Stupid t-shirts I buy on the Internet

I finally ordered my "MORE COWBELL" t-shirt. It's been a long time coming. You can get this and many more stupid t-shirts at www.noisebot.com.

Including other favorites like..

Line 6 JM4 Looper - My next toy

Got an email from my freinds at Line6 today. Seems they have a new looper out. The JM4. I've owned at least 3 loopers in the past and I tend to upgrade and jump to the newest thing because I use it so much.

And this one seems to ROCK!!!!! I like that it has Jam tracks built-right in. I'm gonna have to jettison my Boss RC-50!

Any takers! I'll let it go Cheap!(grin).


I also need some new amplification. I'm thinking of going line 6 as well, I love their stuff! I bought a little Spider practice amp and it sounds just as good as my Atomic! But that's for another day!

Check it out!

VS Tanks - I love Shermans!

I love Sherman tanks. I love the shape and cut of them, the mean bull-dog look, the no-nonsense, get things done attitude the tank seems to have.

Sure the 75mm gun sucked a bit near the end of WWII and the Nazis' all had bigger , more cutting edge complicated tanks, but the fact that the Sherman was a simple mass produced standardized platform and you never just saw one of the damned things, always a big pile of them on any battlefield certainly proved that back then, multiple medium heavy tanks would do the job over a few supertanks (which were so fancy they tended to break a lot)

When I was a kid I got this big set of army men, a big plastic Nazi castle with 88mm guns and a whole load of attacking Allied forces with plastic half-tracks and one Sherman tank for Christmas. I'd set all the stuff up and knock them over with whatever projectile was handy. My best friend back in the 70's then was a war buff and had plastic models galore and we'd conduct massive war games in his basement or better yet, extended trench warfare campaigns at his cottage in Nova Scotia!
He also turned me onto war comics, especially "The Haunted Tank" which featured a Sherman tank flying a confederate army flag (long story).

So, fast forward to today. I'm working on the script of the Bigfoot 3 movie and I decided last year that I wanted to have a tank in the story (what better to hunt Bigfoot with, an old WWI Sherman tank!) so I've been scouring the Internet for the right RC model. The best one hands down is the Tamiya 1/16th scale M4 Sherman. Look at the thing (pictured right)! Tell me that's not the real thing! It's also REAL EXPENSIVE! SRP is $899 CDN, you can get it for $447 US on Ebay from Hong Kong with $99 US Shipping but then you gotta buy some custom batteries and a 4 channel RC controller. You're still looking at over a grand for this thing. And you have to completely build and paint it - which is going to be a lot of fun (some day)!

So I had to look around a bit more, and I found a page on these cool VS IR Tanks (pictured top left). They are 1/25th scale, come assembled and painted (awww) with an RC controller (yay!) and the cool thing is, they have Infrared sensors that let you shoot other VS tanks and have tank battles! In the US you can get ones that fire freakin BB's! Imagine the fun you can have with that and the family cat!
These ones look almost as good if you weather them up a bit and cost $109US. Done deal. I bought two so I could play with the kids! A Sherman and a Tiger! The classic confrontation (ok not really, I'd need like 4 Shermans and one Tiger and the Tiger'd get at least 2 of the Shermans before one managed to sneak up behind it and hit it in the ass).

Youtube is full of tank battles with these things, check them out!

I'm looking forward to putting this thing onscreen with us hanging off of it next year!

Rasterbator, you won't go blind!

Thanks to Gwiliker for this link. This is a program that lets you take any image and blow it up for print on 8.5x11 sheets of paper, which you fix together and mount, or whatever.

The Rasterbator creates huge, rasterized images from any picture. Upload an image, print the resulting multi-page pdf file and assemble the pages into extremely cool looking poster up to 20 meters in size.

Check out the Gallery!


Very cool! I see Frame 351 from the Patterson-Gimlin film hanging on my wall real soon!

Supperworks, Granny and the sick truck.

My cousin is a Auto Mechanic in Winchester. We use him when our car or truck gets sick. Speaking of sick, my Granny is in the hospital in Winchester with some unusual symptoms, but they've ruled a lot of the more dangerous causes out so I hope she'll be fine soon. Her being in the hospital coincides with our truck being sick so we sent it up to Winchester to get some work done on it. We have an ingenious method of getting it up there without actually making the trip. We switch cars with my other cousin who works in Ottawa, but lives up there. So today my wife met my cousin, took him for pizza lunch at Louie's Pizza, switched cars and he drove ours up to Winchester, borrowing some other car to get the rest of the way home ( they're always borrowing each other's cars in the country, that's why they never lock them and leave the keys up in the sun-visor).

So that afternoon I got a call from my wife. She had forgot to put the summer tires in the back of the truck ( more like forgot to ask me to put them in) and my cousin needs them so he can actually put them on. So she is going to drive up to Winchester, visit Granny in the hospital, and drop off the tires.

So she leaves our place with kid #2 as I'm feeding kid #1. We are going to stay home and do fun things like doing homework and taking out the garbage! I suddenly get a phone call from a Friend of my wife's. My wife has a Supperworks appointment with her and everyone completely forgot! Her Friend was calling from home at the other end of the city and she wasn't going to come out here in Orleans where Supper works is because it's too far. Can my wife make up her order?

"She's not here." I told her.

If you don't go make up your order there is some penalty charge, because they prepare it all ready to combine into meals. Plus it could go to waste. Plus you don't have it to eat! I made a few phone calls. I can fix this! I thought. How hard can this Supperworks thing be for a guy who makes bullwhips and guitars and Bigfoot movies?

I herded my kid out to my cousin's car in our driveway. I looked in the sun visor. WHAT! No keys! Oh yeah, my wife was driving.. Crap. I phone her. As I'm doing this my kid finds $15 in my cousin's car and asks me if I want it. I decline and tell her to stop that and put it back.

