senatorhung's pad
ramblings of an information troubleshooter
ramblings of an information troubleshooter
stimulate the feeling that you got inside
Sunday, 20MAR2005:ahh, the joys of sleeping in on a sunny sunday :)
while i could have slept all day, i had things that needed doing. my first stop of the day was at the northmart where i bought a few nails for the 2 Habitat for Humanity houses planned for iqaluit in 2006. chatted with steve about nuluaq and then picked up a few groceries to restock my fridge.
from there, i popped my head into the office and assisted malcolm with one of his many assignments and cleared up a few more emails. then i returned home to get myself ready for the second BMFF show at the astro theatre. i experimented a bit with the festival hair gel that had arrived this week and was happy with the results.
tonite's roster of BMFF films:
- the collective - free riding mountain bikers
- hike hike hike - dogteam animation
- tom crean - documentary of an explorer who accompanied both scott and shackleton on their south pole expeditions
- soul purpose - ever felt like skiing off a cliff ?
- the man who jumped beneath the earth - a 66-year old attempts a BASE jump into a mexican cave
- balance of risk - a man returns to climb the rock where his former climbing companion had died
- a russian wave - becky bristow and dunbar hardy travel to the russian territory of chukotka to evaluate it for whitewater kayaking adventure potential
- weekend warrior - a dude searches for love on the slopes - this film was shot in only 72 hours !!
- IP idiocy link of the day: should cd's be allowed to hijack pc's ?
- today's soundtrack: AOTM mix by lipstick vogue - public pools and pit stops (2004)
i know politics bore you
Monday, 21MAR2005:after too few hours of sleep, it was again time to face the dreaded monday monster. luckily, david had invited me up to the middle school for an anti-racism poster contest, so i fled the office in hopes that the change in scenery would perk me up. attendees were supplied with food and drink in return for their vote on which poster, done by an iqaluit schoolkid, succeeded best at expressing the theme of the event. (me, i wondered about when 'access copyright' was going to crack down on the re-purposing of magazine clippings in collages, but i digress).
my vote went to a poster that portrayed people in indigenous dress under the flags of their respective nations. the artist had taken the time to research the costumes and deserved credit for re-creating the characters rather than simply printing off photos from the internet to embed.
the walk back down the hill exposed me to the bitter windchill and i was sorely tempted to flag down one of the passing taxis. however, remembering tom crean's adventures in antarctica, i persevered and arrived safely back at the office.
the rest of the work day was spent catching up on the flood of emails that had flowed into my inbox during the day and surfing the newspapers for articles suitable for clipping. one visitor to the library was interested in getting material on the historical development of canada's political system and i amazed myself with the amount of constitutional trivia that i was able to dredge up from my personal mental swap space. it's been a long time since i aced my high school social studies departmental exam.
after 5, i started preparing for the next day's nuluaq board meeting and then went home to plow thru previews to make up my monthly comic book order while drafting up a playlist for the mix that i owe cenobyte.
- IP idiocy link of the day: the poker movie pitch
- grokster case - superb overview of the tug of war between technology and copyright since the sony decision
we save a lot of money, spending money we don't got
Tuesday, 22MAR2005:finished my previews order last night. here's the breakdown of stuff that i'll be getting in may:
- 'house of flying daggers' widescreen dvd
- 'egg story' - y'know how some stories are set in a human household, but from a pet's point of view ? well, this one is from an egg's point of view ... very funny. i already have a copy, but i want a couple more to loan out
- 'embroideries', a hardcover graphic novel about the sex lives of iranian women
- 'top 10: the forty-niners' - another hardcover graphic novel by alan moore and gene ha that is a prequel to the top 10 series
- 'love as a foreign language' v.3 - torres + kim
- 'stylish vittles' v.3
- 'concrete: human dilemma' #6 (final issue of limited series) - chadwick
- 'gotham central' #31 - rucka + brubaker + lark
- 'razor's edge: redbird' #3 - brubaker + pearson - oops, they just cancelled it :(
- 'pvp' #0 - kurtz
- 'daredevil' #73 - bendis + maleev
- 'powers v.2' #11 - bendis + oeming
- 'oddly normal' #3 - the art by otis frampton has hints of ted naifeh's work
recently ran across an interesting PopMatters column that discusses how pornography is a capitalist inevitability.
