ShinyPlasticBag

Yahoo! The election is over, and thank god the Nazi's didn't win. Nobody is really happy that the Liberals are in power again, but it sure beats the vile “America 2.0” regime that the Conservatives surely would have implemented. For a few minutes last night, I was under the impression that the Conservatives had, in fact, won. That sucked.

Anyway, the carpet guy is here and busily laying down the carpet in our living room and upstairs hallway. Yay — finally, it gets done. The steps have been carpet-free for more than a year. However, the cable installation didn't go as smoothly as one would have hoped. I had to get fitted for a respirator mask at work (to protect me from things like SARS and tuberculosis), and got back at 8:50 am. On the door was a slip of paper that said “Sorry we missed you!” from Eastlink. The time on it was 8:40. I didn't even think they started doing service calls until nine, but I was wrong. Hopefully, they will be able to stop by later, but we might have to wait until Saturday. Saturday isn't good, though, since that is when the relatives arrive. Life never goes smoothly.

Alas, I must go find something to eat. I can't wait until the carpet is down so I can put everything back together and continue on with my chores.

• Written on 29 June 2004 & posted at 11:27 AM.
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I hate the commercials that Eastlink plays over its hold music for tech support. As previously blogged, we're getting the Watch, Surf, & Talk bundle next Friday. However, I realized a problem with that this morning.

You see, the Scots arrive on Saturday, July 3rd. I work backshift Friday and Saturday — therefore, I'd be dead on my feet when they arrived at 8:30 am, and I'd have to work the first night they were here. Not cool. So, I took Saturday off and switched my Friday backshift for a more manageable 3 pm - 11 pm shift. But this isn't good, because that's when the Eastlink folks are supposed to install the new cable stuff. Hmm.

Therefore, I'm currently on hold, waiting to find out if they can do it on another day. And...they can. Yay! No conflict of interest anymore, because we're getting it on Tuesday. That's three extra days of good cable! Yay!

Now, it's time for me to go on and on and on about how much I miss my laptop, which should be back sometime within the next week. Whilst cleaning the oh-so-messy basement (to make it inhabitable by humans again), I found my copy of Saber Marionette J that I got from a guy in England six years ago. I totally want to get DVD copies, though — hence the desire for Megapixel to be back. Best anime ever. I should probably note that Steve has a new theory (what is with Steve and his theories??), which is that everybody likes at least one anime. I think it's true.

• Written on 25 June 2004 & posted at 04:11 PM.
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So, today's the big day: the fifth anniversary of the car accident that none of us (that is, Keddy, Steve, Rob, and myself) probably should have lived through. This is the accident that, one month and one day after I got my driver's license, effectively ended my driving career until 2002, when I started to drive again. Let us have a moment of silence for the poor little car.

It so happens that there are a lot of five year anniversaries coming up over the next few months, since 1999 was a big year for me. I'll probably point them out for posterity as they pass. Of particular relevance is the Shining Time Station. Awesomeness.

So, who has ideas on how we can welcome them to Canada? Note that, by this, I mean “How can we subject them to a shocking demonstration of how completely strange and messed up we really are?”. Oops, Steve is here. I've got to go.

Be creative.

• Written on 21 June 2004 & posted at 07:08 PM.
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Ever played Eight Queens of Death? It's an interesting challenge: given eight queens on a chess board, you have to arrange them in such a way that no queen can attack another.

It's not an easy puzzle, or so I'm told — it only took me about two minutes. Me so smrat.

Anyway, go give it a shot — read on for a solution. But seriously, try first — see how good you are at these sort of things.

Continue reading “Eight Queens”...

• Written on 18 June 2004 & posted at 04:08 AM.
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So, I've installed Firefox 0.9. I'd been running the RC for about a week, so this wasn't a big jump for me. However, there is one latent issue: you have to manually remove your profile folder or else it will crash immediately after you start it, without any good reason. And the problem will appear to be a faulty version of msvcrt.dll, although it isn't. They really need to work on this: upgrading should be completely painless. How hard can this be?

As far as the browser itself goes, I'm very happy. The new theme is nice, and the theme & extension managers are long overdue. However, they've changed the shortcut key to open up the download manager from Ctrl-E to Ctrl-Y. I'll be the first to admit that Ctrl-E didn't make much sense, but Ctrl-Y is even worse — at least the letter E occurs somewhere in the phrase “Download Manager”. There's no Y there. It seems like change for changes sake — Ctrl-E doesn't do anything now. The most annoying thing about this is that while Ctrl-E was a one-handed shortcut key, Ctrl-Y requires two hands (or some serious stretching). What a piss off. I'd also like to see the theme and extension managers have shortcut keys. I suggest Ctrl-Q for downloads, Ctrl-W for themes, and Ctrl-E for extensions — that way, they're all together and one-handed once again. That would mean getting rid of the shortcut key for Close Window (Ctrl-W), which isn't really needed anyway.

