ShinyPlasticBag

I saw a girl on campus the other day who bore a striking resemblance to Bill Murray. It freaked me out a little bit. This, of course, segways quite nicely into today's topic:

Who invented the stop sign? Although it's commonly known* that traffic lights were originally invented in the 1920s by Garrett A. Morgan (source), stop signs are another story altogether.

Google helpfully told me that Laura Bush (Mrs. G. W. Bush) ran a stop sign and killed her boyfriend in 1963, but it didn't immediately answer my pressing question. I did NOT feel lucky.

However, if we let ourselves wander to the less pretty, less compliant, more painful corners of the Internet, we have an answer: William P. Eno, who lived in the state of Connecticut. According to the McRoberts Masthead, a security company's newsletter, Mr. Eno ”originated, codified, and popularized modern traffic control systems such as signage, hand signals, driver licensing, vehicle safety inspection and speed limits." A few more clickie-clicks corroborates their story. I guess it's true.

So, now we know who invented the stop sign. Truth be told, I don't feel nearly as gratified as I thought I would once I knew. It's sort of a hollow victory — I was expecting something more amusing, like a nun with no arms and one leg, who was run down by an inconsiderate driver somewhere in Iowa in 1912. Or something...it's not like I've thought about this a lot or anything.

Anyway, I have to go be productive. Can anyone else think of ordinary objects with cloudy histories, so we might dredge up their origins?

• Written on 31 October 2003 & posted at 10:04 AM.
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Nick bought a Halloween costume...

• Written on 29 October 2003 & posted at 09:44 PM.
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Sure, it's early, but the November 2003 layout is up. I love it. My apologies to those of you using an obsolete web browser that doesn't support the dotted border effect — dashes are substituted. It's still acceptable, but it's not the way it should look (upgrade your browser).

I think the thing I like best (other than having a picture of Angela Lindvall, supermodel and founder of the Collage Foundation on my web site) is that I can fit so much more information in this layout — links, for the first time in ages, are not bold. I'm also happy to have a white background again, because it makes including that flow with the blog simpler. But blah. That's too geeky, even for me.

Anyway, I hope you like it. Actually, pretend you do, even if you don't.

• Written on 29 October 2003 & posted at 04:27 PM.
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Yay! It's Janet's birthday today. Wish her a happy birthday.



Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday to you
Happy birthday dear Janet
Happy birthday to you

Yay! I got the balloons from the Everyday Celebrations Online Catalog.

• Written on 29 October 2003 & posted at 11:36 AM.
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Exactly one year ago today, I wrote a blog entry in near hysteria, because I had finally found my digital soulmate: Pixel. Though a years worth of heavy (alright, non-stop) usage has given her more than her fair share of battle scars, Pixel remains the greatest laptop alive today. I love her good.

But speaking of looove, Janet's birthday is less than an hour. I got her a supercool Starbucks thermos, the latest Bif Naked CD (Essentially Naked, a best of kind of deal), and a copy of Finding Nemo on DVD (which doesn't actually come out until November 4th — I pre-ordered it from the Disney Store, which was shared gift for Katie, too. You know, it's been 40 minutes since I started this paragraph.

Taylor ran an old version of my Nucleus to MovableType converter and it didn't fix the double linebreak problem (the current version does — download away!). Poor him. Anyway, thanks to some emergency PHP'ing, life is happy for him.

Seriously, though, regarding the Nucleus to MovableType converter, it's the first (that I've ever been able to find) script that can convert all of your Nucleus entries into MovableType with almost no intervention. It's a super easy to use wizard that walks you through all of the scripts. Just download it, unzip it to your server, and run it. Easy as pie. Entries (including extended text) and comments are all moved over perfectly. It's totally unsupported, though. Please don't email me if you have any problems with it, and keep in mind that it's totally “at-your-own-risk-ware”.

Anyway, that's enough random blogging for me. I'm tired. Good night.