i gave it my soul so that i could survive
Wednesday, 23MAR2005:yvonne, carol, rae-lynn and i joined trish at the frob as the nunavut library association hosted a going-away lunch for trish, who is off to PEI. trish regaled us with tidbits about her new charlottetown digs - they'll even have a creek running thru their property so she'll have her hands full keeping an eye on her son.
broomball chronicles:
team white: todd, bobby, rob, greg, siobhan, chad, spencer, julian
team black: denis, gavin, marco, alistair, martha, JF, kevin and me
team solid blitzed team pale right from the first face-off. heck, even i got a couple of decent whacks in during the intial flurry before JF passed to marco for the first pot of the evening. todd managed to even things up after i lost a stickpush duel for the ball in front of our net.
once gavin and greg arrived, things really broke open and passes slicked around between marco, denis, JF and gavin until team pale just got so dizzy that they seemingly let the puck in just to make it stop. with martha and i charging up the middle to shake things up, alistair solidly holding the center line, and kevin stonewalling in net, the match had 'rout' spelled all over the rink.
while greg, julian and rob streaked down the ice without being able to thread thru our impressive d-line, todd managed to keep team pale on the board by taking advantage of every opportunity to umm, how shall i say, 'cherry-pick' and racked up an impressive 4 goals after nearly a month away from the ice.
chad, siobhan, spencer and bobby had the unenviable task of trying to stop the french connection of marco, denis and JF who scored 2 goals apiece. gavin threw in a bonus goal (dedicated to me after he smote me in the belly with the ball with a wayward clearing pass, sending me off the ice completely winded), so that the men (and woman) in black triumphed 7-4 at the buzzer.
since broomball season will start drawing to a close next month, i figured that i would need another means of getting all worked up, so i decided to scout out the atii! fitness centre beside the airport. they have a pretty good setup there, with a cardio section of cycling, walking and rowing machines, a free weight / universal section and a sizeable workout area with wood flooring for classes. the only gap that i noticed was the lack of a leg-extension machine.
it's been a good 10 years since i last saw the inside of a weight room, but it's amazing how much body-memory returned once i sat down at each station. i did a couple sets of pull-downs and free weight exercises before giving the benchpress a try. i was only able to do a set of 10 with just the bar alone, as i was already shaking from my previous exertions.
i should've taken that hint that i'm no longer a spring chicken, but i really wanted to give the rowing machine a try. did a few trial pulls and then started to give 'er until suddenly, a sharp pain stabbed my lower back. oh yeah, i'm supposed to lean *back* when i pull, not lean forwards. ow. ow. ow. walked a bit of the pain off and then spent a few minutes on the cycling machine berating myself for my over-enthusiasm. with both front and back pains, plus post-workout soreness, i'll probably be doing my best robot impression tomorrow.
- IP idiocy link of the day: who owns your email when you die ?
gone before the circle's closed
Thursday, 24MAR2005:woke up in the morning totally exhausted, but since my back hadn't completely frozen up and was only fluttering a bit, i couldn't justify calling in sick to work.
greg stopped by with a lunch from the snack and we chatted about our plans for the long weekend. headed over to another library in the afternoon to join in on a conference call to bring a new librarian up to speed on our joint library cataloguing system. got back to the office in time to celebrate jordan's birthday with cake - the icing gave everyone blue teeth for the rest of the day.
went down the street to the nunatta sunakkutaangit museum to attend the monthly board meeting after work. was going to stick around the office afterward to dig my way down to my desk, but the headache that had been building all day drove me home to take a nap so that i could show up at least half lucid to sue's party in the evening.