On to slightly more interesting material: first of all, Simon is back in Australia, and he broke his foot at a nightclub in Berlin. This is all the news from him I have, though, except for his new desire to move to the United Kingdom for a year or two. Can you say wanderlust? I think so. Anyway, the news I'm really-really-really excited about is the fact that we're upgrading to an Eastlink Bundle. We currently get our cable TV and Internet connection from Eastlink, but our phone from Aliant. This bundle will give us all three, and it will cost about $17 a month, which is fairly decent. The real bonus here is that we'll get twice as many TV channels and caller ID. Nice nice.

This all started with an Eastlink tech guy coming over to check our cable connections and hook us up to the mysterious “new system” (which is needed to get telephone service through cable). He looked kind of shocked when he hooked up his little meter and checked our cable, and then he said that he was completely baffled as to how we got a cable signal, let alone a good cable signal, considering the amount of interference. You see, our house is weird — we don't have cable jacks at all. Two cables go into our house: one directly to the cable modem, and the other into a splitter in the corner of the living room. The TV in the basement has a home-made cable splice that involved copious amounts of electrical tape. This guy fixed it all, and now the TV is a lot cleared — I hadn't actually noticed until he fixed it. Maybe the Internet will be speedier.

And that's all. I'm off to go see Chronicles of Riddick with my dad and then to pull a hardcore prank on Russell. Wicked.

PS: There is a great quote at the bottom of IMDB today: “Religion goes out of favor in 2037 when science discovers the gene that regulates fear.”

• Written on 17 June 2004 & posted at 05:34 PM.
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New news: I might be getting yet another replacement laptop. Sigh. I've got dead pixels on this one, so I have to send it off to Hewlett-Packard in Ontario for repairs. I have to say, I'm much more impressed with their phone technical support than their Internet support — I'm pretty sure they just found a couple of chat-addicted 13 year-olds and put them on the web site.

So, this means that my beloved computer will be gone for two weeks — I can deal with that. I've got Steve over here with his removal hard drive, and I figure I'll borrow a few dozen gigs and if I they need to format it, which they might not need to do, getting back online will be much easier. I'm not sure if they'll be swapping out the screen or just sending me a new machine. Time will tell.

Moving along, my Scottish relatives arrive in less than three weeks. This is awesome, because they're great and I love them. The last time I saw them was 1999, when Mom and Mary Anne and I got to wander around the countryside. Good time. We've got Brian, Mary Rose, their two daughters (Victoria and Rachel), and John coming to stay in our house. It's gonna be cramped, but fun. There are rumours that two more of our relatives (Anna and Martin) will be coming over too, since Darryl's getting married. They're not staying with us, though. Getting around to my original point, we're painting the spare bedroom tomorrow. I have no idea what colour it will be, but anything's better than the baby blue color we've got right now.

Anyway, this brings the world up to date. Cheers.

• Written on 14 June 2004 & posted at 05:31 PM.
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Arg! HP has the stupidest tech support people EVER. I'm trying to get somebody to tell me if my video card supports full-screen video overlay for TV-out mode. Here's the brilliant solution I get from “Nelson”:
The Geforce tab, eh? That'll be pretty hard to find on an ATI VIDEO CARD!!!!! What's wrong with these people? This is why (a) online tech support will never work and (b) why outsourcing to middle-of-nowhere countries is a really bad idea. ARG.

• Written on 11 June 2004 & posted at 04:17 AM.
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Gee, don't you just hate it when a thread that is not currently impersonating a client attempts to operate on an impersonation token? Yeah. Just one thing:

What the hell does that mean?? (Note: this is a re-creation. The original image was much wider.)

• Written on 10 June 2004 & posted at 08:48 PM.
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Man...Ray Charles died. That's messed up.

• Written on 10 June 2004 & posted at 05:53 PM.
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Over the past year, a lot of fuss has been made over Microsoft's Trustworthy Computing initiative — both good and bad. I personally think that they're doing a fairly decent job, even in the shadow of Sasser and all those other lovely worms. Their 3 steps to protect your PC page is a pretty good starting point for most people, but I don't think it goes far enough. I invite you all to take it all the way to the end. I present you with my revised version: 4 steps to really protect your PC.

