Where Dustbunnies Go To Die

Let me start off by saying - a propos of nothing - that seeing the name of someone one has had a one-night stand with in the newspaper is a bit jarring. Fortunately it was in the Lifestyle section, in an article talking about an office design called hotelling, but still. (I'm just glad I've never worked for a company that did this. Normally I keep far too much crap on my desk to be able to function in that kind of environment.)

Now that that's out of the way... I spent far too much money this weekend.

I've mentioned a few times that my PDA had been mysteriously crashing for no apparent reason lately. It stopped for a few weeks, then started again (I wonder if there's a correlation with the temperature, since I carry it everywhere in my backpack). Since it was about five years old (perhaps older), I decided it was time for a new one. I looked at a few that various friends have, and then went into Future Shop on Saturday... where I ended up deciding on another Palm. It has the advantage, at least, that I don't have to figure out how to convert all of my data from one format to another. Though a few of my games from the old one no longer seem to work on the new one.

It's a Palm TX, wi-fi and Bluetooth enabled, and came with a keyboard as well. Plus it has Word and Excel, and can synch with Outlook (which I never use, as I prefer webmail, but it's nice to have the option, I guess). With the taxes and extended warranty (probably a ripoff, but given the troubles I've had with the current one, if this one starts acting up in four years or less I don't have to worry about the expense), it was about $650. Yikes.

While I was in there, I saw that they were having a sale on laser printers as well. I'd been wanting one of those for a while, as I'm tired of the inkjet clogging up if I don't use it for a couple of weeks. (I don't print often, but when I do, I print a ton.) Again with the taxes and warranty, I got a Samsung laser printer/copier/scanner for about $400. (Before the taxes and warranty, it was about $250.) I just need to figure out how to get it home, now - the store may only be a five-minute walk from my apartment under normal circumstances, but carrying a printer, it would probably be more like half an hour. (And given the troubles I've been having with my bowling injury and subsequent pain in my other arm, probably from overcompensating a few weeks ago when I was taking all the crap from my solarium out to the dumpsters, I'd rather not risk further injury anyway.) I've arranged to borrow a dolly from the Penneys if I can't figure out some other way before next weekend.

So that was Saturday afternoon. In the evening, I went to see Cloverfield with kairi_kiss, Chris & Lee Knight, and a couple of other folks. (I'm blanking on their names right now. :( ) I'm seeing mixed opinions from people, but I enjoyed it. Yeah, I know it was basically The Blair Witch Meets Godzilla, but I was entertained - which is my primary motivation when it comes to watching movies, TV shows or plays. Though that didn't stop me from thinking that the protagonists were stupid. Mind you, the protagonists in any horror film are stupid... otherwise they wouldn't be in the predicament in the first place.

And the Trek trailer? Sweeeeeeeeeet. My little monitor doesn't do it justice. (Okay, that may also be because the version I saw on IESB.net was from a bootleg video.)

Today seemed like a long day. I managed to miss the bus at Finch thanks to some kind of delay on the subway (I couldn't hear the announcement - they were making it upstairs, and not on the platform, just as the southbound train rumbled in), and so I didn't get in until about half an hour later than usual. I still managed to fix a strange bug today, though our client is convinced that the solution is something different. (I can prove beyond a doubt that while his theorized cause may be a problem - I haven't checked yet - the one I found today definitely causes this problem.) It only took me six hours because Visual Studio (I almost typed "Visual Stupido", which is probably more accurate) kept crashing when I was in debug mode, executing the code line-by-line, just before I got to the problem code. Argh.)

I was going to go to Third Monday tonight, but figured it was moot because the Penneys weren't going to be there. (Had they been there, I would have been arranging to borrow their dolly, you see... it all hangs together.) So I came home and had dinner here... or rather, tried to. The damned phone kept ringing while I was eating. (All right, most people don't eat dinner at 10PM, I know...) And since it was my Denvention roommate calling to let me know that he'd booked our room in the Marriott (oh, yes, for those of you not on the SMOFS list who are interested, the hotel booking page became available today), I guess that's actually a good thing.

So now it's 11:30 and I'm only just getting started on the stuff I wanted to get done tonight. Sigh.

Oh, and I got two emails today asking me to work on Programming for Anticipation, in two different areas. Guess they think that being head of Events isn't enough work...

Some folks might remember Rebecca Eckler, the Globe and Mail "journalist" who snuck into the Hugos pre-party at Torcon 3 in 2003 and proceeded to write a hack piece making fun of science fiction fans?

Well, it seems she's suing Universal Studios, claiming that they ripped off her memoir Knocked Up: Confessions of a Hip Mother-to-Be for the movie Knocked Up.