• Written on 28 October 2003 & posted at 11:54 PM.
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Praise Taylor a little bit, cos I now have a referers list. Let's see if I get anything nearly as interesting as he has, as far as ridiculous Google queries go.

I'm watching Shattered City now. It's a bit lackluster, and there are tons of advertisements. I've noticed that GMC is pushing the HyWire like mad. I wonder what they have up their sleeve?

• Written on 26 October 2003 & posted at 09:57 PM.
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Whoohee, next year has been declared the year of the Acadians — how weird is that? I heard it on CBC Radio Onethis morning. Just thought I'd share.

Yesterday truly, madly, deeply sucked. Although I wasn't nearly as sick as I was on Thursday, I was still sort of out of it, and writing midterms — especially two of them back to back — is not fun whilst on Sinutab. Although I sucked royally on my algorithms test, I think I rocked the bajezus out of my operating systems, so it sort of balanced out.

Last night, after much prodding, Tony finally got MovableType running on the server. I plan on switching from Nucleus on January 1st, 2004. I still have the issue of my old entries...I don't know whether I should convert them into MovableType, or just keep a separate “Before 2004” archive. There aren't any conversion tools to help me out at this moment, so I started writing my own last night. It's not complete by any means, but so far it can transfer entries (text, extended text, title, and date) without a hitch. Comments will come later. Nucleus and MovableType (when using MySQL) have surprisingly similar structures for everything.

Shattered City, the story of the Halifax Explosion, is on tomorrow night. If all goes well (read: if I don't forget), I plan on watching it. Anyone who isn't from here, you should go read about the explosion, because it's pretty interesting. 2400 tonnes of TNT blew up in Halifax Harbour. And Vince Coleman, aka Super Telegraph Operator Man, saved the day. Sort of. It's interesting.

Anyway, I have to go back to working — it's my last weekend at the IWK. I'm going to miss my little office, and I'll miss the caffiene queens down at Tim Horton's. I will, however, enjoy sleeping in on weekends — something I can do tomorrow, as well. Daylight savings rocks. I don't usually feel this way on the other end of the spectrum, though.

• Written on 25 October 2003 & posted at 11:17 AM.
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Arg, I am so sick. Well, no so much now, but I was very sick last night and today. Which is particularly crappy because I have two midterms tomorrow and today was my day to study. Regardless, I got quite a bit done, so I shouldn't do too badly. Algorithms concerns me, however, because it's a scary course.

Didn't do a whole lot besides that today — watched a little bit of A Fish Named Wanda on A&E this morning, and some Friends in the afternoon. Tonight was filled with gift wrapping — it's Janet's birthday next week, but we're doing the gift thing tomorrow night. Ah, greatness. Keddy came over to keep me company and go to the mall for last minute purchases.

I decided to go with a butcher paper motif this year, just because I think it looks cool. Plain brown paper makes the actual gift seem much more interesting. I'd go into depths about what, exactly, I bought, but you know...peanut arms. Erm...no, not peanut arms. I mean, Janet might read this. So that's not so good. I'll blog about it tomorrow.

I signed up for a PayPal account — did you know that they offer credit cards now? I think there should be a full-fledged Internet bank. Imagine it — the service fees would be virtually zero, since it would be a lot cheaper to operate. Mind you, it'd be more difficult to offer things like mortgages and such, but if I could get a chequing account with an Internet bank for cheaper than I can with Royal Bank, and it was reliable, I'd do it. Mind you, Interac would be a must.

Finally, for my real life friends: how are we determining who's-who for secret Santa? Shall we draw names from a hat, or should I just write a script so that you can get your name online? Comment away.

Mom: Grr! There's nothing on TV but commercials!
Me: Well, it's probably like 9:28 or something, and everything's over.
Keddy: It is 9:28! Exactly 9:28!
Me: Weird...

Oh, and check out The Perfect Addiction, by an Ohio-er named Amanda. It's a very good site, and I quite like the layout, even though it looks a wee bit wonky in my beloved Firebird.

