Wait Until The New Cars Come!

Overheard, You Stupid Dick

Subway, 4:15pm. Two girls and a guy enter at Rosedale station. They’re dressed like they’ve come right off the pages of a ZARA catalogue. They plant themselves in the doorway of the car.

Guy fusses with his vague military-esque like jacket thing as they speak in vocal sliding tones that resemble The Hills. Or they’re vocally texting each other. Either way, my ears start to puss up.

Girl #1: I hope your shirt comes off tonight. (ahhup yr shirt coms aff tunit).
Guy: This shirt is sooo hard to get off!
Girl #1: I hope your shirt comes off tonight! (said faster)

They laugh. But like a tired, bored laugh. Limp. Like you just told a fart joke to an English Lord. They pause.

Guy: (Looking at his reflection in the window) I wish they had Sophora lighting in here.

Xmas Early

Distractions, You Magnificent Bastard

This year was suppose to be different.

This year, I was going to utterly decimate SharkBoy with a gift so left field and unpredictable that he was going to fall down unconscious and I would rejoice and dance around his prone body with a cup of egg nog. And we’d sing carols and upload videos to Youtube and eat mince meat pies.

Alas, I have been found out and my reputation as a shitty gift giver stays intact. SharkBoy knows what he’s getting for Xmas. But in my own defense, not by my hand!

I started this amazing gift bonanza early. Back in the summer, our friend BobaDoug had been trolling the 501st web forums to see if anyone was selling their Stormtrooper armor for cheap. A couple weeks back he sends me an email from some chap in the US who is offloading his gear, attached with this picture (see right)
Of course my mind goes a million miles a minute. Doable! And fun! After about 25 emails back and forth, the cheque is in the mail, the suit is on it’s way to sister-in-law Sylvie, in Vermont, and I make the most solemn vow not to say one word. This time was different. The effort was being made!

To explain the chunk of cash missing from the joint account I said some yarn about how I wanted extra money on my credit card for our upcoming New York trip. Bait taken. No suspecty!

A week later, BobaDoug sends me another picture. See above. No it’s not a dead trooper, it’s a pristine SandTrooper outfit with full gear – was I interested? HELLS YEAH! Sandtroopers are my fave! How could I pass it up! Somehow I had to move another chunk of cash around our savings. They say the best lie is the closest to the truth so I came clean. I showed SharkBoy the picture and said, “This is my Xmas gift to me. I can’t pass this deal up. It’s done.” To which he asked if Doug could look for a suit for himself as well. Oh yes, dear! Of course we will. Little do you know!

All is good. I’ve told Sylvie in Vermont that another suit is on it’s way and hush hush on the first one and that SharkBoy knew that I had bought one for myself. We giggle like school girls.

In moving this second chunk of cash, PayPal was a bit slow. I told SharkBoy not to be alarmed by the amount of money hanging around. Last night, after dinner I checked the bank accounts and it was still there. I briefly mentioned to it to him and he grunted in reply. The phone rings and SharkBoy picks it up. It’s Sylvie.

“Tell DeadRobot his suit is here!”

“Wut,” says SharkBoy.

“Ah…Wow! ha! That was…fast…?” I say.

“How did your suit… get to…” SharkBoy Pauses. A light goes on. “YES!!!”

I hear a tinny, tiny “Oh Shit!” come from the phone ear piece.

I don’t blame Sylvie. I should have kept her in the loop about the *timeline* of the payments and deliveries. It wasn’t her fault at all.

But I’m back to being a shitty gift giver. At least that’s no surprise.

Fail Whale

Celebs and Media, Distractions, The Bad

Twitter is starting to annoy me.

It actually annoyed me from the start. When I first heard of Twitter I thought it was narcissistic, restrictive and destructive to the structure of the web. Example, all those shortened URLs aren’t only a security risk – you could click through to a phishing page, thank god for Macs! – they’re also reliant on a third party to serve up your link. Take it out and there will be millions of broken links to piss off search engines and anal retentive SysAdmins.

Twitter is the junk food of the internet.

With all this in mind I started to Twitter anyway. I followed celebrities and news journos and did enjoy getting their tweets. Still do. Some people post things that are the best of the web. It’s a great way to know when someone updates a blog/video/image etc. It’s great for information.

But lately as my private, non “professional” base of following/followers grows, I’m finding Twitter a lot like something familiar, something 1999…

Oh that’s right! Gay.com’s chat widget.

The majority of the people I follow on Twitter have started to use it as a chat program. I don’t know if this is a trend or if it’s just the type of person I follow. In the morning, I’m shifting through “HI! GOOD MORNING TWEEPS!” “HEY HOW YOU DOING?” posts and their equally important “HEYWAZTUP?” responses – meaningless manusia. During the day I have to skip past “EWWW! NO!” posts when someone mentions feminine hygiene. Or requests to add things to my avatar in the name of some social cause.

Don’t get me started on FollowFriday. On second thought, lets: #FF is utterly useless. If I want to know who you’re following I’ll take the time and click your profile. With the new Twitter page and other slick apps, it’s dead easy. Stop sending out your entire 150 names in 4-5 posts, filling my timeline with garbage!