A few minutes later, after confirmation that keys to my cousin's car are indeed my wife's purse and currently on the way to Winchester I call my parental units and get my Mother on the phone. Dad is out and Mom is sick (she must have been sick, the phone call only lasted about 45 seconds). She ain't going nowhere, but if I can get myself there I can use their truck.

I Open the garage, out comes the bike (thank crap the tires have air) , with the come-along rider for kid #2. This is a mini bike that attaches onto a full sized bike so you can pull your kid. I like it because I can bike at Warp factor 10 and not have to wait for my kid because she is attached to the back(she likes it too!). I sling a pack with her Nintendo DS in it to my back and off we go! It takes me a few minutes to try and close the garage door to the new place without going back into the house because it has sensor beams that open it back up if you walk in front of them while trying to duck under the closing door. You have to press the wall button and do a "Raiders of the Lost Ark" boulder dash before the door closes performing a jump and duck at the same time to clear the ground beam and the closing door. It must have looked pretty weird.

We got to my parent's place in about 20 minutes, passing one "professional biker" on the road on our way over. You know the kind, Oakley sun glasses, all decked out in space-age bike clothing with water bottles attached every where on a racer you can pick up with your little finger. I think the post and bike seat were even attached to the butt of her pants, I didn't get a good look, I had places to be. I stashed the bike, got the keys and drove to Supperworks!

I installed my kid in the front café of the place with her electronic babysitter Nintendo DS and headed to the front where they immediately asked me if I wanted any wine to drink (did I look that stressed out?). Turns out this is a perk of the place. Sweet! I got a diet Coke instead. I got a list of meals and a demo of what to do at each station by some young girl who wasn't old enough to serve me wine if I had ordered it (grin) and it was off to the races. You hit each named station as it corresponds to the meals you've ordered on your sheet and follow the instructions - A teaspoon of this, a tablespoon of that, bla bla.. Then you pop it all in ziplock bags and slap a recipe sticker on it that tells you how to cook it when you get home.

My daughter helped me out after 30 minutes and got a kick out of it as well. It wasn't too hard. I felt like that Rat in the Computer Animated film Ratatouille, except I wasn't pulling anyone's hair. I was the only guy there in a sea of married women, except for one other guy who was preparing the meals with his wife.

I got out of there an hour later with the meals and a new appreciation of the place (I highly recommend it) and trucked it to Dairy Queen to fulfil a promise to my daughter that she could get a Blizzard if she behaved in there and let me get this over with. There's a Dairy Queen right across the street from the Orleans Supperworks but that one doesn't believe in Interac and make you use their RIP OFF EXPRESS bank machine( which they probably also own) It's the kind that charges you $2 to take money out and charges your bank $1.50 which of course they pass back right on to you for a $3.50 hit on $20. No thanks! Out to 10th line where they have no fee Interac! At this point my daughter said "You should have taken the $15 in uncle Mathew's car!"..
"That's not our money, we can't take that." I told her, to which she replied
"He's not doing anything with it!"

Can't argue with that logic. We mentioned this to my cousin in the exchange of vehicles the next day and he didn't even know he had money in there "Oh yeah! Where?!".

Doh!

So Supperworks = Good!
Going there on your bike = Bad
Letting your wife leave you with no mode of transportation for emergencies = Also Bad
Dairy Queens who try to bilk money out of "never carry cash" people like me = Very bad!
Kids who don't yet understand that it's not ok to take other people's money= Not a problem at the moment but could be troubling in the future if it turns out to be my money

And Granny's doing well!

Why do gay men have sex in the woods near my geocache?

Have they all read this book? The reason I ask is I have this geocache which I planted here back in 2003 , and it being a nice sunny day and all, someone went to find it this week - and got something else they didn't bargain for. Now this isn't the first time this has happened, and some people have actually emailed me to close this one down, but I'm not there yet. I think it's a case of a few bad apples ruining a nice location in the city by following male hikers/geocachers and otherwise having sex in public. Opposite-sex sex in public places where you might take your kids for a hike or a picnic is just as bad as same-sex sex in said places.

And it's a double shame because it's the closest parking lot to the Ottawa River bike paths, which is what I use it for all the time!

Is it the high price of hotel rooms? Isn't it cold?

So what sometimes happens in the area my geocache is in is this. You show up with your GPS to do a little geocaching, you head down the path to where my container is and you sometimes get followed by curious gay men. According to posted logs by geocachers, they range in size and shape from fit 20 somethings to "old fat guys wearing sunglasses with no shirt and a ZZ-top beard". They don't make physical contact with you, as there is some complicated ritual that takes place beforehand and straight geocachers don't pass it, and the hint is quickly taken and they back off. Still. It's not the dark ages and gay men do not have to hide out in the woods to do that sort of stuff. Get a room!

I'd like to throw in my "I'm not a homophobic" disclaimer here. Gay people do not freak me out. It's a genetic difference that 10% of our population has. Overt sexual stuff that takes place in "pride" marches and the like bother me a bit in that I don't particularly like the sight of middle aged guys in assless chaps dancing on a downtown sidewalk when I'm taking my kids to the Museum of Nature.

"Is that a policeman Daddy?"
"Nope... he ripped his pants or something. Look over there at the Woolly Mammoth!"

There have been a few times where I have been approached by strange men looking for something all along the Ottawa River parkway. The first time it happened to me was in my 20's when I pulled into one of the parking areas because I missed a turn off into Rockcliffe and wanted to look at my map. As I was sitting there in my car some guy came over, opened up the passenger side and got in.

Uhh, WTF? I looked at him. He was older than me. I didn't know him. What was he suddenly doing in my car? So I asked him. Loudly. "WTF are you doing?" and he said (in an effeminate voice) "Sorry!" and got out and disappeared back into his own car. It dawned on me what was going on. When did that become ok? Should I do that to the next woman who pulls into the parking lot? Is that how one makes Friends around here?