1. Get Up to Date: First of all, go to Windows Update and install all of the security updates. All of them. Make sure your computer is as up-to-date as humanly possible, even if it means making several trips (since some items must be installed separately). This can be a pain, but it's for the good of your system and the Internet as a whole — it's recently been reported that 80% of all unsolicited bulk email originates from compromised Windows machines.
2. Turn On Autopilot: Next, turn on Automatic Updates. You can do this from System Properties (via the Control Panel) — pressing Windows-Key+Pause will open it up, too. Head over to the Automatic Updates tab and check the “Keep my computer up to date” option. I recommend setting it to automaticaly download and install the updates every day. Choose a time when you know your computer will be on, and probably won't be in use. The default setting, every day at 3:00 am, will be fine for most people.
3. Firewall: Get a firewall. Seriously. I personally detest ZoneAlarm and BlackIce due to strange side-effects, so it's fortunate that the firewall built into Windows XP is good enough for my needs. To turn on the firewall, go Network Connections in Control Panel. Right-click your connection, go to Properties, and go to the Advanced tab. Check “Protect my computer and network...”, and if you need to open up any ports, click Settings at the bottom of the window. A lot of people will skip this step due to the hassle, but for anyone thinking of doing that, I remind you of Sasser: it penetrated your system without you doing anything at all. If a larger percentage of the world used firewalls at home, it would never have spread so far.
4. Public Enemy Number One: Unfortunately, not a lot of people are willing to take this step, but it offers a final layer of protection. Get rid of Internet Explorer. I recommend Firefox, but there are other great alternatives: Opera and Mozilla are both excellent. All of them have features that make moving from Internet Explorer fairly painless. Not only will you have a browser that can stop pop ads and “floaters”, but you'll have a more modern browser with great navigation features (such as tabs) and perfect rendering of standards-compliant web sites.

Despite what one would think, thanks to the wonders of Microsoft, even if Internet Explorer isn't your default browser, it can still pop up from time to time. Pop-Down is the ultimate pop-up blocker: it's small, free, and can stop Internet Explorer from opening. Ever. Even Windows Update won't be able to open it. To install it, just download it from the web site, unzip it to a folder, and run PopDown.exe. Right-click the mushroom icon in the system tray and click “Do not allow any”. If you ever need an Internet Explorer window to open up — for Windows Update or whatever — hold down the CTRL while opening it, or turn off Pop-Down.

Of course, there's an alternative series of steps to keep your system safe:

1. Install a Linux distribution.
2. Stop using your computer because it's so frigging frustrating now.

Yeah, I know. I'm bitter.

• Written on 09 June 2004 & posted at 02:09 PM.
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So, we're on the way to Cape Breton. I'm fairly confident that those of you who are from Nova Scotia will instantly say “What?? Why???”, while those who aren't will wonder what the big deal is. Maybe a refresher course in Nova Scotian geography would be in order, but hey.

At 8:00 tonight, we decided that it would be a good idea to go on a road trip up to Cape Breton. By “we decided it would be a good idea”, I mean “Janet wanted to do it, Steve thought it would be funny, and I thought it would be a shit idea.” You want to know why I think it's a shit idea? Because it's obviously a shit idea. But anyway, we've embarked on our ~800 kilometre round trip. We're not planning on stopping for any more than a hour, so we should be home sometime around five am. Good thing I don't have to work until Friday! My sleeping schedule is going to be so out of whack.

Amanda is in Cape Breton and bored, and even though she's coming back tomorrow, we still thought it would be cool to visit her. At, oh, one o'clock, when we arrive, we'll hang out for an hour and then head home. What a bad idea. Actually, based on an up-to-the-minute estimate based on our current velocity, we might make it as early as 11:30. Wacky wacky.

We're a messed up group of individuals. Remind me to lament the passing of the Pixel torch later.

Update: we arrived in Sydney around 1:45 am and we got home at nine am. While in Sydney, we stole Amanda and baby Alex (henceforth to be known as “Axel”) and brought them home. We're all tired, still, and out of it, still, but it was fun.

• Written on 08 June 2004 & posted at 10:57 PM.
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Sigh. I just ghosted Pixel back to the factory default state. I feel like I killed someone. Katie is taking her home tonight. Not that I don't love Megapixel, but Pixel was my first laptop ever. We had a special bond.

Anyway, the scavenger hunt photos are up! How excited are you? Get ready! First of all, I've put up the list of things to get photos of. I put the results for each team into a separate gallery. I encourage everyone to take a look at the various teams and vote for which one you think is best. On Saturday night, we democratically elected the winner to be Team Bagel.

