Category Archives: Personal Bits

Just things from my personal life

Was That So Hard?

Personal Bits, Tech

After 4 weeks I finally sold SharkBoy’s 9mo. old, 8G iPod Touch. At a greatly reduced price, I might add.

It was in perfect working condition and was jailbroken to 1.1.4 so there was a ton of free apps available for it. Very appealing. But it seemed for every channel I tried to sell it through, for every possible nibble of interest, great excitement to purchase it was immediately replaced with ambivolence and apathy.

Before you hit “comment” and suggest I need a Tony Robbins seminar, I don’t think it was my selling technique. I was honest and straight forward with the facts, I didn’t embellish any info nor did I pump up any “excitement” about the device like Jobs does at his Apple conventions. I kept it neutral.

After the 5th time of a definite sale transmorgifying into a polite “no”, I became familiar with the exact point were the sale would go south: making arragements for payment. It was exactly like cruising for sex online in a Toronto chat room. All talk, no follow through.

I reduced the price several times, same results. This went on until SharkBoy demanded the next offer along, no matter how low, I take it. $100, cash. Bang. Gone within 12 hrs.

No matter, it’s been sold to an aquaintence who we mutually share a certain degree of trust. I hope he enjoys it!

End of Day Pics

Personal Bits

The apartment is 99.9% done from unpacking, reorganizing and generally throwing a ton of crap out. Here are a couple pics:

Calvacade Of Droids/Aliens
Left To Right: Iron Giant, Alien, Various Robby the Robot(s), Various B9 Environmental Unit(s), Hint of Gundam Wing.

Programmed to be Inquisitive
George Hamilton is a Collector

Take a picture Right NOW
Flickr Meme: take a picture right now, no preening. Sharkboy is playing Guitar Hero III, I’m just bloody tired.

Catastrophic FAIL

Personal Bits

Last night I sat down to my computer and noticed an odd message, saying that one of the “files on the disk” failed to initialize, resulting in my Taskbar changing itself to look like Windows NT.

Uh. Oh.

Restart.

After a very long time past the BIOS screen, nothing. No log in, nothing.

Restart. Oh god please restart.

Nothing. Dead black screen.

Thankfully I have all my files on a completely separate storage drive. But it looks like a night of disk-humping reloading, rebooting and calling Windows Support to obtain my serial number again. Who’s up for a call to India? Then after that, drivers, applications and preferences. Finally, all my email is gone (take note friends/family!) and I’m hobbling along on web-based interfaces.

If any of you people wish to donate to my “Get an iMac Fund” my Paypal account will be available at the bottom of your screens. Call now!

I don’t know if I got a virus or something from all those old iPhone hack programs were to blame. I do know that if I can’t get it started/fixed, then this will be the most expensive summer I’ve had in a long time.

But, still no ads on Dead Robot Heavy Industries, my readers!

Update:
In some sort of bizzaro world, I wonder if the Large Hadron Collider had anything to do with this? I’m actually one of the “push the goddamned button and let’s see what this baby can do!” kind of people. The web is ablaze with speculation today and all they did was turn the thing on. The actual collisions will be happening later in the year. Doesn’t this whole uproar/hype/geek celebrity suddenly feel like the last 20 minutes of Contact?.

State of Affairs

Personal Bits

The picture below isn’t a shot from the set of Gummo, no. It’s our living room when you decide that your life needs reorganizing and you empty out all our closets at once.

This test of hoarding/purging is in time for two events this month:

The Cabbagetown Festival, where the entire neighbourhood becomes a giant flea market and citizens expell the contents of their garages, attics and closets into the streets for sale and murmured ridicule. We’re pricing things for light speed sale – I don’t think we have anything over $20. Family and friends are not allowed to visit our table, lest they see the results of failed gifting.

Also this month is my Mom’s birthday party, happily hosted at Casa RoboShark. Our first “real” party since getting sole possession of the apartment. Nervous? Slightly. Dinner will be easy, yet memorable: I’m thinking something like turduckhen.

Saugatuck, MI

Hobbies, Personal Bits, Queer stuff, Travel

Five days roughing it in the wilds of Michigan!

“Roughing” is a cliché of course. Campit has heated pool, showers, family cabins and the prerequisite gay dance hall.

Our Home Away
Our Home Away

And the village of Saugatuck ain’t no slouch, either. I swear the value of holiday yachts actually increased despite the economy being toilety. The charm was still there and if I could, I’d retire there in a heart-murmur.

The Most Liberal Car in MI
The Most Liberal Car In Michigan

Things of note:

Evil Panda and Thor have a new dog that transcends “adorable”. Betty the Bulldog was well behaived and utterly cute with her lop-sided underbite.

Get In Close
Cuties!

Evil Panda and Thor transcend adorable together ( and on their own, of course).

Grand Rapids is a place i’d like to look around more. It has a cool university town vibe and that crazy sculpture garden is massive.
Art
Kinetics in The Sun

When you come across a five storey bronze statue of a replica of a Da Vinci horse maquette, you basically feel awe.
American Horse
Big Horse

Bronze horse gonads the size of a Mark V torpedo is awe inspiring, too.