Often in early 2002-2005 Tripper and I would geocache at night around there and when you parked in the lot and left your car there was always a lot of interest on the part of the other people parked there. Until we started strapping on gear and tech and harnesses and backpacks and unpacked these cop flashlights, headlamps and big 1 million candlepower beams, plus a ton of camera equipment. Then they would clear out, sometimes driving away quickly in case we were some type of law enforcement. That was kinda funny.

Throughout the early 90's I used to get propositioned in bathrooms, especially the McDonald's rest-rooms in the Market where strange men like to watch you pee (hey I even blogged that one), the Corel center of all places, and also elevators. There was a lull 1998 to 2003 when I weighed 250 pounds (50 to 55 pounds overweight for me), which is funny but it started back up after Project Ketosis brought me back to my proper weight. I guess some of these guys are superficial - "But I have a great personality!!!! Really!!!" (grin)

What really creeped me out about this geocache thing is the following website someone directed me too. It advertises this location as a pickup site. It has other places too, including the bathroom I used to get hassled at. Check it out. It's very freaky. I didn't think most gay men were like this but I guess if you think about it, testosterone on testosterone, the aggressive casual promiscuity makes sense.

So I'm leaving the geocache there. I'll put a disclaimer. And when I start my next movie, I'm going in there with a full camera crew and see what goes on there. Might make for some funny bloopers!

How big is float?

The other day at work someone asked me how many bytes the float variable type was in VB.NET. I couldn't remember exactly so I did a Google search.

"how big is float"

I didn't get my answer right away, but the 4rd article found caught my eye.

1. Do Big Boobs Float?

   Ever wonder just how well those big jugs handle water?
   www.spike.com/video/do-big-boobs-float/2905961 - 180k -

So. I had to investigate. According to the data, It's not a question of "big-ness", it's a question of "realness" or "non siliconess". REAL boobs float. Fake boobs sink. So pay attention next time you're in the swimming pool if that is your thing.

Yeah for real boobs! I'm not a fan of over-sized fake boobs for the most part. If you unfortunately end up losing one to disease, yes definitely, that I totally understand, but to increase the size of one's breasts to bovine proportions just for us men or self confidence reasons is quite unnecessary. (do they even work after?) .

Oh yeah..

float Data Type

The float type is stored as a four-byte, single-precision, floating-point number. It represents a single-precision 32-bit IEEE 754 value.

The float type can represent numbers as large as 1038 (positive or negative) with an accuracy of about seven digits, and as small as 10-44. The float type can also represent NaN (Not a Number), positive and negative infinity, and positive and negative zero.

Cineplex part Duex - Frozen Flies, Free gum and drunken fights.

Cineplex is where I discovered the joy of gum remover. That you could use this "insta-freeze" stuff to freeze a fly in mid air, and keep it still enough to tie a thread on it, so you could have a fly on a leash (unless you pulled to hard and cut it in half). It's real use of course was to freeze the flat glob of gum someone had decided to squish into the carpet during intermission so that you could kick it out with your shoe. We used to freeze each other's ties with it as well. Very fun stuff. We probably made a major contribution to the big hole in the ozone layer back then playing with that stuff.

At one point in time, the Dentyne company thought it would be good advertising to give out gum as people left the cinemas. Dentyne would ship us CRATES of gum. And I'd say each of us probably made a box of 500 disappear on our own. It went over well at parties you hadn't been invited too. A common thing as an usher in cineplex was to just listen to patrons talking to each other as they came out of a movie, you can't help it.
PATRON 1: "Hey man, we're heading over to Angie's for a party"
PATRON 2: "Is that the place on Riverside and Montreal Road?"
PATRON1: "Yeah, with the white door, just look for the house with all the cars parked on the lawn, you can't miss it!"

Sounds like a fun party. We had one guy who made a point of crashing them. I'd often give him a ride home and he often talked me into dropping him off at these parties that he was not invited too, and he'd bring a crate of Dentyne in case something went wrong (which it always did).

Door opens "Hey, is Angie here?"
DRUNK GUEST1: "Yeah, somewhere in here, come on in! - What's in the box?"

By the time Angie found out he'd already given out 200 packs of gum and everyone was chewing and saying "He's the Dentyne guy! let him stay!!".

The strangest thing they ever made us hand out after a film was Tampax. I shit you not! That did not last very long, but it was surreal while it lasted.

There's people who have had sex in the cinemas, people who fight in the cinemas, people who die, in the cinemas. Just about everything. No one was ever murdered during my time there but a few people really gave it a good try. I've ejected people and had Num Chucks and ice picks fall out of their jackets (they always want them back too). Vanier was a tough little berg back then. As long as they fought in the outer lobby, or outside the Cinema, that was ok, if they were on carpet and they started, then that was our problem. Luckily there was a Tim Horton's on the corner and we'd just call there for them to send over cops when things got really bad.

One night I ripped the ticket of this really big guy and who immediately went over to a rack of free movie magazines and tossed a pile of them in the air. Turns out he was drunk. I remember telling someone to keep an eye on him in #6. Later in the evening one of the ushers came out of #6 with a popcorn bag full of puke. A 16 year old kid staggered out soon after and started to heave his guts out in the bathroom. I went over to check on him but he couldn't talk while he was puking so I laid some paper towels out for him on the floor and went to get him some water. When I got back he was finished but he wasn't talking. I wanted to know who he was with so they could come and get him and take him home. In about an hour all the movies would be out and the bathroom would be crawling with people and he'd get stepped on.

Then my watch went off. BEEP BEEP. Hey it's 10:00pm ! My shift is over! Woohoo! I went to get another Usher to take charge of the drunk guy. I couldn't find one so I told the assistant manager Louie. Louie was a good guy. Louie went down to check the kid out and I went to get changed. Once in my street clothes I was sitting in the lobby waiting for my girlfriend and I told the only other Usher on duty about the drunk in the can. At this time, the door to cinema #6 pushed open and the BIG drunk magazine chucker from before stepped out and went into the guy's can.

