It's voting day for Americans (even dual-citizen, border-straddling people like yours truly).
If you are eligible, please vote. Not all elections in all places matter in the grand scheme of things, but federal elections in the world's only superpower do matter. They have effects, and sometimes they change the world. You have an opportunity to have a hand in making history, which is something very few people in whole course of our species' duration on this planet have ever had the chance to do. Cool, huh?
I love voting. I get a giddy thrill every time I cast a ballot. This has not been diminished by the fact that just about everyone I've ever voted for has lost.
But I keep voting because, hey, I'm due baby!
2004 Nov 02 // Link // E-mail
Song in my head: "I Look Around" by The Rain Parade
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Horror movies in 30 seconds … by bunnies! You cannot resist them, and you shouldn't even try:
And for those who insist that Titanic isn't a horror movie, I have two words for you: Celine Dion.
2004 Nov 03 // Link // E-mail
Song in my head: "Chim Chim Cher-Ee" by Dick Van Dyke (Mary Poppins)
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I went to two parties on Saturday night, and I didn't drag myself home until after 5AM. You'd think that would be some sort of indicator that I'm not a total nerd, wouldn't you?
At least, you'd think that if you hadn't actually met me.
But instead, the big news I want to share from Carringtonland is that I had my very first Ebay experience this weekend. Yup, until now I'd neither bought nor sold anything on Paypal's poppa. And when I finally did, it wasn't to buy something cool like a motorcycle or a poster of Shaft. Oh no, not me. The thing that got me reading about auction sniping and bidding techniques was an $8 copy of a double-decades old Apple II computer game. “Yet another in a long series of diversions in an attempt to avoid responsibility,” and if you get the reference you have no right to judge me. ;-)
The game I so eagerly snagged was one I had wanted to play back when I had Apple II computers the first time around, about five thousand years ago. Now that I've got a “new” Apple IIe sitting on my kitchen table I've started eyeing the Infocom games and other goodies available online. I'd much rather stumble across them at nerd-fest vintage computer trade shows like the one I attended last month, but alas those don't come around often.
So now Dondra's winging its way here and there'll be hot times in the old 8-bit town tonight (or in a couple weeks when it actually, hopefully, arrives).
Eyeglasses, meet masking tape. Pens, meet pocket protector. You'll get to know each other well.
2004 Nov 08 // Link // E-mail
Song in my head: "Fairytale in the Supermarket" by The Raincoats
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Three count 'em three friends in the past month or so have told me their mothers read my blog. How does one deal with such things? I'm having trouble wrapping my head around it.
For instance, yesterday was one of those days where work becomes WORK, and then quickly turns into WORK. Nothing too exciting to relate, just many hours of pouring over the minutia of documentation and thumb-twiddling on long distance phone calls (which thankfully weren't on my dime). Frankly, I'd usually describe the above in more, um, richly phrased detail, perhaps with a few paragraphs of venting about the inability of both lawyers and technical writers to pen a single unambiguous sentence. But in an obvious attempt to maintain my repuation as Such A Nice Boy I'll just say:
Pooh.
2004 Nov 11 // Link // E-mail
Song in my head: "I Will Dare" by The Replacements
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My pal and vintage t-shirt monger Erin gave me a little Apple branded box. Opening it up revealed a vintage Apple II Tutorial pin:
I don't care if my friends want to celebrate or mock my recent penchant for old computers, as long as they do so with gifts as cool as this.
2004 Nov 17 // Link // E-mail
Song in my head: "The Girl All The Bad Guys Want" by Bowling for Soup
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I do have things to share, but no time in which to share them. I even have stuff to share that isn't to do with vintage computers, much to your delight I'm sure. I should have some time to write during the day today, but I'll be away from 'net access so I won't be able to post until later.
In the meantime, I'll quickly share this question for the studio audience: why do I roll my oranges?
I don't mean that I roll them down hills. And I don't mean that I mug them, either. Though I'll admit sometimes I think … no, skip that.
I roll my oranges. And mandarins. And clementines. Basically, if it's orange-ish, round, and citrus then I roll it before peeling it.
aside:
Shouldn't it be called unpeeling? If the shell that I remove from a fruit is called its peel, then the removal of that shell should be called unpeeling. Get on that, won't you?
end of aside
Before I (un)peel an orange I place it on a flat surface (a table or desk is good for this, the forehead of a stranger on the subway considerably less so). Using the palm of my hand, I press down with enough pressure to slightly squish the orange but not enough to make it burst open. Then I roll it around. Roll roll roll.
When I do this, I can feel the peel separating from the juice slices within. After rolling an orange for a few seconds, the peel comes off far more easily and leaves a lot fewer of those stringy white bits I'd otherwise have to pick off. I'm happy with my orange (un)peeling technique.
The thing is, I have no idea when I started doing this. Nobody else in my family rolls their oranges, but I've been doing it at least as early as high school because I remember a then-cute girl in the school cafeteria commenting on my distracted compulsion of torturing oranges before (un)peeling them. I almost stopped rolling oranges right there and then because girls have power, and they are sometimes scary. But the rightness of rolling my oranges won out in the end.
You know, I always assumed the low number of dates I had in the first two years of high school was because I was a Dungeons & Dragons playing computer nerd. But maybe it was just the oranges.
Citrus is a dangerous mistress. Which is not only true, but also hard to say five times fast.
