Archive for April, 2005

Not only was Jenn wrong about the date that she had to go to Toronto for work (it’s next week, not tomorrow morning) she won a chair! See, those are two good things. Hence, everything coming up Milhouse. Of course, we don’t have room in our place for another chair, but that’s besides the point. I got a new chair of my own a week or so ago too—but had to pay for it.

Whoops, that should read “I’m the Taxman.” I just finished doing taxes for Jenn and I tonight. I would have finished earlier but Jack Bauer was busy getting the job done. Huh? Anyway, I’m all hyper from doing taxes. Is that weird?

I also read today that Adobe bought out MacroMedia, which is cool for me, because maybe they’ll come out with a super duper designer combo package that includes Flash MX and Dreamweaver in addition to Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and Acrobat. Heck, ditch Dreamweaver and InDesign, I only want the other four.

Every once in a while I stumble across something about Robert Crumb on the old interweb. He’s always seemed like a weird, disturbed man to me. I was glad to see the New York Times had a happy photo of him for a change. For those of you who don’t know, Crumb was a big cartoonist (and I suppose still is) from the 60′s. He drew all sorts of really neat stuff, including lots of stuff maybe he shouldn’t have. Anyways, he’s got a new biography out.

“Nope” = No + (Pope – Po) Not that it matters. Told you I’m hyper tonight.

The weather has been pretty good so far this spring, but this weekend felt like the first day of summer to me. Jenn and I went mini-putting for the first time this year on Saturday afternoon. The rest of the day was spent running around doing weekend chores. Today, I treated myself to waffles (by the way, did I tell you I’m under 200lbs again?) and got Jenn out on her first long distance (relative) bike ride. Usually we just go up and down the canal.

Today, I took her out on a 20km ride. We went south down the canal from our place just past Dow’s lake. We crossed over at the Hartwell Locks then headed to the Experimental Farm. We rode through to the west side and followed the bike trails to the edge of the greenbelt. Not even a half km in was our destination… a scenic lookout from the highest point in Ottawa. It looked suspiciously like a water resevoir to me. Kind of like the one behind Hillcrest Highschool in Thunder Bay, but about six times the size. From the top you can see out all over town and across the Ottawa River.

As we were heading back a guy in a recumbent passed us. It was the kind that you pedal with your arms. Really cool. We were all stopped at one place together and I was talking to him about it. He offered me a chance to ride it, but I declined. He was really built, and I doubt I could have done it justice. One the way back through the farm there was a guy flying a remote controlled airplane that we stopped to watch for a while.

We planned to head out in the morning so that we’d be close to home around lunch time. The timing was right on and we stopped in for lunch on the patio at a good Mexican restaurant in the Glebe—the place we went to with Tom a couple years ago.

I just finished washing the car (first hand wash of the year, I’m ashamed to admit) and now, I’ve got to clean myself up for church. (Every third Sunday our church has it’s main service (and a pot luck) in the evening.)

A couple of months ago, I put up a new page on shroomazoom.com called Whimsy. It was sort of a compliment to my portfolio, but for a specific purpose. It turns out, it didn’t really serve the purpose that it was intended for, and just after I put that page up, I started working on an alternate Whimsy page. I like it better and it probably would have served the original page’s purpose better too. But, I’m not putting it up for that purpose. I’m putting it up because I want to show you some of my doodles and stuff. So check out the new Whimsy!

So, back in November, I went to Frisby Tires on Industrial Avenue in Ottawa (in case you want to know) and bought some winter tires. I had my “all seasons” stored there because I didn’t relish the idea of hauling a bunch of slushy, salty tires in my trunk back to my meager storage room (and then rearranging the storage room to make space for them.)

Today (admitted later than I should) I had Jenn drop off the car on her way to work (she works only a ten minute walk from the place.) Then I got the calls… “We can’t find your old tires. We probably scrapped them.” Can you believe it?

Someone messed up and didn’t tag the tires correctly and they had over 70,000km on then (and probably showed it. So, they thought they were old tires of them that weren’t any good and pitched them. We paid $25 for storage—and were reimbursed for that. But what can I do? What’s reasonable? They were at the end of their life and this was an accident, so, what is fair compensation?

Jenn is a member of ARIDO, and while I think they do very little for her, they were pretty nice to me yesterday. (And in a way, because they were nice to me, they were even less nice to Jenn.) Here’s the story.