So, the galleries: Team Adventure, Team Bagel, Team Shitty Ass Camera.

Wow, the setup music for Windows XP is new age-ie and relaxing.

• Written on 07 June 2004 & posted at 12:17 PM.
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Oh, those zany backshifts — they make you zany, causing you to have zany adventures with other zany people who are also a part of the zany backshift scene. Zany. Tonight has gone by pretty quick, and it's been pretty fun. After grabbing many a free coffee from the Tim Horton's kiosk that is setup for the telethon, Tawnya and I jetted off to Alexandra's Pizza in the middle of the night for some donairs. Actually, she just kept me company, because she's a craaazy vegetarian and doesn't eat donairs. Plus, she was weirded out by the fact that the tinfoiled donairs were pretty much the same size, shape, and weight of, say, a guinea pig. Yummy! Nothing quite like watching somebody shave some meat off of a spicy torso. Mmmm.

Anyway, Debbie is training Jenn, the New Girl of the admitting and registration scene, so much of my time up there was spent warning her of the horrors of backshift. I think we scared her a bit, but she will be fine. The hospital seems to have hired an awful lot of new people lately, which isn't bad (since we're perpetually understaffed), but is odd and sudden. Why go for six months without nearly enough employees and then suddenly hire a whole heap? It's not like they were trying to get people and no one wanted the job — come on, who can turn down $14 an hour to sit in an office and do paperwork? It's a great gig.

Moving along, yesterday was the day of Shiny Plastic Scavenger Hunt 2004, originally slated for today (I just want to point out that “yesterday” means “today” to me, and “today” means “tomorrow” — being awake during a date change leads to weird sentences). There were three teams: Team Adventure (Steve, Keddy and myself), Team Bagel (John, Janet, and Russell), and Team Shitty Camera (Pugsley and Castro). Despite the minor hitch that Team Shitty Camera had a shitty camera which ended up losing most of their pictures, it was a blast. I had all intents of putting the pictures online RIGHT NOW so that everyone could vote for the best team, but I don't have a copy of the items we were supposed to take pictures of (Russell, fix that — send me a copy of the email). Since we had no judge earlier to decide a winning team, we did a democratic sort of dealie, according to which the winning team was Bagel, followed by Shitty Camera and Adventure. I'm curious to see how the Internet Crowd will rank the photos, though. So, as soon as I get a copy of the list, I'll shove them up here for all y'all.

So, yeah. I guess it's time to depart. I hope everyone enjoys the time period during which I am asleep.

PS: Girls have boobs. And Something Awful has a review of a horrible movie called .com for Murder. The review is hilarious, and the movie sounds so ridiculously bad that we need to see it. Seriously. Somebody try to find it.

• Written on 06 June 2004 & posted at 05:30 AM.
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First of all, I write “virus” just because modern virii aren't virii in the original sense of the word (well, original in the computer world). As some may recall, viruses originally spread by infecting executable files and replacing some of their code. Modern versions are (generally) just scripts, so I think they almost deserve a new category — especially the ones that can infect you without you doing anything at all.

Speaking of which, meet Korgo: he's a bitch. Much like Sasser, it can spread without you doing anything unless you patch your system (or are behind a suitably beefy firewall). So, do that — it's the KB835732 security update. You'll save yourself and others a hell of a lot of hassle.

(Found via Slashdot)

• Written on 05 June 2004 & posted at 02:05 AM.
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I'm sorry, I just had to share this picture:

For some odd reason, I'm watching Tomb Raider. I've seen it before, but I don't really remember much about it. Also, my phone has been ringing a lot over the last half hour — I guess I should answer it at some point. Sigh.

At some point in the near future, I think I will be performing a case mod first: sprucing up a...USB drive. Yeah, weird, I know, but my beloved USB drive is scratched to all crap from two years of pocket dwelling. I'm going to get some black and silver spray paint and a blue LED to replace the red one. Why? Cos then it will match my laptop. :) How sad is that?

Anyway, yeah — who has some interesting ideas for amusing activities for the near future? I think we should do another digital camera scavenger hunt — who's up for that? Yesterday, I went bowling with Janet, Keddy, Steve, Nathan, and Apollo. Surprisingly, I'm pretty decent at bowling, or at the very least, not as horrible as I am at most things. I had a blast, and I think we should make it a regular event, once a month or something.

Fancy fancy.

• Written on 02 June 2004 & posted at 04:05 PM.
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