musings

In just a few minutes I’ll be heading out the door on a short (duration) trip to Ottawa, to hang with Kourosh and Coralie. Tomorrow we’ll be heading to Montreal to catch Caribou (nee Manitoba) in concert. If the last Manitoba show in Ottawa was any indication, tomorrow’s Caribou show should be amazingly good fun. I’ve been looking forward to this trip for weeks – during my last trip up to Ottawa Coralie was in Newfoundland, so it was just Kourosh and I (and what an awesome trip that was), so I’m looking forward to spending a day and change (yeah, it’s a short trip) with the two of them.

I found a site with 622 music videos on Warren Ellis’ blog. It’s worth a visit to the site to see, if nothing else, the amazing video for Fatboy Slim’s “Weapon of Choice”. The song’s a tired old horse (poor Norman Cook – his Fatboy Slim persona has really turned out to be a one trick pony), but Christopher Walken doing a dance routine makes it all cool.

I’ve posted a couple of new galleries – a few selected shots from each of my last few vacations.

Sin City is a colossal achievement in cinema. It’s the perfect adaptation of comic to movie. No, scratch that. It’s not an adaptation at all. The movie is the comic. Each frame of the comic is faithfully recreated. The cast was fantastic – great perfomances all (okay, Michael Madsen might as well have been a wooden plank with a pair of horn rims on, but he had all of 5 minutes total screen time), a great look, and all the wonderful cheesy over-the-top noir dialogue of the comic. Go see this movie. And then go again.

Like the RIAA, the CRIA (Canadian Recording Industry Association) has been campaigning for copyright reform claiming that peer-to-peer file-sharinghas led to billions of dollars of lost sales in Canada. Piercing the peer-to-peer myths: An examination of the Canadian experience is an excellent article by Michael Geist (who is both a lawyer and Ottawa University’s Canada Research Chair of Internet and E-Commerce Law) that dissects these claims.

I really hate dark text on a light background on computer screens. I know it works for paper, but paper isn’t emissive. Anyway, I got tired of being blinded by my own blog so I knew I had to change the theme. I’m also pretty lazy, so rather than come up with something original, I took my existing theme and inverted it. Mostly. I stole the link colors from the main page. I don’t know if it’ll stay this way, but at least for now it’s less blinding.

I know I’ve posted about the iPod making my life better before, but I wasn’t fully cognizant of how many ways it did so. This morning I started my daily commute, as always, by pulling out my iPod and headphones only to realise that I’d failed to charge the battery for it. Nothing to do but to do the daily slog sans-tunes. I discovered, to my dismay, that the iPod not only delivered music, but drowned out the daily inanity of the idiots around me. If I’d had my iPod charged and ready to go, for instance, I’d not have had to hear an Indian and Italian Beavis and Butthead plan to kill one of their fathers for “child slave labour” (he was apparently being asked to help with the family construction business in return for loan of his father’s car). It’s mornings like this one that make me realise that, while I don’t mind individuals, in general I just plain hate people.

I’ve added a DGD category to the list of links in the sidebar. Ordinarily I’d not have bothered, but I wanted everyone to have easy access to my photo gallery.