Blog: Articles from July 2005

I got my new sunglasses on Monday, and new glasses on Tuesday. So this is what you ordinary people see, eh? Mmm, shiny.

Watching late-night/early-morning television is extremely difficult, because it turns out that finding good late-night/early-morning television is more difficult than finding a Liberal Member of Parliament in Alberta. TBS generally has a movie on, although whether or not the movie is one I would like remains a difficult question.

There’s lots of Atlanta-based commercials that scare me. Almost half of them (if not more) appear to centre around career training/diploma training things. So I’m wondering, early at the morning, if TBS’ targetted demographic are high-school dropouts with low grades and a tendency to watch bad television programming?

The scary thing is that the answer is probably yes… .

Well, tonight (actually last night, since I’m writing this at 4:18 AM) proves that there’s not really such a thing as a bad night at the ballpark.

It was raining, but I still had a very good time. Our team got off to a very good start: the pitcher kept the other team off the bases, and our batting order was quite strong. To that end, I saw two home runs for our team (one of which brought home three). Up until now, all the home runs were on away games or home games I didn’t see.

We were up 13 at the bottom of the 7th. Now, at this point, we did not have to worry about many things. So the coach let one of the pitchers bat. He struck out, but it was cool to see him bat anyway, and he got to play right field in the 9th; another pitcher tried his luck at the bottom of the 8th and also struck out. You know your team is confident when they let the pitchers start to bat!

Speaking of pitching, for the ninth inning we let our second baseman pitch. He’s a great contact hitter (seldom strikes out, lots of fly balls though), excellent fielder, and apparently used to be a pitcher four years ago. He did pretty well in the ninth: three up, three down. One was a routine throw from our shortstop to first base, and the other two were fantastic consecutive strike outs.

I really enjoy watching our team play, even in the rain. We sat in the bleachers the whole time (my dad and I) because, frankly, I prefer their view and the freedom of space to the confines of the reserved seats, even though we had reserved tickets from my dad’s work. I got a little wet, but it was worth it.

Final score: 14 - 1. That is all.

I actually did things today, which is scary. Once again, this proves that boredom is dangerous.

I had the whim to make an alternate style sheet for the site, so you can switch them easily from the View menu using Firefox. If you use the Switch Styles link to switch styles, a nice little cookie will keep track of whichever one you like to use. The waterfalls in the Thunder Bay style are Kakabeka Falls.

Planet InvisionFree is an aggregate of staff blogs at InvisionFree. Finally! Instead of checking lots of RSS feeds, I can just use the one feed and keep track of the staff. I‘m sure those blogstalkers will find it convenient too.

I’ve become tired of searching for lost boards, so I wrote the Lost Board Locator that quickly searches all the servers for me. Far easier than typing in the server numbers over and over.

Watched Cellular tonight. It was better than Phone Booth and I enjoyed some parts of it. The movie got better toward the ending as the corrupt cops were revealed, the beginning was a little slow.

I‘ve updated my blog as best I can. The RSS feed is hopefully working properly now, and I’m just waiting to iron out a few more bugs before I publicly release version 3.1.

As for other news … there isn’t much.

Today, it feels like I got a lot accomplished while at the same time I did next to nothing. Or is it that I feel like I did a lot while accomplishing next to nothing?

I went biking with my brother down to the university and back. It was an interesting experience. I’ll probably be biking to university in two years. Cheaper than driving if those gas prices keep on going up.

This blog now has an RSS feed that I cobbled together, and which I’m still trying to badger to work. I‘m also working on setting up a Coppermine photo gallery. I’m working heavily on improving my blog, but now I’m going to take a break, maybe get some writing done.

Well, my paternal grandparents arrived from Waterloo on Wednesday to visit with people they know from Thunder Bay. My brother and I got to see them a few times. On Thursday we went for lunch with them and my Uncle George (who is in fact more like my Great-Great-Uncle; he is 92). I had fish and chips, ordering 4 pieces of fish thinking they would be tiny and being confronted with several large pieces. I ate them anyway.

We got to see them again on Saturday, where we went fishing on a place called Sunshine near Kakabeka Falls. I didn’t catch any fish, but it was worth a try, and fun, eh.

On Monday we went out to their friends’ camp on Island Lake. We went swimming, my brother did a little more fishing, and then went out to the island on the lake; I paddled there in a canoe and he took a paddleboat. I enjoy canoeing. There was a dog called Cue who had accompanied us to the island in the motorboat with the smaller children, but decided to return to the shore via the canoe. Not only did I overcome my fear of water, but I also endured my fear of dogs, at the same time.

Today we went to the optometrists, and my eyes are still blurry from those eyedrops they give you. Apparently I have 20/40 vision, which means that what I see from 20 feet away, a “normal” person can back up and see the same from 40 feet away. The optometrist is giving me a stronger prescription, and I‘m also getting nice prescription sunglasses, which will come in handy during the summer.

I’ve got a slew of features and upgrades planned for VSNS Lemon. At this time I think they will be included in version 3.1, although that isn’t a final decision. As soon as I get around to getting the site back up, I’ll include a new feature list, although development is still under way.

Lastly, for those of you who left some nice comments in the July 8 article, you may notice some disappeared. I didn’t delete them, it’s that we switched servers and I couldn’t update UNI.CC’s DNS until a few days ago because of their stupid “maintenance” (the service doesn’t work anyway). I can’t wait until I can get my own domain….

Lots of updates. Every day I say I’ll write an update, then I go off and do something else… .

Unfortunately, my school is closing. I’m understandably distraught. My marks are good though: 98% in all four classes, making a nice average of … you guessed it, 98%!

Not much else to talk about … um … I got promoted today at InvisionFree Support. I’m now Tachyon, a Support Team member.

Which means I’m off to answer support tickets and other such things….