We all heard some yelling and then a big WUMP that shook the wall! We ran into the can. Myself, Ross the Usher and someone else found the BIG drunk guy holding our Manager Louie by the neck against the bathroom mirror, basically sitting him in the sink(grin). Turns out the kid was his little brother and he didn't appreciate Louie telling him he had to get out of here and that the kid was drunk and underage. With the 3 of us (4 with Louie) we managed to move this guy into the lobby. Someone called Tim Horton's and asked them to send over any cops they might have there.

I'll always remember what the Big drunk guy said to us in the bathroom as we danced with him, trying to get his hand's off of Louie's neck. He was actually growling like a dog and saying over and over again "I got a lot of f@#kin' Family problems. I'm gonna kill all of you guys!". Not only did we get him out of the bathroom and out into the Cinema lobby, but there was an exit door right there that led to a utility hallway still inside the building but outside the theatre space. And it locked behind itself when it closed. I thought we could shove him out there and close it, locking him outside. We were experts at it, doing it to each other on countless shifts (I used to stick a pebble down in the frame so it wouldn't lock if I thought some ushers were going to toss me out that door. It was embarrassing, you had to circle the theatre to get back in again). So I pulled this door open, and we danced outside into the hallway, but it closed on us, leaving us locked outside with the big drunk guy with the family problems who wanted to kill us. Actually it was looking like he would actually be able to follow through on his intentions, he was having no problems throwing us around, we were just basically hanging on to his sweaty arms as he pinwheeled trying to clock one of us. This guy smelled bad.

By this time our head manager arrived on the scene (he was one of the biggest dickheads on the planet) and he opened the locked door from the other side and started to yell at this drunk guy and a strange thing happened. All of us let go of the big drunk guy. It was weird. He fixated on our manager, in his tux, standing there, yelling at him to "Get the F@ck out now!" and it was like in slow motion. Maybe this Big drunk guy will thump our manager! HAHAHAHAHAHA! Sure we'll jump in at the end so he won't get killed but just let him get one or two in there first! Was I really thinking this?

Just then some guy came in from the back and inserted himself between the drunk guy who was about to charge and yelled two inches from his face "Hey hey HEY!!". (it wasn't Fat Albert). It was a plainclothes cop, and behind him was the biggest, blackest, uniformed cop I'd ever seen. One of those 6 foot 8 guys who are a bit fat but still scary because they are so tall and the big drunk guy calmed right down.

We all had to file statements but I'm sure nothing came of it. Three weeks later the big drunk guy was back to see a movie. He was sober and well behaved and didn't remember any of it. The following week my manager hired cops to work there on Friday, Saturday and Tuesday nights, and nothing like that ever happened again (on those nights at least).

Cineplex Odeon. Working for minimum wage in the 80's.

Ahh, the cinema. I worked there for 4 years in the late 80's and early 90's. I had a job at a Wendy's hamburger joint for 3 months (don't eat the chili) before I got a job at Cineplex . I quit to work at the theatre for a number of reasons. Less work for the same pay, less grease(not as hard on the complexion). I didn't have to cut my hair. No 14 year old crew chief's telling you (at 17 years old) how to do your job different from the way the other 14 year old crew chief told you to do it, and slightly less stupider clothing. Better fringe benefits! Although I had learned how to eat a stray fully prepared hamburger while on grill in 4 seconds flat at Wendys (you cut it in 4 with the spatula), the prospect of free movies and all you can drink carbonated beverages was all the more better. The good looking female co-worker quotient was the same (if you can believe it! Those were lucky times with superficial male manager hiring practices), so why not take the opportunity and change jobs!

At a food place, you're stuck slaving away in the back, wearing a stupid uniform (I had a Wendy's "jazz" cap at the time. It was a promo to make the employees look "kewl"), hoping no one from your high school saw you working there, apart from the people from your high school already working there. Some of the in-store managers are cool, the district or regional ones who pop by to make them nervous and turn them into pricks are frickin cyborgs impersonating humans who would have been more at home in Nazi Germany.

At the Cinema working as an usher, you're out there in front, interacting with cute women and other members of the public. You're not too embarrassed to be there in your purple sports coat and bow tie, and it's pretty laid back, and you work for an hour getting people inside the movies and then you're on break sipping a free $4 overpriced coke. This impressed me greatly! Then when you went back to work it was your job to slip into each theater and watch the movie for awhile and make sure the temperature was set to slightly above freezing. When they let out you tried to herd the people like cattle outside and then you picked up between the aisles. Only the big stuff, cokes and popcorn bags so people could shuffle in or the next show. Many of my co-workers used to snack during this procedure, on the things they picked up off the floor, which I personally found a bit gross. "It's a bag of half-eaten M&M's, what's unsanitary about that!" was a refrain I'd heard more than once. The time my friend Darryl took a swig from a stranger's Coke in front of me was just for shock value I'm sure(grin).

Not much more to it than that. Moving stock around, kicking people out who tried to sneak in. Dealing with drunks and street people. Refunding angry people's tickets, sweeping the popcorn on the lobby floor. Not too much to worry about. There was always something interesting going on.