• Written on 23 October 2003 & posted at 09:57 PM.
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Well, it's raining. You know how I feel about rain: I love it. Tonight, I am a hypocrite, because this rain really, really sucks. It's like movie rain, where they hook a hose up to a fire hydrant and just blast the bajeezus out of everyone in a fifty meter radius. Mike and I went to Mic Mac Mall tonight (basically so he could get the phone number of a girl he lusts for, although she ended up not being there), and when we entered, it was fairly nice. When we came out, the rain was coming down in sheets (someone explain the origins of this saying, please). Hydroplaning was the name of the game on the way home.

Earlier, Janet and I carved pumpkins. I did my first stencil pumpkin — basically, my first non-generic Jack-o-Latern pumpkin. It's Homer Simpson, and I think I did a fairly good job on it. Mind you, it's not really something to be too proud of, because all I did was cut out where the stencil told me to, but I'm still impressed with myself for not ending up with a gaping hole in the middle of it or something. It's hard to take good pictures of pumpkins when they're lit up, because the flash destroys the illumination effect, and my camera's not too good in the dark. However, here's a photo of it that turned out reasonably well. Janet did a second pumpkin, which is of Gene Simmons (from Kiss). It turned out fantastic, and it's quasi-photorealistic in this photo of it. Can you imagine being famous enough that random people are making pumpkin stencils of your face? I think that would weird me out a little bit.

Pheck*, the wind is coming up now. I hope tomorrow isn't this terrible, because I still don't have a suitable jacket at this point. My winter jacket is too heavy for fall, and my non-winter jacket, erm, doesn't exist. Arg.

Anyway, I'm off to install Pretty Good Privacy. Wish me luck. Not that it's a difficult thing to do or anything.

• Written on 21 October 2003 & posted at 10:20 PM.
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Yesterday, Janet, Pugsley, Katie, David and I went to the valley to buy pumpkins. We visited Hantsport, Wolfville, Grand Pre, New Minas, and Kentville, with a final stop at Hennigar's Farm Market to buy our pumpkins. They're so much cheaper and better down there. Yahoo! I love Hennigar's. Anyway, there are a bunch of pictures, so view and comment and stuff. And stuff.

• Written on 19 October 2003 & posted at 07:04 PM.
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Yesterday, to my excited glee, Apple released iTunes for Windows. I was looking forward to this, since I've heard iTunes is so great, and I'm not too pleased with Winamp (2.91 was great for it's time, but it's a bit dated, and 3.0 is definitely not the future). I downloaded it, and eagerly installed it. And...

It sucked.

I could spend an hour typing about the numerous user interface flaws, but I won't because nobody else cares. However, the following things leap out at me as instantly giving it a big fat F:
1. No iTunes music store for Canada? What the hell? WHY? That was one of the things I was so excited about.
2. The internal browser (used for the iTunes site) is slow and bloated. Drawing the OS X style widgets must waste a lot of CPU cycles.
3. The window flickers when you resize it. I'm using a decent computer here, that shouldn't happen!
4. The visualizer (apparently) has only one effect, and it only gets 12-15 fps on my system. Yeah, that's reasonable.
5. No context menus. Anywhere. I realize that Macs don't use them as much, but this is Windows. You have to adapt to the system you're on.
6. No iTunes music store for Canada? WHY WHY WHY WHY DIE DIE WHY. To think I might have actually paid for music. Apple has made me bitter. The RIAA better blame them when the time comes.

Anyway, I must go learn about the Radix Sort, which also iSucks.

• Written on 17 October 2003 & posted at 02:46 PM.
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It was my idea. But Janet drew it.

• Written on 15 October 2003 & posted at 09:10 PM.
• There are 21 comments.
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Well, it's fall. I know that, technically, this happened about three weeks ago, but now it's really here. The seasons are funny in Nova Scotia, and usually, they don't kick in until they're a few weeks behind. The leaves are falling off of the trees with reckless abandon, and somehow, I managed to get hit in the eye with one. These things only happen to me.