This crap has no meaning to me. And I like it when Twitter has meaning. Has value. Now, to me, it’s becoming a really slow and irritating IRC channel.

Rant over. Back to your lives, humans.

(posted to Twitter 11:28am, Friday November 5th)

My BEST Starbucks is So Much Better Than Your Starbucks

Toronto, You Magnificent Bastard

The window comes into view and I excitedly look in like a kid on the street at The Hudsons Bay Company at Christmas.

Sitting in my seat from yesterday is a man with sunglasses, winter coat and a scarf wrapped around the bottom of his head. It’s 7C outside. He’s inside.

I’m sure it’s gone.

Wait. Back up.

Yesterday I flew down the stairs of the subway, eager to get home to play my latest video game guilt free. I say “guilt free” because whenever I play it when SharkBoy is home and even if he’s occupied with something, I feel a bit guilty that we’re not humanly interacting. Since he had overtime last night, it meant at least an hour of guilt free gaming. I had to hurry.

I jam my fist into my back pocket. It’s not there. The $107 VIP subway monthly pass is missing.

I rifle through my wallet because sometimes things magically appear in there, like my DisneyWorld Monorail Pilot ID, which I take great pleasure out of trying to pass it off as real ID. Which only gets me quizzical looks like I’m an escaped mental patient. Which at 45yrs old maybe I am.

It’s not there. My world sinks. I just lost $107 dollars in the form of a small credit card size piece of plastic. I pay the single fare and start forming an email in my head:

Dear TTC;

I could care less about your station monitors that 98% sell ads, 2% announce the next train (which is always 3-4 minutes away, duh) and are dirty 100% of the time. I could care less that your posters are claiming we’re dirty pigs and we need to keep the TTC clean – I’ve learned to ignore bitchy behaviour like this from when I had anal college roommates. But if you’re going to spend some money, can you please fix your monetary intake system? Okay great, you now can pay for your fare choices by debit card in some stations (bejebus, guys, go look at NYC for payment options – literally no restrictions – MONEY IN!), but how about loss prevention, for both of us? $107 dollars is a hell of a lot of money to lose, especially on the second day of owning it – I got $9 worth of rides out of my pass before losing it.

You think you’d take care of that to a beneficial state where you and I don’t LOSE any MONEY. It would be easy implement a registered purchaser system and still retain the pass back allowance. One registered card with a moniker of -01, -02, -03 for months, easily canceled and reissued if need be, like a credit card. For a small fee, replacing a pass midway through the month could be cost of $15. Think of it: I lose a card, you cancel the one in the wild, charge me 300% mark up on the cost of replacing it (staffing the replacement counter, cost of plastic, server time, etc) and then we’re both happy. I learn a valuable lesson not to lose my card again (and there will always be people losing their cards) and you just got $10 extra on top of the $107 from me! Cha-ching!

As I ride home I also think about where I might have lost it. The last place I used my wallet and might have popped the card out from my back pocket was my local Starbucks. The one where even the new staff magically know that I take a grande Earl Grey tea in a venti cup. I decide to ask when I get my tea the next morning.

Okay so you’re up to speed.

I somberly walk up to the cash. One barista is already pouring my tea, the other has wrung me in. “Good Morning Ted!”

With downturn eyes, I sheepishly ask: “Did anyone turn in a monthy pass?”

Her eyes light up. My eyes light up. She reaches for her lost and found drawer.

“It has VIP across the top! I lost it yesterday and I was worried I lost $100 and I was so angry you don’t know how mad I was and…and…” I speed along, sputtering out. My baby is back in my hands.

“What makes it a VIP pass?” she asks. I realize I don’t know her name. Hello wave of guilt. Surfs up!

“Husband works for the City. Gets them at a slight discount. THANK YOU!”

“Well Greg was eying it and we all decided to give it a day or two.”

I hand over $5 for my $1.94 tea. “Keep the change,” I say. I feel that $3 isn’t enough. Hang ten!

I had expected someone like “Greg” or a patron of Starbucks to pocket the pass. I know I would. Well maybe not since I would already have one, but seriously the staff at the Brookdale and Yonge Starbucks are the best. Restored (a little bit of) my faith in humanity.

More Numbers

Hobbies

So I gets me a new camera. It’s pretty freaking sweet. You all know that.

And I goes to the Zombie Walk here in Toronto last weekend. I take a bazillion pictures and post some of them up to Flickr.

A couple are picked up by Flickr Blog and hosted on their main page for all the world to see.

My stats spike. Wow!

Look at that spike! In total, the entire population of my old home town clicked on my pics to see. Puffy chest!

Today I see over on BuzzFeed, a popular meme tracking site, my pics were posted as part of a Nerdy Zombie article. Okay that’s cool. Wait… no credit! Even with a Creative Commons Licensing agreement attached to my photos. I’m kind of miffed, but not overtly so. The internet is about sharing, and to police it would be madness. I just wish a link back or nod would have been nice.

Look at me. I’m a fucking numbers hog now.