ShinyPlasticBag

The strangest thing happened this morning...oh wait, that's already been done. Hmm, I need a new angle on this...let's see. Much like Mike yesterday, I found a strange package in my mailbox this morning. It was a VHS tape (so retro) wrapped in plain brown paper with “Mark” written on the front. No postage or address or anything, so it was dropped off by somebody. I popped the tape into my VCR and watched, pretty much expecting to get the same deal as Mike. What I found was:

1. A clip from the movie Rush Hour
2. A clip of a cat jumping into a wall
3. A clip from “Come On Over” by Christina Aguilera

The weirdest thing of all is that, after the last clip, the screen goes black and a big white X appears. I called Mike to tell him and he thought it was pretty strange. But guess what? John got one too! His video is a clip from Clueless, a car spinning in circles, and — get this — “Hanging by a Moment” by Lifehouse. WEIRD. We discussed possible meanings, but everyone seems to be able to find some sort of logic in theirs except for me:

• Mike: “Mutt” by Blink-182 is playing in the background of his American Pie clip. Then there's a video of a cat. Then a song by Alient Ant Farm. Dog, cat, ant. Animals.
• Me: Maybe I should have gotten John's tape, because I'm Clueless.
• John: Clueless, car, hanging by a moment. John was clueless about his car (getting TP'd) and he's still hanging on to it.

Isn't this weird?

• Written on 28 July 2004 & posted at 03:38 PM.
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So, last night Janet and I watched Le Fabuleux destin d'Amélie Poulain, known more easily as Amélie. First of all, let me remind the world that I love weird foreign films. Second of all, let me thank Dan for telling me three years ago that this movie was wicked. Third, let me thank Tracy for letting me borrow it. Finally, let me say that it kicked ass.

I don't remember the last time I watched such a strange movie — I actually don't know if I ever have (although American Beauty is a very close second). Basically, the movie is about a strange girl who doesn't really know how to relate to other people. She decides to perform a good deed, and if it goes well, will dedicate her life to good deeds. It does, so she does, and as she performs all of her good deeds, she falls in love with a guy who is a lot like she is. Very good, very weird. I'm quickly falling into the category of people who prefer subtitled movies over anything else.

Anyway, work was good this weekend. Both nights were quite slow, so I ended up being on a mad coding spree for the Summer of Express contest. As I've mentioned, I'm submitting SpindeXML in the C# category. For the uninitiated, SpindeXML is a CD indexing program that lets you browse and search your CDs quickly. And man, do I mean quickly: the new version (4.1) is about 30 times faster during searches than the old one. It's backwards-compatible with files from the previous version (although the new one creates Unicode XML), and you can actually mix and match components from the two versions (there are four modules: the main interface, the indexer, search, and browse — each is a separate EXE file). I can't imagine why you'd want to, though. So, I'd say the project is about 90% done. I'm having some trouble with the indexer, which seems to work fine, but Russell's discovered a folder on his hard drive that gets indexed in a totally messed up way, and I can't figure out what the problem is.


And that's me up-to-date. How are you?

• Written on 27 July 2004 & posted at 02:11 PM.
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Man alive, time flies when you're, erm, chillaxing. Since Monday or so, I've been thinking “it's time to update the site” but not getting around to it. And before I know it, here we are at Friday, and the relatives are getting ready to leave. I can't believe it's been three weeks already, but the calendar seems to corroborate the events happening around me. Since the last update, I've been camping in Prince Edward Island with the relatives, Mary Ann, Rogan, Dustin, and (but of course) Janet. It was a lot of fun, although I'm now flat broke until next Thursday. Rogan and I spent all of Wednesday on the waterslides at Rainbow Valley, everyone's favourite somewhat ghetto-esque amusement area. I love waterslides.

Anyway, I'm sad to see the relatives going, (although John is actually staying for an extra week, so they're not all gone). I've had a blast, and it really sucks that I only get to see them every five years. However, it will be very nice to sleep on my futon again — I can't wait for that. We're heading out to the airport tomorrow afternoon to see them off, with (as usual) promises to keep in touch. These rarely pan out in real life, of course, but with the advent of email and instant messaging and cheap long distance, I'm more confident it will work.



So, that's me up to date for now. If anyone wants to say farewell to my Scottishes, here and now is most likely the proper place and time.