There were a lot of scams the staff were into to make extra money that I can honestly say I was never a part of, just because I'd feel too guilty. One of the more lucrative and slightly gross scams I found out about by accident was the re-selling of drink cups. All the inventory was kept track of negatively. That is to say, if they handed out 3 sleeves of large drinks, that was 300 cups. If you had 50 cups at the end of the night, then you must have sold 250 large drinks, so there should be $1000 in the till from that. So the vulnerability there is the re-addition of outside cups into the candy bar stock. Management made a big deal of locking up these big sleeves of cups so this would never ever happen. Where would enterprising staff get a handy supply of extra cups? Why they're lying on the floor of every cinema after the first showing. There was one guy who used to grab cups and stuff them into a separate garbage bag, and he'd rinse them out in the mop room (if he had time. ever wonder why your Sprite tastes a bit like Orange Crush?) and pass them back into the candy bar and they'd split the difference. If you chucked 25 cups back there, that was $100, $50 for your share. Not bad back then when you made like $25 a shift. The first time I stumbled onto this scam was the first week I was working there. I found a garbage bag of cups in the mop room and I started to hoof them in the garbage when the guy who was running the scam that night came running up to me hissing under his breath "WTF are you doing! GIVE me that!!" and he disappeared behind the candy bar without explanation. Ohhh. Gotcha.. That's not for me though. I never turned my co-workers in. It's like prison, no one likes a snitch. Someone in management might catch on one day, that's their job. Later I found out that management were running an even more lucrative scam, so WTF?

They'd let us take free drinks from the fountains for break which was cool. Some people abused it though. There was one guy who used to bring in empty 3 litre pop containers when management wasn't looking and re-fill them every few days with Orange and Coke and everything to drink back at his apartment.

Another scam was strip tickets. These were emergency tickets you handed out if the theatre had a power failure and you had to cancel the showing. If you had no power the cash registers and stuff didn't work so it was hard to do refunds, so these tickets could be used to get into any Cineplex theatre at any time free. Ushers would find rolls of these and distribute them to their Friends. Some guys would accept cash in the box office and hand out a strip ticket (bypassing the cash register) and just keep the money. You kinda knew when this was going on but it was hard to prove because you never knew if the patron had received the ticket long ago from a cancelled showing. Some guys used to refund tickets belonging to the Friends once they had already paid. They would let the buddies pay and seat them, grab the ticket, go to the box office and say "These guys bought these tickets for some Friends but it turns out they had arrived earlier and bought tickets already, can you do a refund?" Ok, no questions. They'd hand the money back to their buddies or keep it if they were especially dishonest. I got no problem letting the odd person in for free (we could do it legally if we went through the trouble of getting them a pass, it was just easier to let them in through the door) but option 2 is stealing from your Friends.

Ticket reselling was another scam some guys would run, similar to the cup thing. The patron comes in, hands you a ticket, you're supposed to rip it and point them on their way, telling them to keep it. Some ushers would just keep ticket, pointing the patron to their theatre and then they'd hand the unripped ticket back to the box office and the cashier would re-sell it again, bypassing the cash register, keeping the money.

I often wondered if all these people I worked with became criminals later on in life. Although it should be self-evident to anyone who has ever worked anywhere remotely like this, some people asked me, why didn't you ever tell your bosses about stuff like that? Did I mention some of the crooked managers? (that's another blog post). I guess that stuff starts at the top. Especially if you go all the way to the top.

Bigfoot discovered in WIndows 7!

In the latest beta, in the default wallpaper, if you look down on the left at the treeline at the waters edge. You can find...

BIGFOOT!

No wonder he's able to hide. No one would think to look there!

What were you doing 20 years ago, 1989

After reading Squid's great post on what he was doing 20 years ago, I thought I'd do the same! Here is the heavily abridged version.

Hmm. In March 1989 I was 19 years old. I was doing a grade 13/14 thing at high school and contemplating college after the summer. I played in a local Ottawa band called AFTER THE FACT that wrote and recorded original music, which at the time, was my primary focus and attempt at a career(that's me with the red guitar, I still have it!!!). Until I woke up to the harsh reality of musical life and discovered that I did not live in Toronto or Vancouver, I did not play french music and wasn't into being a starving artist(sigh). Which was too bad because it was an awesome amount of fun to do while it lasted and enabled me to meet and work with a ton of great and talented folks, some of whom I still talk to today.

I was still living with my parental units and for extra money I worked at the Vanier Cineplex Movie Theater combining another love of my life - Movies! More importantly FREE MOVIES! (check out this memorial website for a sister theatre of the time). There I met a ton of weirdos and all kinds of weird stuff happened (see "the poop crayon") which should and will be detailed in another blog entry. Suffice it to say I became an expert on how to handle mentally ill street folk and other types of disgruntled patrons.
One funny thing about the theatre was you got constant updates on the local dating scene. Like the girl who would come to 4 movies in the space of a week on a different night each with a different guy (sometimes to the same movie). Hmm. Then the same guy she bring twice in a row after that was the winner I guess. Vanier could be a tad violent and we sometimes hired cops to stand in theatre on Tuesday's, Fridays and Saturday nights (all nights I worked) to deter the more rambunctious patrons.

I also worked at Consumers Distributing, that catalog place where you'd write something down and give the paper slip to someone and they would go and bring it out for you. I was that guy. They called us "Pickers". We had no computerized inventory so we were a bit screwed up. We'd only know when we were out of stock of something when we went to get it and it was not there. Then we'd take this little inventory magnet the shelves used to have and put it on the main board in front. That was the out of stock list. There were several weirdos there. On my first day my co-worker asked me to punch him as hard as I could in the arm and then he'd do the same to me to see who could hit harder(I tend not to play games with people who suggest things like that. I figure they know something I don't). My first week someone got fired for answering the telephone with "Welcome to Dr Morgentallers, you rape em we scrape em". (Ack!). I was surprised to find out that Consumers sold women's vibrators. 3 or 4 a week! Sometimes the guys would put batteries in them and leave them on the metal shelves turned on and they'd make a hell of a racket until our boss would go and shut them off. That summer we sold these Battery powered squirt guns and we unpacked a bunch of them and had water fights in the aisles when the boss was on vacation. It seemed we could do whatever we wanted with the stock as long as it stayed inside the store. One day our radio in the back died, so one of the guys took a ghetto blaster off the shelf, dropped kicked it and said "Oops, damaged item, return to stock!" and we opened it and used it as the warehouse radio for the rest of the summer.