As much as I like fall, I'm not a big fan of getting blown around by crazy winds. The winds of the moment, however, are mainly due to a storm that's rolling in. Emera is warning people that power might go out again, because there are so many branches still dangling from hurricane Juan. Plus, most of the repairs done after the hurricane weren't much more than patch jobs (our power still flickers occasionally), and I doubt they could put up with much abuse. So, my server might go down, and a dozen or so sites on the Internet will crawl because of it. Viva la Linkpool.

Life is very busy with school and such, and not too much of interest in the bloggable world has occured for me to comment on. So, with that, I bid you adieu.

• Written on 15 October 2003 & posted at 01:45 PM.
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this is the school song
we'll help you archieve perfection
destroy your record collection
it's for your own protection

First of all, is REM one of those bands that is really against digital music, or really for it? I can't remember, but I recall them being polarized to one side, as opposed to the indifference of most bands. Either way, their new song is very catchy. And the video was very cool.

What is up with Disney DVD? What is Disney DVD? Is it somehow different, better, than normal DVD? Why distinguish yourself from every other company producing DVDs with your own special little name and a different logo? Companies like Disney really piss me off. DVD is an international standard. Don't brand it. I've noticed that Paramount Pictures has started to label their movies as Paramount DVD. Only some of them. It's ridiculous.

Another thing from the DVD world that pisses me off are the mandatory warnings or previews. The DVD player that I am watching the video on is mine: it is not the content producers right to disable my control of it. Nothing should be forced upon viewers like that, because even if it's something I want to watch the first time, after the fifth viewing, I probably don't want to stare at a WARNING screen for 30 seconds, followed by half an hour of previews. The little hand doing the international “stop” position whenever I press a button is also infuriating. Things like these really contribute to piracy: a lot of people don't really care about stealing movies, we just hate the companies. Hit 'em low.

The following is a very brief list of artists and/or groups that have new albums (or have ones coming out soon), and really shouldn't.

• Hawksley Workman
• Cyndi Lauper
• Tears for Fears
• Meatloaf (I typoed Metaloaf the first time, and that would be a cool band name)

My final point for today is that Blackbox Recorder is an amazing group, and everyone should get a copy of the School Song.

• Written on 13 October 2003 & posted at 12:21 PM.
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The following table details the distribution of the various colors/flavours of Skittles in a 92 gram Original Fruit Skittles package.

Lime	Grape	Lemon	Orange	Strawberry
16	23	11	20	20
17.77%	25.56%	12.22%	22.22%	22.22%

These figures include the strawberry Skittle that I dropped on the floor, making a total of 90 Skittles in a package — that means each Skittleis 1.02 grams, give or take.

Yes, the entry is in my science category.

• Written on 11 October 2003 & posted at 12:32 PM.
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This all started when Taylor decided that this was a good picture for me on the Hipnite Team page (“Taylor: i thought that was an accurate portrayal of nova scotians”):

Taylor: so you looking @ hipnite
Cory: no, i was taking a shower, but i just checked it out and i need marks address to mail him some food. i hear just 45 cents a day will feed him, and he'll write me a letter at christmas time

That's real nice, guys. Make fun of me, why don't you. I just want to point out that I am not a young aborginal girl. She looks so sad! :(

• Written on 09 October 2003 & posted at 07:32 PM.
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I'm still a little stunned that Arnold Swarcthsjsa...Terminator guy won the election. It was pretty shameless — I think movie quotes should be banned from campaign speeches. “Hasta la vista, sales tax” has to be the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

Needless to say, Google News was completely flooded with links relevant to this irrelevant news, as were most other sites. Since Google News is a meta site, it kind of makes sense. I was reading an Asian newspaper (on one of my wild tangents of tabbed browsing), and even it had a dozen links to Arnold news. Who cares? Seriously. Even if I lived in California, I still wouldn't care that much.

Anyway, I'm in my operating systems class (first assignment: 14/15 on part A and 10/10 on part B — third A+ in one day, woo!), and after half an hour, class is finally beginning. Passing out assignments to 200+ people takes a really long time. Gotta love being alphabetically favored — poor Zygfried Zimmerman*.