• Written on 23 July 2004 & posted at 12:53 AM.
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So, in a display that pretty much shocked absolutely everyone, Darryl got married. Yep, Darryl. His new bride, Amy, is obviously a perfect match for him, and is nicer than most people since she actually took his name (who would want Wall for a last name??). The wedding and reception were both very nice, although it was very strange to see all of these people who I haven't seen in years and years. Two events at the wedding stick out in my mind as classic Darryl-isms: first, he messed up his vows, even though it required a short-term memory span of about three seconds. By the end of it, the elder was feeding him words one by one. Classic. This, of course, messed Amy up, and she did the same thing when her turn rolled around. The second classical Darryl-ism is the choice of music he decided to use for their grand entrance to the reception: Also Sprach Zarutha, aka the theme to 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was a very great, very pretentious choice. I loved it. Anyway, I wish Darryl and Amy lots of happiness, since they deserve it. I'm glad they've found each other.

A day such as this has led to me being at work and quite sleepy, since I didn't get much sleep yesterday or the day before. Even though I snuck away from the reception fairly early, I could only grab about an hour's worth of sleep before work. I can tell that I will be collapsing by the end of this shift, but if I'm lucky, I'll be able to avoid tomorrow's activities (a barbecue down in Western Shore) and just relax a bit. I'd forgotten how hard working backshift can be if you're not staying on the backshift schedule (or something like it) on a regular basis.

In other news, Taylor and Kitta have both recently celebrated their blog's second anniversaries. After I stumbled across Kitta's, I decided to actually check when my site was created. It turns out that I, too, birthed a web site two year's ago: Friday was the second anniversary of ShinyPlasticBag. It doesn't quite count as much, however, since I didn't begin daily postings until March of 2003. However, I do find it strange that the three of us all registered our domains within the same week and then ran into each other a year later. Very strange coincidence. However, happy birthday to all three sites: gtmcknight.com, kitta.net, and shinyplasticbag.com. May these domains be the best of friends forever.

• Written on 17 July 2004 & posted at 11:20 PM.
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In other news, I'm having a blast in Maine.

• Written on 14 July 2004 & posted at 01:16 AM.
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Another year, another renewal. This time, I decided to double my pleasure:

I guess $39 isn't bad for two years worth of domaining-it-up. Of course, I still have to renew my DNS hosting, but that's not up until sometime in September. I wish Domains at Cost offered DNS hosting so I could get both things in one place — I could have just renewed my domain with my DNS host (Lanechange), but their site is ugly (I'm shallow) and I didn't want to experience the hassle of a domain transfer.

To do list: (1) add CSS code to make lyrical quotes look nice, (2) update the XSL files for full lyrics to match the new layout, (3) create the goodies and projects pages. For those who are curious, I'll be putting things like the referers and stupid searches pages under goodies, and info on my be-yoo-ti-ful creations under projects.

Anyway, I'm out. I'm totally watching Amélie tonight: who's interested? Yay, foreign flicks!

By the way, I'm off to Maine (ick) for the week — I'll be back on Thursday, I think. Wish me luck.

• Written on 12 July 2004 & posted at 04:36 PM.
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Well, in case you're using a text browser, I'd like to point out that I have a shiny new layout. I'm a big, big fan, and I hope everyone else likes it too. This is the first layout I can remember doing that doesn't feature any green. It's a bit weird for me.

Anyway, excuse the mild bugs, which I should be fixing on my lunch hour tonight, and help me celebrate: exactly one year ago today, I started my counter. Over the last year, I've gotten (as of now) 85,701 hits. That's an average of a bit more than 230 per day, most of which I blame on the fact that Steve, John, Keddy, and myself all use it as our home page. If anyone else does too, let me know.

A more important milestone is the fact that it's Pugsley's birthday. Happy 21st, you big...guy...you.

Everyone, call me this afternoon. I want to hang out — I feel like I'm living in a backshift bubble. I hate that.

• Written on 12 July 2004 & posted at 01:59 AM.
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Best geek news in quite a while: the Mono project has finally released version 1.00! It's always great to see open source projects get to that first big milestone. For those of you who aren't in the know, Mono is an open source implementation of the Microsoft .NET framework. This is because even hardcore, anti-Microsoft, open source geeks had to admit that .NET was a pretty amazing accomplishment. Although I'm not one of those hardcore geeks, I don't like Microsoft's implementation. If you like to code, check out SharpDevelop — it's a wicked awesome IDE that is modelled pretty closely on Microsoft Visual Studio. However, it uses Mono.

HP was kind enough to return my computer yesterday, so I've spent most of my free time since then getting up to speed. Both of the Mozilla projects I follow, Firefox and Thunderbird, have released new versions. As far as I can tell, the only change is fixing that shell: protocol security issue that was discovered a few days back. Speaking of new versions, a while back Firefox gained the ability for users to customize what search engines they can access through the search box. I just added IMDB, freedb.org, and Dictionary.com. Try it out.