It was here that I first found out about that mysterious organization called "The government". Some people had left to work there "on contract" and I heard it was a money pit compared to the $5 an hour I was probably making back then. I vowed to explore this option in the near future. I was let go from Consumers when I told them I was going to college that September and would not be able to work days. SO they replaced me with a skinhead kid from Cornwall who had come up to go to college. Guess the boss just didn't like me. I saw the old boss a few years later when I got in full time with the Feds. He was still there, Consumers was in it's death throes and he congratulated me on my career path like you would congratulate someone for coming down with Cancer.

It was around this time (or the year before) that we got our first household computer, an IBM XT. I think it was my dad's attempt at getting me to look at other career possibilities other than Music, which wasn't really going anywhere. We had a 4 color monitor! Then we had EGA which was 16 colors and VGA which was 256 colors at some thing like 320x240 or 640x480 resolution (as I write this today on a dual monitor 24 inch LG Flatron @1600x1200 with 32 bit color). It didn't take long to get some proficiency with DOS. PROMPT=$P$G anyone? Who writes this stuff? I remember my Dad getting into the PC as well, it was his after all. He'd bring it into work at the fire station sometimes to learn how to work it on his downtime so I'd only get to mess with it when he'd leave it at home. I remember visiting some guy's house and seeing a cool menu and getting a copy of that and discovering...

YOU CAN MAKE EXACT COPIES OF STUFF! Ones and Zeros! Intellectual property be damned! WOOHOO! This coming from a kid who used to hook up 3 VCR's in series with RCA cables to copy movies he rented from the store 2 at a time. Dos commands like TREE being a pain in the ass I remember using a utility called XTREE all the time. I loved that proggy. Making directories all over the place (we called folders that back then).

We had a gigantic 10MB hard disk. A few short years later I remember paying $500 for a second-hand 100MB hard drive which meant I could have all the Leisure Suit Larry, Police Quest, and Space Quest games on the same hard disk! SIERRA games were the start of a huge gaming habit back then.

I had met the future Mrs Zartimus around this time and she was the ex-girlfriend of a friend and co-worker of mine at Cineplex. He was trying to get back together with her and I was helping. Really and truly I was (no sarcasm here although it's hard to tell in print). Since this involved spending a lot of time with her, telling how great my Friend was and how they should get back together, one thing led to another and the focus soon shifted to "Hey, she's really cool, perhaps I should re-think this whole helping her get back together with her old boyfriend thing." My friendship with my old co-worker did not fare so well for a time, but I got married to Mrs Zartimus 6 years later in 1995 (two kids and still going strong).

I liked the times back then, not as many responsibilities but I have way better toys and gadgets today than I did back then. Thanks to facebook I'm back to hanging around with some of the same weirdos I hung around with back then. And the money's better!

I'd say there here is now. What were you all doing 20 years ago?

KeePass

This app saved my bacon again today. I keep forgetting to blog it as I've been using it for a few years now ever since Lenzpot told me about it. I swear I blog these cool little apps for myself sometimes so I can keep track of these little gems as I format my PC on a yearly basis to clean out the junk one accumulates over a year.

It's KeePass . It's a real lightweight password manager. It stores all your various site passwords in a single text which is opened up by a single master password file all encrypted up the wazoo with AES and Twofish and it's free and open source. In my opinion, all encryption proggies should be open source, just for transparency so you can see what they are doing. We wouldn't trust the government or some third party company would refuse to publish their encryption source code so we can see all the back doors they threw in would we? (Shhh, we do every day. Scary...)

So you start up a KeePass database, put in a website, or portal, or whatever and jot down your password for that site to store, or it can think one up for you. Heck, you don't even have to see what it is as it has the ability to do the login for you if it is open. The master file is portable, just as the keepass application is. You can chuck it on a memory stick, no install needed.

I accessed an old website that I hadn't used in a year today. What was the password again? Off to keepass - there it is. The only thing you have to do is remember the master one - and keep that one a secret.

Tehrankari convicted of murder in sister-in-law's death

Well, Duh!!!

What a waste of time this was. How come this trial wasn't over in about 2 days?

This guy is a f*&king idiot. A murdering idiot as it turns out. No wait, a murderous bank robbing hostage taking idiot from another country. I used to buy gas from this guy around the corner from my place. At the time I didn't know he was the same guy who robbed some banks in the in 1992 and took some people hostage. It happened in the west end when I was going to college and I remembered seeing it on the news that day. The guy in the white trenchcoat and rifle wearing the backpack running all over the place as the police chased him. They should have deported his ass to Iran right then and there but Noooooo. After his early release from prison his soon to be wife and sister in law went to bat for him to fight his deportation. I know hindsight is 20 20 but geez. How ironic that he is convicted of murdering one of the women that got our stupid government to let him stay here in Canada

The guy represented himself, insisted that the jury be made aware of his 1992 robberies and hostage takings and pretty much accused anyone who ever had a disagreement with him as a criminal and a liar. I loved his quotes. Having recently become fluent in a 2nd language I can appreciate the difficulty speaking in your 2nd tongue, still.. He was a dramatic ass on the stand and cross examining people. When was the last time you heard of someone representing themselves in a murder trial and winning?

And that cockamamie story about the guys breaking into his place and poking his prostrate to extract semen to plant on the dead body. This guy obviously saw the Hannibal movie and ran with it. IDIOT! Gee they found my sister in law dead in the bush and there's a big circle cut out of my bedroom carpet and my semen in her body and her blood in my car.

All a big co inky dink, the police are trying to frame me!

"No power on this Earth can shackle my tongue!"

"That juror was dismissed because she knew some woman I took hostage in 1992,”

"And he was milking -- please excuse me -- my penis to get something out of it,"

“This is a life-and-death situation and I don’t appreciate you smiling there!

"No mister policeman, you were very wrong."

