I want a bunny.
Monthly Archive for August, 2004
Midnight Sun North American Tour - Midnight Sun Solar Race Team The UW Solar Car team has just broken the world record for longest single journey by a solar-powered car.
I came home to find my monitor had fallen out of my wall. Sigh…
McSweeney’s Internet Tendency: E-mail Addresses It Would Be Really Annoying to Give Out Over the Phone. And I thought loismustdie@yahoo.com was hard enough to decipher.
Yahoo! News - Kevin Smith Clocks in for ‘Clerks’ Sequel I remember now why I fell in love with Kevin Smith.
Gothamist’s recap of the MTV VMAs. Beat to the punch. The show was uber boring indeed.
nine of my twelve search engine hits have been for k-os and his joyful rebellion disc. why aren’t more people on the net talking about this album?
Today I was in a strange and foreign place. The Canadian National Comic Book Expo is less and less comic oriented every year. Back when Simon and I volunteered in the late 90’s, it was a pure comic book fest, and the crowd was made up of your typical non-offensive fanboys.
With each passing year, the emphasis on comic books dwindles, and the expo expands a bit more to encompass more anime and more sci-fi. This year they even added the horror genre to the bill.
Patrick Stewart was home recovering from his very exciting angioplasty. Celebrity sightings included Geordi, Worf, Sulu, Jake and Nog. Also, Chewie was, well… not as hairy in person as I imagined.
Of course, those weren’t the highlights. Simon and I got wicked sketches from Scott of VGCats (he’s from Waterloo! Big ups!), met the Black Bastard (p.i.m.p.-licious), and oh the costumes! It joint was busy as heck, and Simon had a permanent look of shock the entire night. He couldn’t control his facial muscles.
We chatted up Simon’s favorite comic book legend, Ty Templeton, who’s very much like a more tolerable Comic-book Guy. Greg Hyland, the artist behind Lethargic Lad and Munchkin Fu gave us a nice insight to the world of independent publishing. Skottie Young doodled for a room of fifty for an hour.
But probably the strangest part of the day, I didn’t buy anything. Surrounded by action figures, and comic books, I didn’t purchase a thing. Oooooh… spooky! And some girls just aren’t meant to show that much skin. Seriously.
I doubt I’ll go back next year. I’ll just stick to getting my comics from the Silver Snail.
MSN Entertainment - News - Patrick Stewart Has Heart Surgery Our thoughts are with Jean-Luc as he recovers from his angioplasty. Make it so! Number one!
QT’s Diary Could it be? Word on the street is it’s a fake. But a guy can dream.
Last night Simon, Mu, Alyssa and I checked out the k-os CD release party.
The venue was pretty hoppin’. It was outdoors at the Sunnyside Pavillion, and the weather was just perfect. We chilled for a few hours there. Jammed to some old school beats, some live music from k-os’ indy musician friends, and soaked in part of Toronto culture I don’t really get to experience very often.
The crowd had a pretty healthy mix. Mostly hipster or wannabe-hipster types. Some true fans of the music, and a few suspected socialists. k-os roamed the crowd and chatted with quite a few cats, but otherwise kept very low key. Alyssa’s day was made. She got a free t-shirt, a very nice poster, and k-os signed the album she bought.
k-os’ sophmore album, Joyful Rebellion dropped today and I picked it up. The album is pure k-os style. A sweet fusion of conscious rhymes, with jazz, retro baselines, soulful acoustic guitar, or any sound that k-os sees fit. There’s so much more to k-os than Crabbuckit and B-boy Stance, his first two singles off this album. k-os wrote, raps, sings, and produced most of this album. There’s even a guest track with Sam Roberts, though it seems out of place, even on this eclectic album. You can find it for $13 at Future Shop.
EMI distributed this album, and I exclaim, this is the largest annoyance ever. EMI Music doesn’t manufacture CDs, they make “Copy Controlled Discs”. These CCDs aren’t technically CDs because they don’t match specifications. They’re purposely defective as to not work on computers and don’t even work on some CD players. If you buy this album, you can only listen to crappy 12 kbps digital versions, and if you have a car stereo there’s a good chance this cd won’t work at all.