Now that it looks like we may actually be learning, I should probably go. Later.

PS: I actually overheard the following conversation:

Old Guy #1: See you later, alligator.
Old Guy #2: After a while, crocodile.
Old Guy #1: See you soon, racoon!
Old Guy #2: Goodbye, Old Guy #1.

I didn't think that ever happened. Shoot me before I turn sixty.

• Written on 08 October 2003 & posted at 04:00 PM.
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Ah, inspiration is a funny thing. Why is it that, when I'm sitting on my butt watching Murder, She Wrote all day, I can think of wonderful, long entries to put on my site, and when I'm actually out and doing things, I have nothing whatsoever to say? I find that incredibly odd.

I spent most of yesterday working on my Object-Oriented Programming assignment, which sounded very hard, but turned out to be fairly easy. It was one of those things that seemed difficult until you looked at it the right way. Anyone who's interested in learning for free can see the problem — and if you're very interested, just drop me a line and I'll show you the solution I came up with. If nothing else, I think it was an interesting problem.

In other news, I got back my second assignment for my Oral & Written Communication Skills course. We had the choice of either doing a properly formatted memo (boo!) or making a simple web page on the topic of our choosing (wee!). I went with the second option, primarily because it didn't require me to refer to anything to get it right. I chose to do a web site for the course. I like the layout, because it's simple, but my ever-present instinct of doing the least amount of work possible prevented me from making it 100% valid. At the very least, however, it is style independent. Anyway, the point of this paragraph was to brag, so here I am doing so. I got a 14/15 on it (A+, woo) and a weird comment attached to it. To paraphrase, “Is shinyplasticbag.com yours? I liked the web site you did, but the main site was much more interesting. I particularly enjoyed xsatellite.com.” As far as I can recall, xsatellite.com was something in the Linkpool a while back. Weird.

Final words of advice: check out some of the music by Hot Rod Circuit (sorry, no link — writing this offline). I have absolutely no idea what site it was that led me to them, and I've only listened to a little bit of stuff by them, but I'm a fan thus far. You might as well check it out — you pirate music anyway.

• Written on 07 October 2003 & posted at 10:54 PM.
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I have incredibly exciting, yet entirely irrelevant, news to share with the world: Zebrahead, one of my favorite bands of all time, has a new album (“MFZB”) coming out next month. The best part is that they've put the first single, Into You, online for free download. And it's not one of those crappy, low quality files or in some wonky file format. It's a 128 kbps MP3. Life rocks! I recommend you all give it a whirl.

If you've never heard of Zebrahead, and a lot of people haven't, they're best described as being a really poppy kind of alternative music. If you've heard them before, I have to say this song sounds more like Waste of Mind did than Playmate of the Year, although it has a bit of both. Sort of like Blink-182's new song, Feeling This — it sounds like a blend between Enema of the State and Take Off Your Pants and Jacket.

You know who doesn't get nearly enough credit? Suzanne Feller-Otto. Who is she, you ask? I don't know. So I guess she doesn't get nearly enough credit.

Enjoy the 'head.

• Written on 04 October 2003 & posted at 02:16 PM.
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I think that autumn might be my favorite time of the year. If it's not, then winter certainly is. For the time being, though, I'm very happy with autumn. I decided to heed Tony's advice from a while ago and make the picture in the corner of this layout smaller. The coffee cup picture didn't look right when it was cropped, though, so I went on a wild hunt for a good picture. Thanks to the absolutely super fantastic stock.xchange, I found some great autumny photographs. The one I finally settled on is called First Day of Autumn, and it was snapped by Crissie Hardie. I have to admit, though, that I had a hard time deciding between that one and Autumn Reflections by Elisabeth Howe. They're both very nice pictures, but I chose First Day of Autumn because it was a bit less distracting.

