'm walking on Vaseline (stupid crocs).

Tonight I arrived home to find that my wife had bought me a pair! $4.95 at Somethingmart! They're not the same as I had but they are a lot less dangerous so the old pair is now in the poobelle.

My deathwish crocs.

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Pool heater super goodness

2010-06-15T22:04:00.001-04:00

We haven't gotten the first post pool gas bill yet but so far, ye old pool heater is looking like the best investment of the summer! Floating in non sub-zero water for four nights in a row is way cool. I'm glad we came to the conclusion that we live in Canada and needed one.

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The government sex store

2010-06-14T21:00:00.001-04:00

I try and put some thought into what I call server sharenames. They tend to hang around awhile and if you name it right, they are short, identifiable for what they are, and easy to remember.

So when it came time to come up with a name for our secondary storage NAS partition, I decided to call it SECSTOR. Say this now out loud. I did this for the first time today explaining to a female colleague that our SECSTOR was a good place to store old files because it's cheaper(the discs are not as fast).

It reminds me of the time I linked some files for an old co-worker named Arther and copied them to his home directory which he linked to with the drive letter F:

I told him I put the files in F:\ART

It comes out funny in meetings...

Battle of Arracourt

2010-06-14T20:45:00.000-04:00

Don't just watch it on the History Channel. Re-enact it in the family room!

Muhahahaha!

I love Shermans!

Me 2 Hornets zero!

2010-06-01T12:23:00.001-04:00

I took out two hornet nests attached to my house over the past few days. They were little itty bitty ones with only a few dozen of the flying 'I can sting you as many times as I want' yellow jackets. What do they do anyway? Bees help pollinate and make honey. I like that, but what do Wasps and Hornets do for me?

The task went well this time. Because the nests were small, softball sized, they just took a 60 second shot of water from the hose each. If you get the hole at the bottom, the little buggers can't get out and you drown them all before the nest gets so water-logged it plops to the ground. Then you can ground spray it into Oblivion.

The only thing you have to be concerned about are the wasps who aren't home at the time of your assault, and come back to find you spraying the bejesus out of their old homestead. They tend to get pissed off about that and hopefully you're done and can run!

I made the mistake of forgetting about this a few years ago on a much larger nest at my old place and ran like a fool, aImost taking out my fence in the process. I came up with a plan involving a cinder block, duct tape, and a bungie cord. I let everything calm down, mounted a cinder block about 10 feet from the nest, aimed the hose nozzel at it and duct taped it into position on the block. Then with the water shut off the trigger was wrapped with a bungie cord but not before I tooth-picked a stick in there to keep the bungie from closing the trigger. I rigged a line to the trigger, pulled the stick out and WHAMMO! Missed the nest by a foot. I shut the water off and re-aimed. It was at this point I realized the bungie trigger was moot because I could lock the trigger open and just turn on the hose(doh! Oh well, it was fun to build!).

From the safety of my side yard, I unleashed hell (or Atlantis) on the hive of pestilence and watched as 3 of the buggers followed the hose spray right to the nozzel and landed on the back of it! Wow, they put two and two together! Smart! As it turns out, that's where the gifted program for insects ended because they didn't follow the hose to me as their little wasp pad dropped to the deck scattering larvae and dead Wasps everywhere.

Oh the humanity!

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Ottawa Flyers Fan

2010-05-28T18:57:00.001-04:00

Got a crappy white car? Have a favorite hockey team and some trem-clad rust paint? Why pay for fancy airbrushing when you can do it yourself!

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Lambourgini's in Orleans

2010-05-22T15:30:00.001-04:00

3rd I've seen in three days. I'm in the wrong line of work . Two days ago police had a yellow one pulled over on my street and yesterday one passed me on Innes road. There used to be a Lotus Esprit turbo (my favorite car) living a few streets over but that one's long gone.

I wonder how many car-seats you can fit in those?

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TPGMBF3 test footage tank 01

2010-05-03T22:34:00.001-04:00

I had a few minutes this evening and managed to shoot some test footage I had bouncing around in my head for the next TPGMBF movie (part 3 if anyone's counting). I hopped on my bike with the camera on a monopod and filmed some front and then side video on my street. I reversed the frontal (you can hear me talking backwards on-camera) and then shot footage of my remote control Sherman tank in front of an outdoor green screen. This certainly fixes the lighting problems. You get a good match if you can do it in the same conditions as the background footage.

I shot some pilot footage and jammed myself in the turret and match-moved it to the tank. The next test I'll try to rig a point of reference off the camera to mo cap and slave the tank object too so it behaves itself in the frame. And then match the speed better. The treads are flying but my bike wasn't all that fast.

Corney but I think it's gonna work. I picture a scene with like, 4 of us hanging out the cockpit somehow.

Aliens in my ice cream.

2010-04-01T22:21:00.001-04:00

Seriously. Which kind of encounter is this. 2nd? 3rd?

You can see where it touched down.

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Sneaky kid trick #16

2010-03-29T22:41:00.001-04:00

60 minutes past bedtime, sneak downstairs, quietly belly-crawl into the kitchen so your dad can't hear you (he's busy pouring over a complicated piece of music on the couch), open the snack cubbard, expertly extract the box of Oreo cookies and belly-crawl into the 1st floor bathroom.

