Just another useless personal blog
This is a stack of the DVDs I’ve burned so far since I started using MythTV, most of which are movies I haven’t seen yet or don’t care strongly enough about to buy the official releases (and it’s actually missing a handful I’ve lent out or forgot to include).
Now if only I could find the time to actually start *watching* them…
More kittens than you can shake a stick at. If you were inclined to shake sticks at kittens, for some reason.
Hmmm, maybe carrying my camera around in my jacket isn’t such a good idea after all. The extra movement is already causing some of the print on the dials and such to rub off. I have a case for it, but then it’s too bulky to carry around in the jacket anyway.
Ah well, I think I’ve already photographed everything vaguely interesting in my daily life anyway… Time to dig through the archives.
(at a nearby pet grooming shop)
This was part of a graffiti-style mural on the side of this building. It wasn’t your usual random ‘tagger’ stuff; apparently the owner of the building actually commissions them from artists every few years or so.
I’d been meaning to photograph the whole thing for a while now, but then he started painting over it one day recently and this was all I could grab. It’s now a Calgary Flames logo there.
But only in the more sophisticated, snooty neighbourhoods like mine.
Downtown Calgary, around 8:45am: (Click for full-sized image)
I’ve started carrying my camera around in my jacket just in case I run across anything worth photographing. Althought I sometimes wish I had a newer model like the F828 or a DSLR like the D70, my current one at least fits in a jacket pocket; the bulkiness of the others would make them a pain to carry around casually.
I actually ran into this error today. A server wasn’t responding when I tried to copy files to it, and after going into our development lab and attaching a monitor to the normally-headless system I discovered it stuck at this prompt.
Found while cleaning all the junk out of my desk:
I have a slight problem. Whenever I get mail, or flyers, or magazines, or most anything else on paper, it tends to get tossed off onto the kitchen table, or top of the fridge, or some other out-of-the-way place.
So, after eight years of accumulating stuff this way, I finally went around and collected all of the bits and pieces lying around the apartment and I’m left with:
Now I have to sort them into three piles: stuff I can throw away, stuff I have to shred first and can then throw away (old bank statements, credit card bills, etc.), and then the stuff I really want to keep (tax records).
Sigh, sometimes I feel like I skipped the qualification exam for being an adult…
I wonder if the local bank branch will let me run it all through their nifty change-sorting machines…
Doesn’t this look appetizing?
It’s actually not too bad (if you like Froot Loops), but it just looks *wrong* outside of its natural habitat of a bowl of milk…
My living room at midnight:
Pity the poor guest who gets stuck sleeping out there…
(Though some are dim and close, there are 17 LEDs in that picture, with others possible that just weren’t on at the time.)
The newest member of my little family, ‘ebotona’:
It’s an iBook G4, and although I’ve occasionally used Macs before, this is the first one I’ve actually ever owned. Why an iBook? Well, I always like to have something new to tinker with. My knowledge about Macs is about 10 years out of date, so it couldn’t hurt to get back up to speed on them, especially since I may get nailed with doing our OSX client port at work. I don’t really need a new full-blown desktop system, but I could occasionally use a laptop, so the iBook fills both needs; it’ll fulfill my travelling requirements, and still give me something new to fiddle with when at home.
So what was the first thing I did? Wipe OSX off and install Linux, of course… :-)
Continue reading “Say Hello To My Little Friend”
This is a stack of CDs. CDs containing games. Games which I STILL HAVEN’T FINISHED YET. Some of them I haven’t even *started*.
I never meant to fall so far behind, of course, but then something called EverQuest happened. I still managed to sneak in some time to play other games too, but the vast majority of the time my first impulse was to log into EQ, see if anything was happening, if anyone needed me for a group, etc. All these other games weren’t going anywhere, they’d still be there in the exact same place I saved, but getting things done in EQ often meant being online at the right place at the right time.
Normally that would have just meant that the couple others I was playing at the time would have been the ones to suffer, but of course there’s more than that now. New games were still coming out and I’d hear about them through the usual reviews and word of mouth and felt like they were worth checking out. So, I’d pick up new games, install them and fool around with them for a bit, but…whoops, time to log in for that raid on Chardok tonight. Before long they too would fall to the wayside.
So, now I’ve got this mountainous pile of unfinished games. I haven’t spent as much time in EQ lately so I do have some more time to spend on them, but it’s still going to be pretty slow going. I also still like going back to some of the highly-replayable games like the Civ series and Diablo 2, which doesn’t help work through this pile any.
I’m tempted to say ‘screw it’ to my usual gaming approach and just grab walkthroughs and whip through them all as fast as possible, just to at least enjoy the stories, dialogue, victories, etc…
There was a full lunar eclipse tonight (well, almost full — I think the sun held on to a teeny little barely-noticable sliver), and I managed to snap a few photos.
My camera lacks manual controls, so the inconsistency of the following pictures is from me mucking about with various settings seeing if I could do better. They’re in chronological order, left to right, top to bottom.
The very last one is the darkest it got, and it was actually darker to the eyes than you see in the picture here. As is typical in these eclipses, the moon didn’t really vanish, the rest of it just became very, very dim, and the camera manages to pick it up better than the eyes alone do.
In my insatiable quest for toys, I finally picked up a flatbed scanner. I had been holding out trying to find a 2400 dpi model around here, but after playing around with it a bit, I doubt I’ll even use the full 1600 dpi of this model all that often (those files get huge!).
There is actually a practical reason for it. As part of the process of cleaning up around here, there are a bunch of things that I’d like to keep around, but just don’t have the space for: pictures, segments from magazines, comic strips, etc. So instead I’m going to scan them in and then I can ditch the originals. Second on the list is the comics found in the back of The Gateway student newspaper I picked up when I was a student at the UofA (besides the ones that already have their own scans online, like Space Moose or Bob The Angry Flower).
First though, was a promise I’d made to my mother to try and reproduce a picture from a photographic proof (the tiny little sample pictures you get to choose from for the final picture) of her parents. She’d tried taking it to photographers and getting them to reprint it, but they wouldn’t do it — apparently they don’t work off of other peoples’ proofs on general principle since it may be someone trying to scam the photographer into getting them the free sample proofs and then taking it to another, cheaper photographer for the final work.
Unfortunately in this case we don’t know who the original photographer was, whether he’s even still in business, or whether he’d even still have the negatives after all this time, and we can’t exactly take her parents down and have another picture taken when one of them is dead… So, we’ve had to take matters into our own hands and thus I’m trying to scan and reprint the photo based off this tiny little proof picture. This is the best I have so far:
(Shrunken down for web viewing, of course. The original file is 3403 pixels by 4797!)