her housesit was a librarian's fantasy palace, with everything organized in bins, on shelves, and lined up with labels facing outward. can't imagine how hard it must be to keep everything in place with 2 kids ? malcolm and i played a round of darts and then we hung out listening to cd's and debated the merits, or lack, of the rolling stones, jon secada, foreigner and phil collins.
chris, olivia, fletcher and rachel arrived later and everyone moved to the kitchen. after a while, sue demanded that we make an appearance at the legion, so we bundled ourselves in and out of taxis to join the lineup. the legion was then only open to members, but by the time we made it thru the first set of doors, the bouncer announced that they had closed the sign-in book and no one else would be able to sign in. sue boldly walked in on the heels of the bouncer and almost got away with it.
- link of the day: consumer groups finally getting into P2P advocacy
to make the dream come true
Friday, 25MAR2005:sleep is good, sleep is grand, off in never-never-land !!
lazed about in the afternoon reading more extracts from 'hanging out with the dream king'. the michael zulli interview provided some insight into the design of my fave character from the 'sandman' series, hob gadling. as a change from their continual re-issuance of the standard sandman tpb's (which i already own), dc should make up a separate collection of hob's appearances and reel in more suckers like me who have more money than time.
still, it'd be another great book to introduce people to the series - the tale of a man who willfully cheats death, learns about the profits and horrors of the slave trade, hangs out with the immortal crowd without any of their particular karmic obligations, and gets to take the piss out of renaissance festivals, having been around the first time thru. hmm, maybe michael zulli could be convinced to re-pencil his earlier issues to make it all consistently gorgeous ?
more neat tidbits were revealed in daniel vozzo's interview. apparently, before he became the colourist for 'sandman', he had been in a punk band that opened for billy idol, the ramones and even the clash. 'sandman' was also good for him personally as a long-time fan of the comic became interested in meeting him after learning of his involvement - that fan is now his wife :)
signed off on the mix for cenobyte and molly today. once i had the theme for this one in my head, it came together pretty quickly. the final tracklist flows pretty well musically, but it still hasn't gelled in my head completely. guess this is one reason why you shouldn't re-use songs in your mixes - once you've got a mix that works, it's hard to break the associations with the songs that precede and follow enough to create new associations on a subsequent mix. after i've sent / delivered the mixes, i'll post them to my list at aotm
today's soccer game went much better than last friday. no one bothered to tell me that we had already won by default, so i still got worked up about every goal scored against me. i let 2 bad ones in, one from the center kick, and the other after leaving my crease to try to chase down the ball in the corner. i did manage to stop the single penalty shot and team orange ended up the victor with a final score of 7-4.
- movies viewed: million dollar baby
gonna walk away from trouble
Saturday, 26MAR2005:broomball chronicles:
team white: jacques, julian, marco, gavin, jane
team black: tom, anna, JF, christian, me
team black got their first goal after intense pressure on team white's net, but when gavin joined the white squad, team black figured that the combo of marco, gavin and jacques would be overwhelming. however, christian rose to the occasion and scored 4 goals, with JF getting 2 and tom potting 1. for team white, marco scored 2 and gavin got another single. with no subs, everyone got a good workout.
then it was on to todd's semi-regular poker tourney. 10 people joined in the festivities including becky, todd, spencer, JD, vinnie, peter, chris, derek, shane and myself. some amazing hands appeared during the evening, including a quad 7 in the community cards, 4 kings on a pocket pair, a straight flush and even the top hand of all, a royal. with todd getting the latter 2, the rest of us should've known that lady luck was with him. i was 5th out, surviving into the no-limit round. todd was the eventual winner of the tourney and the commemorative t-shirt, while peter and chris took the runner-up positions.
vinnie cleaned up on the first side table, i closed out the second, and then spencer, todd, shane, vinnie and i played one final side table that went to 5 in the morning. after todd decided that he had finally had enough and went all-in, spencer and i split the remaining pot so that todd could get to sleep. the final tally left me in positive territory for the night and halved my cumulative poker losses to date.
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