Okay, the similarities are striking, but after what she wrote about Torcon, and reading that she had had small offers from film producers but was "holding out for the Big American Offer," I find it hard to have any sympathy for her. Let's just think of it as her just desserts. ;)

Last week, at the end of the night of bowling, one of our opponents came over and said, "I didn't want to say anything while we were bowling, but you might do better if you stood up a little straighter - you'd get more speed on the ball. Right now your backswing is too short."

Leaving to one side the fact that this is supposed to be a social, fun kind of league and there was no particular reason for her to hide that little snippet from me all evening (I'm as competitive as anyone, but come on), I discovered tonight that she was full of it.

My first and second games both started out pathetically - I would throw the first ball into the pocket, leave one or two pins, and then on the spare attempt I would pull the ball slightly to the left and miss by the most minuscule amount possible (or, as my teammate Bridgette would ever-so-delicately put it, "by the width of a pubic hair"). So I went back to my normal style in the third game and promptly had my best game of the night.

Final scores: 155, 135, 183.

And those first two games' scores sound a lot better than they were - I had maybe 65 in the fifth frame of the first game, and 78 or thereabouts in the seventh frame of the second game. Fortunately I had strong finishes in both games (I actually reverted to my normal style in the ninth frame of the second game - and promptly got a spare in the ninth and two strikes plus nine in the tenth, for 49 pins in the last two frames).

Considering that three weeks ago I bowled two 200 games using my normal style, I'm not sure why I listened in the first place.

I was supposed to drop by angrykat's gathering afterwards after coming home first (I wasn't showing up in sweat pants and a sweaty t-shirt, sorry), but my elbow is killing me (I still can't straighten my arm without pain) and my neck is kind of sore as well, probably due to the attempt to alter my style tonight. (Ye gods, I sound like a wreck.) Not to mention, I should probably be in bed by 2 or 3ish if I'm going to get up in time tomorrow - I'm meeting gurudata at 1.

On the job hunting front, I heard nothing today, not even from the recruiter on whose voice mail I'd left a message yesterday regarding an 18-month government contract in Oshawa - I'd expected him to return my call, but I guess he was busy as today was the deadline for applications. (Yes, commuting to Oshawa will likely be difficult - don't remind me. Maybe I should learn to drive one of these years? Or maybe I should just talk Mike into letting me move in with him and his family, since he lives in Whitby. On second thought, that might be awkward...)

I heard through the grapevine tonight that a friend in the bowling league was laid off after 21 years at Bank of Montreal. I expect this means that there may be some additional competition for jobs over the next little while, though from what I've seen of their online job postings, BMO - or at least his part of it - is primarily a C++ shop, so maybe not. A year or so ago he'd offered to take my resume, but nothing ever came of it. It seems they got a new VP who cancelled all of the IT projects my friend was overseeing. Yikes. Sounds like he got a good severance package, though. Three weeks for every year of service? Oh yeah.

I just checked to see what was currently on TV so that I could fill in the "Music" line for this entry and found the following:

Full Moon High (PG)

A teenager (Adam Arkin) becomes a werewolf after a family vacation in Transylvania. Also stars Ed McMahon and Roz Kelly.

Yikes. It's just as well my back is to the TV...

On the TV behind me, Amanda Tapping is explaining how black holes can be used for converting matter to energy, using tons of technobabble. And it's not even a Stargate episode.

Talk about typecasting.

I came across this on the_nita's LJ earlier tonight, and thought I'd do my bit to pass it along.

Evgeni Plushenko had far too much fun doing this routine.

Brokeback Figure Skating?

Off to bed now. *yawn*

...'m sleepy.

Got up around 11 today (on 5 hours of sleep) due to a Gaylaxicon committee meeting at 1. I feel that, despite some of us still having not gotten outstanding tasks done (and I include myself in that - oy, do I include myself :( ), we managed to get quite a bit accomplished and decided today. I really must make a push to get through my To Do list in the next few days, though, as I don't want emails and messages I send to get lost over Christmas.

Came home, had dinner, read the paper, watched the Leafs game (WTF is wrong with them these days? Four losses in their last five games, three by a 2-1 score :( ), and now I'm caught up on email and LJ. Fortunately today was a slow day for many of you, from the looks of things.

There was something amusing in today's Globe and Mail: The Omnificent English Dictionary was reviewed. It's a site which is gathering word definitions submitted by the public. But not just any kind of definitions; they're in the form of limericks. A couple of examples:

A mysterious murderer (serial)
Antiseptically wiped all material.
They searched night and day
For a clue (DNA),
But his traces were all abacterial.

My writs are routinely abated:
Defeated, excluded, negated.
The judges don't care
For my fanciful flair
Or my facts that are slightly misstated.

Brilliant...

Oh, and for anyone here in Toronto who wants to see Brokeback Mountain, there's a special advance screening Thursday, December 15 at 7pm at the Varsity Cinemas in the Manulife Centre at Bay and Bloor.