"This is what I'm forbidden to tell you," Tehrankari shouted as he was pulled past jurors. "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, this is not justice!"

“I admire his psychic ability.”

“There is a person they found, a very good scapegoat with a record,”

“If I was there, then I am the scumbag who has done this crime. But I am not.”

“I led police to my own semen-loaded underwear. That’s a smart thing to do.”

“You had to prove it beyond a reasonable doubt,” he said. “You failed beyond a shadow of doubt.”

You lying Satan,”

“Why are your officers using my head as a punching bag?”

“It is unfair, unjust, I cannot do this,” he yelled at the judge. “Why don’t you just kill me, that is better.”

“I cannot go on!”

“You broke the law sir. You disgraced the law,” Tehrankari said. “You call yourself a judge.”

Updated: Sat Mar. 14 2009 13:15:29

ctvottawa.ca

An Ottawa man was found guilty Friday night of killing his sister-in-law during a sexual attack before dumping and burning her body near an NCC hiking trail more than four years ago.

Allen Tehrankari was sentenced to life in prison with no chance for parole for 25 years for the first-degree murder of 46-year-old Barbara Galway, whose body was found in January 2005 near Mer Bleue, a popular nature trail in Ottawa's east end.

"You disposed of her body as if it were a piece of dirty garbage," Justice Colin McKinnon told Tehrankari after the jury returned with the verdict just after 6 p.m.

Tehrankari was heard to say of the jury: "They don't know what they're doing."

During closing arguments, the Crown argued Tehrankari planned to kill his sister-in-law because he believed Galway threatened his marriage.

Throughout the trial, Tehrankari maintained he was framed for the killing. He argued two intruders sexually assaulted him in his home, extracted his semen, and planted it in Galway's body after she was killed.

Tehrankari's first trial ended abruptly in October 2007 when he fired his defence lawyers, leading McKinnon to declare a mistrial.

Prior to the arrest for Galway's murder, Tehrankari spent several years in jail for a violent bank robbery and hostage taking in 1992.

When he was released from prison in 2000, he began to fight a deportation order to Iran. Galway once signed a petition to help keep her brother-in-law in Canada.

With a report from CTV Ottawa's Kristy Kirkup

Project Plasma

Two weeks ago I bought a Plasma TV. I had been waiting a few years to do this and the prices have come down considerably since I was looking a few years ago. I have a fairly good looking rear projection Hitachi (with the Pegasus guns!) that isn't going anywhere anytime soon so I wasn't in a big rush but when my ancient tube TV that I've had since I was 20 blew the week before it became the perfect time to put Project Plasma into place.

Where to buy? I bought my last TV at Stereo plus in Orleans from Carlos, and he gave me a great deal. I popped by and saw row upon row of big TV's and thought a 50" would do the trick. I was pretty much leaning towards Plasma the whole time, what with recent improvements to image retention (if you happen to play a game on it with a stationary HUD) and the anti-glare screens. Plasmas are prone to glare with the glass top screen and mine was going in a bright room. Also viewing angle. Plasmas are viewable from 180 degrees while LCD's and RPTV's (rear projection TV's) crap off in picture when viewed from the side. The LCD's are not prone to screen burn in or retention but they don't have a true black so the movie experience is always better on a Plasma. Heck, I could pick out the Plasmas from the LCD's on the wall just by looking at the ones I thought were richer, so Plasma it was. Turns out there was a sale in a few weeks so I planned to come back then.

So Friday came, TV day! So I broke out the flyers. Turns out that almost everyone, Sears, Stereo Plus, futureshop, had them on sale this week for $1799. But Audiotronics had them on for $1788. $12 cheaper! I had bought stuff there a few years before so for $12 (and the name of an in-store contact from a Friend of mine who works in the same mall) off I went, bing bang boom Bob's yer uncle, paid for it, in and out in 10 minutes (I came back 2 hours later with my truck to bring it home). They gave me a good price on a Blue ray player and some HDMI cabling ($$$$$ ouch) as well as a wall mounting kit.

I started the install at 10:00pm and by 2:00am I was watching TV. I spent most of the time surfing YouTube watching DIY mounting videos ans sticking a huge 50 inch by 30-something inch piece of cardboard I cut from the shipping box on the wall and running back to sit on the couch pretending it was the screen. I settled on 4 feet from the ground to center as the sweet spot. No Blue Ray test though! I had neglected to buy any movies and I didn't think any stores would be open at 2:00am otherwise I would have gone out right then and there. That had to wait until Saturday (Dark Night, Iron Man and Indy4 - Woohoo!).

A few things..

1. They are heavy as shite. I was stupid to mount it alone by myself at 1:30 am but I pushed an ottoman underneath that I could rest it on in case some body part gave out while lifting (something popped in my leg but watching the Plasma afterwards made it better).
2. 1080p, Blue Ray and High definition TV are worth every cent. I swear the picture looks better than what I see with my own eyes.
3. The type of Plasma I got, the Panasonic Viera 50" 1080p Plasma HDTV TH50PZ80 can go in a bright room with no worries.
4. My HDMI-connected Xbox 360 looks GREAT! No image retention or burn-in issues. There's a game-mode on the TV that helps combat that, if it is a problem at all.
5. End of Feb, early March is a great time to buy a Plasma TV. All the new stuff comes out in April and they want to get rid of last year's models.

Epilogue:

The week after I was reading the newspaper Saturday morning and saw a new audiotronics flyer. It showed a picture of the Plasma TV I had just bought, and it was on sale for $1688! One hundred dollars less! The Bastards! I phoned them up and they said, no problem, we have price protection for one month, no worries we'll give it to you at that adjusted price. So I went down and they paid me the $100 odd bucks. Woohoo!

And this past weekend I was reading my Saturday paper and I purposely looked at the ubiquitous Audotronics flyer and saw, AGAIN! On sale for $1588! $100 off. I drove down that afternoon with my two bills and came back with a third one stapled to them and another $100 in my pocket.