2004 Nov 24 // Link // E-mail
Song in my head: "Baby It's Cold Outside" by Zooey Deschanel and Leon Redbone
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Electronics surplus in Toronto was synonymous with Active Surplus on Queen Street for many years. The large, cluttered building with the ape standing outside has been one of my favorite nerd-friendly shopping destinations since high school.
But they've gone and cleaned it up. How sad.
They've also moved it down the street and up to the second floor. The ape still stands out front, and there's even a fellow hawking flyers for the new location. Yet I still had trouble finding the place. I walked back and forth in front of it twice before spotting it. That doesn't bode well for their foot traffic.
Okay, I'll grant that I'm nearsighted and prone to getting lost, but still I think this place is too non-obvious.
The new digs are not nearly as fun as the old ones. It's too brightly lit for one thing, and too well organized by half. But worst of all is there is simply too little stuff.
Oh, there are still lots of boxes full of plastic funnels, chess pieces and paint rollers. But the new location is woefully under stocked when it comes to the stuff that made Active Surplus famous: the strange cable adaptors, esoteric circuit boards, and rare computer hardware.
Active Surplus is now a place to find a cheap harness for your pet instead of a cheap hard drive for your PET, and that's really too bad.
Luckily, some of the people who used to work at Active have opened another surplus shop up on Bloor St. just west of Bathurst. It's called Above All Surplus, and although it's much smaller than Active it's far more in keeping with the old Active feel.
My trip down to Active left me empty handed, but I came away from Above All with the cables I'll need to fashion a null modem, plus a box of 5.25" floppy disks for my Apple IIe (about $10 total).
The floppies are big news for me. Sure, you Windows users have probably had boxes of them nearby all along, right there on the shelf beside your boxes of anti-virus software and your long list of tech support telephone numbers. But as a Mac user I haven't had a computer with any kind of floppy drive for about six years.
It was fun formatting my first floppy disks in half a decade. I took a photo, because I'm a nerd.
Oh gosh, I'm such a nerd.
Tomorrow I'll try to post something that interests normal people like television or girls or cars, I promise.
2004 Nov 28 // Link // E-mail
Song in my head: "Instaglo" by The Invisible Cities
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The monthly Nerd Night get together for game playing and all-you-can-eat pasta was a blast, as always. It was a smaller than usual turnout (if there can be a “usual” at only the third event) but there was just as much laughter and gaming fun as always.
I try to play at least one or two new games each time. This time around, I tried a game called Labyrinth. It's a tile game, and I really enjoyed it even though I came in last.
Another game I tried for the first time was something called Pit. It's a card game from the 70's in which you try to “corner the market” by collecting a hand full of the same cards (labeled wheat, rye, corn, and so forth). You can trade any number of the same-faced cards at once. When you collect all the cards for one commodity, you ring a bell to close the trading and announce that you've won.
The game quickly devolves into a table full of people yelling "Two! Two! Two!" or "Three! Three! Three!" as they try to arrange trades. It's fast, it's loud, and it's hilarious.
And I cheated.
After playing a number of rounds, all of which zipped past and all of which ended in bouts of laughter, I decided to throw a wrench into the system. I collected one of each of the different cards, and then … I just held on to them. It was now impossible for anyone to corner any market, so the game just went on and on, getting faster and faster, louder and louder, as the same few cards were traded back and forth by everyone (but me) frantically trying to find that one last card they needed to win.
In the movie below you can see the moment I start to mess with the game because I begin collecting and then trading away cards without even looking at them. Everyone else is so caught up in the game they don't notice, but you can hear Erin behind the camera start to laugh as she catches on:
Carrington cheats at Pit [1.9MB AVI]
Nerd Night has become one of the things I most look forward to each month. It's open to everyone, so if you're free on the last Monday of a month you should come out and play. Drop me a line for directions. The next one will be on December 27, and since most people are off work that week the turnout should be good. There's even talk of making it an all day drop-in game-a-palooza.
I'd tell you to make sure you don't miss it because all the cool kids will be there, but with a name like Nerd Night I'm not going to fool anyone.
I just remembered that in my last post I promised some normal non-nerd blogging about television or girls or something. I guess I do have stuff to share about watching television recently and how it reminded me why I don't watch it, plus I've got photos of Tanya taking photos of bicycles. Stay tuned.
2004 Nov 29 // Link // E-mail
Song in my head: "Play By The Rules" by Sissies
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I promised “normal stuff” about girls and things, so here's some of that. Don't say I never gave ya nothing.
Walking with my friend Tanya involves stopping for her to take pictures of bicycles. She has a new digital camera (one that shames my precious pocket snapshot maker) and a thing for photos of bicycles.
My friends are weird, though I suppose that's a teleology.
We hung out on Sunday and I took photos of her taking photos of bicycles, because I am postmodern and very interesting to know.
Just so you don't think it was all pomo and pixels, we also ducked into a computer shop. And before you jump to the conclusion that we did this because I'm a nerd and constantly have technology on my mind (even if that may be true) I'd like to point out that it was her idea. She needed RAM for her iBook. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.
In the shop there was a fellow talking into his cell phone. As we passed him he said, "It's not my business. I'm just a middle-man. I'm lying for everybody.”
You meet the most interesting people in Toronto. Or would do, if you stopped to chat with them instead of just eavesdropping like me.