Celebrate your successful mission with an oreo double-stuff!

Then, clean up the evidence!

Oops!

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When you run out of dishwasher soap

2010-03-27T10:49:00.001-04:00

Apparently guys, when you run out of dishwasher soap(the dry stuff), liquid dish soap is not a viable substitution. What's up with that?

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Re-occurring dream - Phantom of the Opera Sting is trying to kill me again.

2010-03-21T14:16:00.002-04:00

Lemon Meringue pie is good dream food. I had my reoccurring "Sting is trying to kill me!" dream again. Instead of trying to drive me off a cliff in my own truck while he played bass and sang, this time he was dressed up like the Phantom of the Opera. In the dream I was on stage, playing electric guitar (for a change) in front of a huge crowd who were screaming and yelling and suddenly a sandbag on a rope dropped from the ceiling and hit the floor beside me. I looked up and there was that damned Sting again, on the catwalk in a cape cackling maniacally. His Fender Precision bass guitar came out of nowhere and he played it for 3 seconds and it disappeared up his arm like one of those movie sleeve guns. Then he dropped another sandbag. The crowd went wild again, either because the guitar is awesome or they really want Sting to kill me so I stop playing. Someone in the crowd yells "He's behind you!" like they do in Dora the Explorer. (Do YOU see Sting trying to kill you? Say YES!). Actually, I'm looking up and he's above me still (never trust the crowd). Suddenly the crowd fell silent and I woke up to my wife's hair dryer shutting off.

Next time I'm asleep, I told her, put the hair dryer on the floor away from anything flammable and leave it turned on. I gotta get that damned Sting in my dream before he gets me!

Motion sensor light switches

2010-03-16T09:43:00.001-04:00

The last few months my kids have been leaving the lights on in the bathroom by mistake. Someone at work told me about these motion sensor switches that switch on when you walk in and switch off when you leave. I stuffed one in the 1st floor bathroom, and so far, it works great! Aside from plunging you in complete darkness after 10 seconds if you're pretty still when you're in there(just wave a limb around and it comes back on).
Now I'm looking for an automatic toilet flusher...

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The breakfast of all kids on March break

2010-03-16T09:32:00.001-04:00

Cheese and ginger ale. I let my kid get up before me and she went about fending for herself today. Interesting..

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Test

2010-03-10T15:33:00.001-05:00

Bla

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Daddy, what kinda penis you got?

2010-03-08T18:29:00.001-05:00

My five year old got a book out of the library. It's one of those kid books on where babies come from, cleverly illustrated cartoon-style with all the details.
Storytime was going pretty good until we got to this page. The previous page imparted the wisdom that boys and girls differ from each other in that girls "sit down" to go to the bathroom while boys "stand up" sometimes. Pretty simple! I'll have to remember that one!

But the following page delved into the "why is this one not like that one?" circumcised/un-circumcised question.
Which prompted my kid to ask:

"What kind of penis you got Daddy?" she points to the illustration " the one with the nose thing or the elephant looking one?"

Two minutes later, when I was able to stop laughing and breathe again I ducked the question, turned the page and changed the subject.

"look how many puppies a doggy can have!"
"ohhhhhh"

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Hey I can see my gnome!

2010-03-08T18:16:00.001-05:00

Too bad I don't have a comparison photo, but mr gnome was under snow a week ago.

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Squirrel lungs

2010-03-08T18:14:00.001-05:00

The cat next door is enjoying the early march smow melt. He hangs out in my backyard and ambushes small mammals. Then he leaves the remains at the foot of our stairs. I think that means he likes us.
I still haven't figured out what dead thing the cat dragged under the deck before the snow hit. It stopped smelling in December so I guess it doesn't matter much anymore...

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Congratulations USA on your silver medal!

2010-03-01T00:56:00.000-05:00

You've come a long way and your goalie was scary!

Sorry! ....

TGIF feb 26th. Looks great ouside!

2010-02-26T14:48:00.001-05:00

I made the mistake of looking out the window. Why am I at work?

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Puttin' on the cheese in the snow!

2010-02-25T22:15:00.001-05:00

Angus burgers. Yummy! Btw. Crocs do not make good winter BBQ shoes...

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Getting lucky in video games - Mass Effect 2

2010-02-25T00:54:00.000-05:00

I played and finished Mass Effect 2 to completion (went through the Omega 4 relay 2 weeks ago and saved the damn universe) and didn't get anywhere with my female collegues ;-)

What am I doing wrong! Getting lucky in video games. Whoda thunk it! It's harder than it looks! In space, no one can hear you strike out!

I suspect I'm playing my character too nice. Gals love a bad-ass. Just like in High School.

Maybe I'll try out these tips from IGN.COM!

Medieval history 101

2010-02-23T20:29:00.001-05:00

My daughter is studying medieval history in grade 4. She has a test on Thursday so I'm quizzing her.
'"Jade". I ask "Where was the Magna Carta signed?"

"At the bottom.."

You can't make this stuff up!

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What! No more Popsicles!

2010-02-21T18:47:00.001-05:00

Oh the humanity!

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My 5 year old daughter made this at school..

2010-02-14T23:41:00.001-05:00

Out of clay.. Should I be worried? it's supposed to be 'a little person'...

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