The sales guy said:
"This is the lowest I've even seen them" and I said.
"See you next week (I hope).. "

Beavers in the backyard

There are some neighbors we haven't met at the new place yet, because their front door is still under the ice. We have Beavers in the creek in back of our house. That should be neat, as long as they don't chew down the big trees in back of our property and try to take out the house or the pool.

A few weeks ago when the ice thawed they came out and chewed down more branches and brought them inside their lodge for a snack. The rodents don't hibernate and actually swim around under the ice (they can hold their breath for like 15 minutes apparently).

It looks like a small lodge in the side of the creek bank. It must get pretty boring in there. After cruising through a Wikipedia article they appear to make two chambers in there, sometimes on different levels. One for drying off and the other chamber for living.

We found the dam upstream and during the thaw they also took the opportunity to fire more branches in there. If they do become a nuisance they say you're not doing yourself any favors by destroying the dam, they will just build it back up again and cut more trees in the process. One thing that I read about that can piss them off or psyche them out is a beaver dam drain tube. It's a long perforated tube you sink and drive through the dam underwater so that is allows water to drain. The beavers can't find it, they are unable to raise the water level while it is in place and they get pissed off and leave.

Hillarious. I can see the female beaver yelling at the male now. "What the hell are you doing, your dam sucks!"








Update. I just saw him for the first time. He's pretty dark brown and hard to see. I snapped this through the window. When I stepped onto my deck he disappeared into his ice hole.

Sanyo Xacti SD card video camera duct taped to my guitar headstock

Speaking of guitars, I picked up this nifty little camera a few months ago with this very thing in mind. I've always loved the "fingerboard" perspective shots one gets by attaching the camera to the headstock and moving the guitar around. So with some duct tape and a 240 BMP click track I was able to shoot a pick up scene to insert into existing footage on the Bigfoot 2 movie due out in May.

Check it out! I got mine from Dell on sale for $149, they go for about $250 most places (the SD card is extra, they always get you somewhere).

The Bigfoot Guitar

This is one of the coolest guitars I have seen in awhile. Now why haven't I made one of these? Created by George Marlin for the Miami Beach Guitar Festival.

I want.. No.. I NEED one!

Here's me ordering a body blank from Warmoth guitars sometime next year.

Thanks to Gwiliker and his Bigfoot early warning system for this one.

The new backyard in winter, 2009

Well, It's not really my backyard. It belongs to the farmer who owns the Innes road Golfland driving range I think. There's deer that cross by in the morning because the guy leaves feed out for them. It will be fun to walk back there though (when the snow melts), it's full of paths and trails.

There's coyotes too! My next-door neighbor gets up at dawn to watch them and happened to catch sight of a coyote who had figured out that they crossed in back every day at that time. It waited for them and came out of the tree line and bagged one, and spend the better part of the day ripping chunks of meat off of it and running into the tree line to eat it and coming back for more. The land owner came by in a snowmobile later that day and happened to see the carcass and dragged it off to do who knows what with it.

I was out there a few weeks ago and saw a fresh survey stake marker, which is never a good sign. My house is 10 years old, with my luck, the year we move in they'll decide to put a Wallmart back there just for giggles.

This is the view from the kitchen balcony, and one of the reasons we bought the place. No backyard neighbors! Although there are the furry kind of course. Here's a video I made of me torturing the kids by pulling them out there in the 4 foot snow on a sled.

GAG 13th on Friday the 13th

Managed to go out geocaching for GAG 13. Friday the 13th! Only trouble was, my Jason Mask was packed! I went with Tripper and he brought his, and Kenmore had one. The hockey masks come in handy for when branches spring back and hit you in the face.

I may have to invest in one for geocaching. In one photo here Tripper is all excited because he found a tree saw in a cache. It went well with his outfit. Bone saw is what it is more likely. We only ran into a few geocachers. We did all the deep woods ones for the most part and it was FREEZING. One had a lake we walked across. I was kinda nervous because I've already fallen through shallow ice a few times this year near the new place, but this stuff was thicker. In any event I seemed to have gone first which I don't understand, because gravity likes me best outta our group.

GrizzlyG joined us for a few to start the night but he had to turn in early because he was carrying the foaming monkey virus or some such thing.

We also found this creepy teepee. We should all go out next time in the Jason suits. It would be much creepier and safer while out in the woods in the middle of the night.

I can see the police report now...

Home renos - Ceramic tile

I haven't been doing much of anything fun lately as we rip and gut the interior of our newly purchased home. It's always interesting to speculate on why the previous owners did something a certain way. I'm certain stuff I've decided to do at my old place is now befuddling the current owners (although I left sticky notes everywhere!)

In this case we removed the ceramic tiles in the front entrance - and found another ceramic tile installation underneath. Two demo jobs for the price of one! We should have been alerted to the fact when the flooring guy took a peek in the heating vent and saw three layers of sub floor, but it could have just been a case of ceramic tile prep overkill. What's extra fun about removing ceramic tile is that the boards they sit on are screwed in, and the grout (cement-type stuff they use to stick the tile down and fill the gaps with) covers all the screw heads so you can't see them.

You get to wail on them with a sledge hammer and break apart the hardened grout layer and THEN unscrew the boards the best you can. When we got half-way we used a shovel and pry bar to pop the board off. Have you ever tried to lift your house with a shovel? I thought at one point I was going to go through the floor! Wood screws in 4 inch square bunches are pretty immovable. Then we got to do it again for the second one underneath!

The most fun was at the start of the project, where you use a demo hammer to obliterate the existing tiles. Makes for a lot of dust and crap!

Hours later, with a new sub floor installed.. It looked like the picture above.

Actually. The whole house kinda looks like this now. The kids think "Hardwood floor" is actually that plywood crap that goes underneath. The toilet in the dining room however, is a big hit.