And speaking of IMDB, I've got the strangest urge to watch Detroit Rock City, which is a few years older than I remember. It's been a long time since I've seen it — who wants to watch it?

In other news, I got an email letting me beta test w.bloggar 4.00, since I'm a special member or something (I donated a few bucks through PayPal). The verdict? It seems to be exactly the same. Well, that's not quite true — it will finally open links in the default web browser, instead of Internet Explorer, and there's an option to insert XHTML compliant tags. However, it still doesn't let me edit extended text. However, that's not a real big shortcoming.

From the big shortcomings department, however, have you noticed that Windows will complain about not being able to find “www.whatever.com” when you enter an address into the Run box and Firefox is your default browser? I've found the solution to the problem on JonGalloway.ToString(). The solution is pretty simple, so if that's been bugging you, fear not.

Anyway, I'm off to play with the GMail account Pugsley gave me (so far, not really impressed). Later.

• Written on 10 July 2004 & posted at 04:43 PM.
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So, I'm quite pissed at HP right now. My laptop was sent away on June 18th and arrived there on the 21st. They guarantee repair within 14 days of receipt — it's been fifteen. I was informed that there is a “parts delay” and my computer is not ready. They've delayed it by another week and, frankly, I'm not too sure they're competent enough to complete it by then. If their service centre is so poorly organized that they don't have a few extra LCDs available, they're frigging brain dead. Moreover, they'll give me no information whatsoever about when the part is expected to arrive. The would-be-humourous-if-I-wasn't-fuming part of this is how the web site blabs on about how having a central repair facility helps to ensure quick repair, since the technicians will have ready access to all needed parts. I would understand this a bit better if something like “Transistor L42-7A” had blown itself up, but it's the screen that needs to be replaced.

Tomorrow, I'll be calling back during regular business hours so I can get in touch with the repair folks directly. If they can't give me a straight answer, I'm going to try to talk them into sending out a brand new unit. We're leaving for Bangor on Monday and I want to have a computer to keep me amused. Plus, there's that programming contest that Russell pointed out which I think I have a decent chance of winning.

Tech support still sucks. And the Scottishes are still awesome.

• Written on 07 July 2004 & posted at 12:12 AM.
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So, the Scottishes are indeed here and (indeed) great. For those of my local friends who haven't met them yet, make sure they do. The combination of accents plus either extreme sarcasm (for the adults) or extreme cuteness (for the wee ones) is a killer. Too bad they live all the way across the Atlantic Ocean. Who would want to live there, anyway? If it's no' Canada, it's CRAP, after all.

Also, my beloved laptop arrives home on either Tuesday or Wednesday (I am, of course, hoping for Tuesday). I never thought I could get so excited about eight pounds of metal and plastic, but here I am. So many things to download once it gets back: newest version of Firefox, newest version of Mono...it'll be great.

Anyway, part of Steve's underglow fell off last night, lasting approximately two months longer than I would expect anything that we've installed to last. I'm going outside RIGHT NOW to help (read: watch) him fix it. Yahoo.

• Written on 04 July 2004 & posted at 05:52 PM.
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Yahoo! Three weeks of me saying “If it's no' Scottish, it's CRAP!” in a bad Scottish accent! I can't wait. Additionally, Alex has officially left for six weeks in Costa Rica to do some crazy hippie stuff, so wish her luck in not getting malaryia or a tapeworm or something.

Because if it's no' Scottish, it's CRAP.

• Written on 03 July 2004 & posted at 08:30 AM.
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So, how is everyone? Happy belated Canada Day — that makes 138 of them, if my calculations are correct. Which they generally are.

It's raining outside, and thundering, and lightninging. I'll bet Amanda is scared. I find it somewhat pleasant when the weather is all crazy — it's nice to see the climate get pissed off every now and again.

I'm at work (well, on lunch, actually) because I didn't want to work backshift tonight. In fact, I don't work at all tomorrow, because (da da da daaaaa) the Scots arrive tomorrow morning. I didn't want to be all sleepy when they got here and I didn't want to have to work on the first night they were here, so I figured I'd rearrnage my schedule a bit. Tomorrow, at 8:30 am, Janet, Steve, me, my mom, my grandmother, my aunt, uncle, cousin, and his fiance are all traipsing out to the airport to great them. It'll be great. (Sorry, have to throw random Friends quotes in every now and again — for the curious, watch the episode right after Ross and Rachel broke up — season 3, episode 17 I think. Man, I'm lame.)

So, I'm excited. Yeah. Can't wait. And I have to leave now — so, welcome them to Canada with all of your mental powers. We'll have a barbecue so you can all meet them.

• Written on 02 July 2004 & posted at 08:33 PM.
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