That's Impressive

Drug deals outside your tent at 4 am is a good sign that culture lines are blurring (camping & raving collide). It also was a sign that we were going to get little sleep due to intermittent stupidity. I don’t blame the campground, just the shitdicks who think drugs while camping is fun.

And finally, I really need to learn how to knit. Thor made me a present of a tea cozy and I’m totally wanting to take classes this winter and knit a robot sweater…

Tea time!

My complete photo set is here.

SharkBoy’s amazing photo set is here.

Sorry Paul

Personal Bits, Queer stuff

Back in 1990, I had broken up with my Kiwi boyfriend Paul (amicably) and while I was in school, he and another friend, Colleen got drunk and I guess, bitched about men (me) through a couple bottles of wine.

The result was him painting a “heirloom” of a hall table that has been with my family for years. My earliest memory of this table (it’s always been deep forest green) was that it was in the basement to hold tools and kid’s mittens and touques (kids were not allowed through the front door of our house, for some stupid reason like… oh tracked in mud or something stupidly adult). When Dad separated from Mom, he took a few bits of furniture with him to the new apartment including this table. It was his new “dump” table. You know: you enter your apartment and on this table you dump your keys, letters, gloves, errant plastic bags of body parts you’ve picked up through the day, etc.

This table followed me through Brockville, Brantford, Kitchener, Oakville, Ottawa and back to Toronto. It’s rickety, there’s a huge crack down the middle of the top and the nails no longer hold things in place. It’s like a 15 year old dog you don’t have the heart to take behind the barn with a shotgun.

Cut back to a drunk Paul and Colleen. Angry through the alcohol, they decide to “give me a card” for my birthday. We had watched Ruthless People a while back and I had mentioned, rather snottily, that they used “Memphis” furniture design principals for the art direction. Paul hated that kind of crazy design, he thought it was “L.A. Ugly”. So in their drunken anger, they took brush to desk and here’s the result:

Sorry Paul

On the back they wrote: “Something to remember us by. Summer ’90. Enjoy your card – Paul and Colleen.”

Today is the end of 18 years of visual assault. I painted it. You can still see the purple and red “donuts” through the white. I know they’re there.

But I kept the back with the “inscription”.

Insurable

Distractions, Personal Bits, Travel

With all the gadgets in the house I started to get a bit edgy about the cost of replacing them if (god forbid) some street bacteriophage got it into their heads to enter into our home, touch things and then leave with said things. It adds up after a while and would take a while to add it back up.

Last night I saw an ad for E-insurance where regular folk turn into animated cartoons and do all sorts of fantastical things like fly, save trees, jump, fly, swim great distances, um… fly… and just be cartoony. Unfortunately E-insurance was unable to turn these people’s voices into professional cartoon voice actors which made the whole ad seemed flat and gimmicky. But I was impressed with that “one stop shop” for insurance.

Quick! To the internet!

And lo and behold, there is a Canadian version called Kanetix, a one stop shop site that is blistering with information. Not an entirely ugly site, it seems rather “Government of Canada” kind of vibe, in the sense I can trust it (no animated “Welcome!” gifs, like the previous campground post…). So I start to look around and I’m suitably impressed within moments. Beyond all the features you’d expect, it’s got dynamic forms that morph to your responses. To me, that says “smart!” and “we have money!” so already I feel at ease using the site. Ooh look! The Postal Code swaps out lower case for upper case text! Keen!

I start with Travel Insurance, since we’re going to Saugatuk, MI soon. I may be bitten by a moose. you never know. So I punch in some facts, some figures and hit submit. BAM! Faster than oh say… crappy AVIS car rental site, I get ascending pricing of about 8 quotes. I’m still reeling at the speed. I guess insurance servers aren’t as clogged as car rental sites. Anyway, two options from there: Call to buy, buy online. Snazzy!

I’m intrigued now: on to home insurance. Area code… date of birth… couple personal questions… You can imagine my tounge is poking just outside my mouth as I type all this. Oh and imagine I’m humming too. That would be nice. Right. Fire plug question… easy… couple inches from the front door… Fire hall location… Real close. Wish it was closer, hubba hubba… What? Ok. Click, no thank you, sure, no, ha! ok, sure click, and CLICK! Hey presto. Ooo a 4 second wait this time, which warranted a pop up window that barely had time to load and boom! 2 quotes for an annual fee with quote reference number. Hm! Reasonable.

Just the act of searching for insurance makes me feel responsible. More adult.

Then I ask myself real quick: Am I getting old?

The other voice in my head, the one that says “Don’t stand naked by the window nearest to the TTC stop” says real quick: “Not old. Just smarter!” My chest puffs out.

I show this to SharkBoy and without a bat of an eyeball, says “We’re already insured through my work. You married into it.”

Oh. Well.

Can I get an animated version of myself then?