The first thing I do when I buy any album these days is convert it to MP3 using iTunes and add it to my playlist and iPod. I don’t use a CD player, so this “anti-theft” device really ticked me off. There’s a workaround, you can search it yourself, but it’s awkward to implement and not all the tracks I ripped are perfect digital copies as I’d get with a real CD. I bought the damn CD, I should be able to listen to the music on it. Beware the CCD.
Many like-minded netizens have complained to EMI when encountering equally annoying problems with other albums, and have sometimes even gotten protection free versions of their albums for free. I doubt I can swing it with this album, but that would make me hate EMI a little less.
The script was a way for me to articulate what I was feeling; alone, isolated, “a dime a dozen” and homesick for a place that didn’t even exist.
Saw Garden State today after having been reading Zach Braff’s blog for a little while. Quirky but fun. Cat didn’t see the NJ.
Since my great hard drive crash of 2003, I haven’t erased a single photo from my digital camera. I’ve just now maxed out my 256 Mb SD card with probably about 600 photos, and I’ve recently begun the task of trying to organize them.
The thumbnail view native to XP explorer is way better than previous versions of Windows, but make viewing your photos a real pain. I’ve experimented with Photoshop Album Starter Edition, which has a great chronological view but has too clunky an interface for my liking. If I had a Mac, I’d just be using iLife, and there wouldn’t be much discussion here.
Flickr is a great webbased photo-sharing site, which includes functionality to post your photos to a blogger, wordpress, movabletype, b2 blog, and their very nifty Organizr flash/web app is totally worth checking out. This is probably the most innovative photo software I’ve come across. And it’s free!
Picasa is the best photo organizer around. A couple months ago, they were acquired by Google, and made their software download completely free. It automatically imports new photos into its database, and lets me see all my photos in one very intuitive interface. I experimented with its email photos functionality, which seemed to work flawlessly, and shunk my large photos into bite size resolutions.
Sometimes the sheer number of photos you have is overwhelming. I don’t even have that many photos yet, I have too many other hobbies consuming my time. I used to think I would give my camera to a more snap-happy person, and see what gems I get at the end of the night, but sometimes, all you end up with is a couple dozen photos of CJ.
We finally got a gold! Hurray. Does someone know why the China team and the Hong Kong teams are considered different countries? Did they even try to combine them?
I Love… by Year This is for Simon.
I’m getting the lowest marks of my university career this term… Stress is stupid, but it totally got to me. Have I peaked? I hope it’s not downhill from here.
TV sucks these days. I’ve not absolutely nothing to do. My weekend highlight? Ikea. That’s sort of really sad.
Yesterday was the first day of the Canadian National Exhibition. (The Ex). Every year I try to make it out to the CNE at least once, if for nothing but tradition.
My favorite things about the Ex:
- The food! Tiny Tom Donuts, $0.99 spaghetti, perogies, are all things I now associate with the CNE. Of course, I now know the CNE food is overpriced and sub-par in quality, but the Food Building is still killer fun.
- The Midway is fun for all ages. They’ve got rides, games, gambling, just about anything you’d want to do on a summer Toronto day. My game of choice was of course the “Guess Your Weight”. The prizes sucked, but it was worth it to have a guy miss my weight by some 40 pounds.
- I love fireworks, and the CNE now has a show nightly.
- The shows. This year, you can catch the Cat Show, the Garden Show, among others.
- Live music. The CNE loves to hold concerts, and the fun atmosphere means just about anything is good. Expect to see tribute bands galore. I plan to check out the Toronto Urban Music Festival on Labour Day weekend. Talib is headlining.
- It’s always worry free. The CNE is a great place to just waste a day. You won’t get anything done, but it’s easily the most energy filled plot of land in the city, any time of the year. I just enjoy soaking all that in.
Last year, we watched a saw demo; it was back behind Mu’s head over there. Wood chips were flying, and I was really surprised that no limbs were lost. You can’t have fun in the sun without chainsaws blaring so loud that you can’t even hear yourself think.