A company here put on a seminar last night all about colour for ARIDO members. They brought in “the international colour guru” from Seattle, gave away some swag and fed the attendees. Jenn got an email about it a couple weeks ago, with a link to register online. She told me about it, and since this guru did colour stuff for web and print as well as fashion, interiors and everything else—and she was the Executive Director of the Pantone Colour Institute, I figure I’d try to register too. No problem, it was a snap, I even got a confirmation. When I got to the seminar last night, my name wasn’t on the list, but I was just told to make up my own name card and sign in on a sheet of paper. Then they gave me a bag of goodies and ushered me in.

The presentation was really cool. It was about colour forecasting. Kind of like what the weather man does for weather, but much more of a long distance forecast. She also explained how they go about forecasting colour and what indices they use. It was neat, because usually when people think of colour forecasting, they think that there is some group of people out there who decide what they want to be trendy and then push it upon the industry. In fact, she does it the other way around, taking a look at various industries, seeing what colour they are using. Depending on the industry, you can get an idea of how long a colour will be around.

Anyways, I thought it was very informative, and even though I didn’t win a chair or a book, I did get a free tape measure and pen.

Never the less, I’ve had the opportunity in the past to put some JavaScript stuff together for my own websites and for those I’ve done for others. This past month, though, I’ve been doing some JScripting entirely from scratch. And, boy-oh-boy, it’s been fun!

I did so much computer science in university, but I can’t remember doing any real programming since. I find that for a regular computer user (or slightly advanced, depending on where you place the “regular” standard) like myself, programming is just to inaccessible. A few times a year, usually when Robin is working on his 4k game contest entry, I get inspired to write something. Even though it’s possible to work out some of my ideas (using emulators, or trying a free compiler, or something else) it’s not convenient, so I don’t do it.

JavaScript, so far is the closest I get to programming. And what I’ve been doing for work (making funky auto-graphing functions) has been quite satisfying. I upgraded to OSX 10.3 a couple of months ago and Apple’s XCode was included in it. Who knows, maybe next time I get the bug to simulate a two dimensional hockey game, I’ll whip that out and give it a try.

Now, this isn’t going to be as political as the title might suggest. Would you agree with me that blogs are a form of media? At the very least the internet is, right? Well, Between my blog reading and television watching this weekend, I had a bit of a media convergence. And what’s even better, as I’m typing this, the convergence is expanding. Follow me…

I watch The Simpsons, who doesn’t? I also have been reading TBayTel Tony’s blog. Now, here comes the fun. Apparently the employees in the Internet Department (is that right?) at TBayTel have a theme each halloween and dress up. Converge the Simpsons with a Halloween costume theme and mix in Tony and what do you get?

Otto Man! Of course, Robin works at TBayTel too, and the following convergence only happened as I started writing this entry. So, who does Robin dress up as? I’ll leave that to the commentators.

Well, it’s a normal weekend over at the Foulds household. Eggs for breakfast and then clean up the house because we haven’t done that since Jenn’s parents were in town. This afternoon we went out to EQ3 and Ikea to look for a new desk and chair for me. I noticed that my belly wasn’t pointing true the other day and think it might be due to the sub standard office furniture that I use everyday. We swung by MEC on the way home and got Jenn a helmet and a bell for her bike. And the nice people there let me root around their spare parts bin so I could find a bit of the harness for my bike computer that fell off on the dreaded Fundy trip last fall. Did I say dreaded? I mean… where’s a thesauras when you need one.

So, I just finished commenting on Tim’s comment on my last post (re:point of view in writing.) It got me thinking again about writing another story. Some of you might remember that last spring I started writing what I thought was going to be a children’s fantasy story. Well, I wrote through the spring and summer and fall even. I have it all planned out. The story is writen (in outline form) but the meat of it never got done. The first four (of ten) chapters are done. Of course, this is all first draft stuff too.

Anyways, I’m starting to think that I’m close to being ready to write again—maybe it’s just spring. But this year, I’m thinking of approaching it differently. Instead of writing to a particular audience with a particular genre, I think I’m going to go for something more experimental (at least for me.) You see, I’m interested in writing fantasy, and sci-fi (okay, speculative fiction) and mysteries too. I think what would really stretch me would be to write something contemporary and experiment with an idea instead of a style.

Who knows what will happen though. That’s the nice thing about doing creative things for myself and not an audience—I don’t have to finish things (though I’d like to.) I’ve got this half finished story in my book, I’ve got a painting started sitting on the floor of the kitchen (that’s been there for a month now,) and would you belive that I have started a new UFG cartoon? Started, but not finished. But that’s okay, it was just for me anyway.