Category Archives: Distractions

Flu Crazy

Distractions, Personal Bits

I’m just one stomach flu away from my goal weight.

– Emily, The Devil Wears Prada

With the world going sick with Swine Flu, I managed to catch a nasty stomach bug on the weekend that laid me up for 24hrs.

When I say “catch” I mean eat 2 week old left overs in the fridge. I reap what I sew.

It’s funny, I’ve had food poisoning a few times in my life, twice so bad I wound up in the hospital. I always feel sorrow when I see a shark gutted open and a license plate falls out from their gut – not because of the humility of your stomach contents being paraded openly on PBS, but because my eating habits mirrored that poor shark’s. CHOMP!

Tuesday was a fog. I couldn’t think straight. I see today that I completed a few web corrections yesterday and haven’t had a screamy email saying I fucked up. My head was pounding and though I’ve never had a migraine, I could feel every pulse throb behind my ears.

“Is it the Swine Flu?” SharkBoy asked, hoping for workplace bragging rights.

All I could manage last night was a 1/2 cup of pasta (“Now I know you are sick!” says SharkBoy) and 4 large glasses of water. The evening was spent brainlessly watching The Karate Kid.

At night, in bed, I had chills and finally peace. I dreamed I was eating a huge fried egg sandwich with a stranger who hated everything.

New Camera

Distractions, Hobbies, Personal Bits, Queer stuff

IMG_0024Last Saturday I finally got an offer on my Casio camera and started into the fun process of weeding through online consumer sites that offer comprehensive and unbiased product comments ( here ends the seething sarcasm). “Camera good, wish touch screen!” Seriously, were these people sleeping through grade 10 English?*

I head off to BestBuy (I know… I know…) and had 4 staff standing around me at once not looking me in the eye. You know the eye, the one that says “I have a question…?” but is met with personal conversations between the floor staff, awkward maneuvering out of my field of vision and outright ignorance to my plea. In the end we went over to Blacks across the street where one of my compadres managed to rip the security lock off a display camera, setting off an alarm. As dutiful white boys we were, we stood there and waited for a staff person to come and shut it off. And waited. And waited. To the point where the alarm started to die and croak. We just left, off to Henrys where I was ready to drop my $279 (plus SD card and taxes) for a Canon SD780 SI. Until I found out that Henry’s flagship store isn’t open on Sunday. Huh? Oh well, Downtown Camera’s doors were wide open and I didn’t mind paying $10 more for the convenience. They were extremely helpful and knowledgeable about their product and bent over backwards to find a battery and a SD card so I could test the camera indoors. From now on, I’ll do all my demo testing at big box stores and then head over to specialty stores for my final sale.

SkyLine

It’s toted as Canon’s smallest, but no where near as small as the old Casio. It looks a lot like SharkBoy’s camera but with more beveled edges. It has all the familiar feel of my old A640 but without the big hard-to-move scene selector knob on top. Poof! Gone.

Prince Charles Gargoyle

They’ve moved around some items in the menu system due to the new AutoScene function – no more flicking through menu options to find the Macro or Fireworks options, the sensors see it and then set it up with one press of the shutter button.

It shoots “HD” as well, which means video at 1280×720 at 30fps with HDMI output (720p). Now I need to get a mini-HDMI cable and try it. You think with all the new doodleydoos for video they’d have autofocus during recording. For now, here’s a vid for you. Be sure to click on the HD button in the controls:


*I know… I’m one to talk. But come on…

Thursday Awesomeness

Distractions

Via Boingboing: Cops Vs Clowns!

From Offworld two bits:
1) Rock Band is getting Lego-ized. I can see SharkBoy finally opening up the inner Iggy Pop and destroying everything on stage.
2) Steven Fry (the voice of LBP’s narrator) twitters that Little Big Planet is coming to PSP. Cool. Bet it will be as blocky as Dead Rising was for the Wii, though.

While we’re on games: Wired has some awesome images of Bioshock 2. A little trickle of pee just went down my leg.

The voice of Dr Venture, James Urbaniak, finishes filming a walk on part for The Office and gets pleaded to leave a voicemail in Dr V’s style for one of the show’s stars. I now know what I want for my birthday. Funnily enough, celebrity James calls it a brush with celebrity.

Not Awesome but pretty damn funny: Photoshop disaster Zack Efron Style!

The Hybrid Return

Distractions, Personal Bits, Travel

We’re waking up the house in Vermont now and soon we’ll hit the US border, drop the in-law Mom and Aunt back in St-Jean-Sur-Richelieu, hopefully hit the Ganq’s casino for $40 and finish the long road back to George Hamilton.

This opening sequence is so cryptic I can’t even begin to tell you. Pics of a Cabane a Sucre, creepy cake and more later. Thanks for your patience.

Dead Robot Sonar

Celebs and Media, Distractions

I’ve been busy getting ready for a trip to the inlaws residing in Montreal and Vermont (No we’re not going to renew our vows…yet) so here’s a bunch of news items that made me go huuurmm?

Another Somali pirate attack. Here’s a thought: don’t boat by Somalia. It’s like African shipping lanes are run by the RIAA.

Apple snoozes and the next big interface gets dropped. Note the graphically correct circle menus (easier to navigate than stacked menus!). However, I’m not liking the “Cube farm” feel – I get enough of that in real life. I’m sure they’ll jazz it up in future releases.

RIM “leaks” the next gen of “text input”. “See this? It’s a stylis! We’re going retro! Screw you iPhone!”

iTunes drops their crappy DRM to all their songs, applies tiered pricing. I still haven’t found any reported $0.69 songs in the Canadian store. And I was knee deep in old Rough Trade songs.

Poor Penelope Cruz. ‘Nuff said.

I need a new video game. The Onion to the rescue!

Speaking of video games – will this movie tie in game not suck? Who cares… VIN DIESEL!!!

And finally, someone smart has collected the top 99 things you should have seen since the inception of the internet. No Exploding whale though (the first internet video I ever downloaded. Took me 4 hours, kids!).

Link Love: Gizmodo, StumbleUpon, Wired, The Onion, PhotoshopDisasters.com, The Unofficial Apple Weblog and the god like Google.

Why I Love The Internets: Eeeeturrrnal Loooove!

Distractions, iPhone

Offworld is reporting on a new video meme scouring Japan of such rare complexity and intricacies. The work being created rivals the libriaries of Kubrick, Bergman, Hasslehoff… oh who am I kidding? It’s a frigging Japanese MEME for godssakes. I have no clue why it came to be. Or why it’s taking off. I do know it makes me laugh as well as sing chomped up Japanese lyrics while I’m in the shower.

Let’s start at the beginning: seems if you jiggle the game cartridge on N64’s Goldeneye the characters go fucking apeshit, as seen in the video below.

Somewhere along the lines some smarmy Japanese kid added a soundtrack from their own country’s version of Rick Ashley and ta daaa! Meme! Note: if you’re going to make your own video, you have to make sure you have the 4 main moves synced to the music!

Be sure to open the video to the YouTube page for many many more boggling videos.