If you're ever looking for a photo of something specific, and you need it to be unrestricted and royalty free, I really suggest that you give stock.xchange a whirl. You can search and browse their archives as much as you want, but you have to register to download the full size photographs. Since registration is free and the images are amazingly high resolution (most are at least 1280x960 pixels), there's really nothing to lose. And thank you, Taylor, for pointing it out to me in the first place.

Have you seen the new Romeo & Juliet cell phone commercial for Nextel? It's absolutely brilliant.

• Written on 03 October 2003 & posted at 02:30 PM.
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I find the sex genre of blogs to be very humorous. I can't understand why anyone would ever want to bother blogging about their sex life. Moreover, I can't imagine anyone else ever wanting to read about it — it's about as lame as those erotic fan fictions that you run across now and again. These things, in case you've never seen one, are laughably pathetic. “And Harry reached into his robe and found that both of his wands were at the ready...” — that sorta thing. Weird.

When I decided that tonights rant would be about sex blogs, I asked my buddy Google (me and him are like *this*) what he thought. And he had a lot to say. The second link led me to the Yahoo Directory sex blog section. For some reason, ErosBlog caught my eye in their list, and I visited it. It's actually a fairly amusing site. Although I haven't dug particularly deep into it, it has some interesting news stories and a fantastic quote (“Sex is good, but not as good as fresh sweet corn.”).

At this point, though, I became bored, and started to IM with Taylor. This is why I will never be an investigative journalist. Where was I?

Ah yes, the sex blogs. As I scroll through the Yahoo listing, I notice a recurring theme: amusing titles. It's so hard to choose between FlufferSmut and Pornblography, although I garantee I won't like the Wildgeek Gay Sex Blog. (It should be noted, though, that if I wanted to hide some hidden cache of wonderful things, I would give the site a name like that so that most people would never visit. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with that, I'm just saying that I don't want to see a wild geek having gay sex.)

I've just finished skimming the amusingly named sites. Word Oyster is by far the best one — it's perverted, yes, but it's not porn. It's actually quite funny — the site features a photo of a woman with four breasts, and a sarcastic writing style. You really can't beat that, can you?

Now, I have to go take a shower, because I feel really dirty. Maybe I should stick with non-topical blog entries. But first, who thinks Tony would like a pair of these for Christmas?

• Written on 02 October 2003 & posted at 11:59 PM.
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Taylor has turned me on...to a fantastic web site. It's run by someone that someone he knows knows (gotta love those recursive sentences). I highly recommend you check it out, if only for the quotes page:

Now I want to get in a police chase and have them chase me halfway across the country. Such is life, I suppose.

For some reason, my body is very stubborn. I spent all summer staying up way too late and sleeping in an equal amount. When I started working ultrasound in June, I had a really hard time adjusting to waking up at 6:30 in the morning. Two months worth of practicing that didn't help me at all when school started. Now, I haven't been to class since Friday and I'm already back in free-time mode. It's 2:01 in the morning and I'm not really all that tired, although there is nothing much to do. Truth be told, I'm actually taking crap while I write this. Isn't that great? The wonders of the laptop, combine with a little ol' too-much-info.

Web Site To Do List

• 1. Define strong in CSS, so I don't have to count on the default style being equivalent to bold.
• Define em in CSS, so I don't have to count on the default style being equivalent to i.
• Define blockquote in CSS, so I don't have to count on the default style being indented.
• Get out of the habit of closing all tags with </a> when I'm not concentrating hard enough. What is up with that? It seriously happens all the time.
• Install MoveableType. And find a way to move my many Nucleus entries over.
• Write a more complex showSidebar function for Linkpool so that my server being down isn't catastrophic to the network. I have an idea here.

If anyone hasn't started to digest kaileybrennan.com, get started. It's a great site, and she's the first new everyday person I've added in a long time. And it would seem she's linking back to me now. Ah, what a wonderful world we live in. I love bloggers. We really are the best kind of people.

• Written on 02 October 2003 & posted at 02:02 PM.
• There are 7 comments.
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