Roborant

Episodic Post Number 2:

How I spent my unexpected summer vacation (aside from re-roofing my shed): A two-part-tale of morality and circumstance.

Prologue: Does that technically make it a 3-part story?

Setting up the details and then setting the stage:

1) My erection job was part of one life-plan I’d drawn up for myself. When I set it up, I had no idea how long I’d be staying in the old hometown, and just wanted a break from my day-job. I assumed I’d be leaving Jan 2009 at the very very earliest, and still didn’t know where I wanted to go, but possibly staying much much longer. Thus, I made arrangements to return to my ‘real’ job after Labour day (including taking deductions for my [paltry] benefits for July and August out of my last cheque in June so that I would still be eligible for benefits in September). As it happened, I went back to the job just for September, and that was only because I felt I owed them for 5 years of good employment.

2) Midway through a summer of days spent working outside, staying out late (I never worked before 10am), and generally having an awesome time, I realized another year of working in a sunless tomb, always going to bed early, and having (almost) no friends might just kill me.

3) I decided that Guelph was a good choice. First off, I had Ben, who had been begging me to come and get a job and an apartment with him for over a year. Then there was Robin (who most of you don’t know). We’d had some really really good jams before he moved a Guelph in March of this year. He had also been begging me to move there and jam some more. I got in touch with both of them and they both agreed that it would be great to see me.

Now that you know the sequence of events that led to this story, let me set the particulars: As you may recall, I had been let go from my job due to my father’s agitation on behalf of my rights as a worker. This left me with 3 weekends and 2 weeks until I went back to my full-time job after Labour day.

Part one: ‘Networking’ in the G-spot

Having recently informed my parents of my intention to move, I decided to make good on that by visiting Ben and getting a job with his company. Since I was no longer working, I went down for saturday, sunday, monday. The weekend was for kicking ass, monday was for an interview with the owner of the company. It’s a family-run affair and they’re eager to hire friends and family of their workers in order to have a cohesive atmosphere. Or something.

So upon rolling into Guelph (upon a horse of iron) I met Ben and Gemma and we moved some furniture. You see, after a year of cajolling me into moving to Guelph to live with them, Ben finally gave up on me and they got a new 2-bedroom apartment. I think it was less than a 2 week difference, but when I emailed Ben, they’d literally just signed the lease on the new place. And in preparation for that move, we were dumping some of their old furniture at Value Village.

Once we had that out of the way, we magically fastforwarded to dinnertime, where Ben and I were joined by his supervisor Joel and their friend Fluffy (also from the company). We split 100 wings at a local bar, and I had my first sense of apprehension at leaving home. The wings at this bar… well… if you’re used to Boar’s Head and OEP wings, these things really just didn’t compare. They were cheap of course, but half the size, and they came unsauced. The sauce was served alongside in little dishes. According to the waitress, this was an advantage. After all, we could order 6 or 8 different sauces and mix and match. But at the heart of it, I’d say the cooks were just too lazy to sauce 100 wings in one order.

However, things just got better and better from there. It was roughly 5pm, and we decided it was time to get thoroughly drunk. Shots, Jager-bombs (just more shots of jag for myself), and other alcoholic delights began to flow. Half an hour later, we asked the waitress for the status of our tab. Only $70 between 4 of us! Awesome, let’s have another round of shots! As Ben and Fluffy ducked out to the can before the next round arrived, the waitress came back and said that the tab was actually at $130, with the next round of shots coming on top of that. Needless to say, my estimation of her tip was 15%, but it turned out to actually be 1.5%.

After that hideous affront, we decided to head for another bar. I don’t know how the subject came up, but for some reason we decided to head for the seediest bar that the town had to offer: The Dip. Now, I know that that seems cliche (the Dip being a dive, after all). However, we were 4 young drunken men and apparently no one had ever had the heart to go there before. This bar has the reputation among everyone I’ve talked to in the city of being the number one hangout for prostitutes, drug dealers, and general scum — all in the 40+ age category. It is the place where the walking dead go to kill their hopes for the future.

They also had domestic bottles for $2.50, I believe.

We walked in and set up camp in front of the pool tables. It was a dismal sight. Shitty tile floors were everywhere (although that did give me a great opportunity to Heelie everywhere). The bar had one overweight unhappy woman behind it. No wait staff. 4 bouncers floating around, all of them skinny and 30+. There was a tiny, sad little dance floor, cordoned off by iron railing, no more than 10×10 feet, in front of a stage that couldn’t have held more than one mournful country singer and his ‘companiment. The tables we’d placed ourselves in front of had seen better days as well: inner workings torn out, there was merely a gaping hole in the side of each table where the chipped, faded (is that even possible?) balls would try to catch some rest before being sent back onto the tired felt battleground. While the delicate curves of the cues may have been aesthetically pleasing, they did little to enhance the game except add an element of surprise.

The only triumph of the place (the screw-drivers were rancid, thank-you for asking. Prince Igor cut with watery Sunny D for $3.50 a pop), was the beaten-up juke-box in the corner. 3 songs for a dollar, all of it classic rock. Things were starting to look up. We killed an hour or two thrashing each other at pool, cranking up the tunes, and having a good time.

Then one of the bouncers came over and unplugged the juke.

This caused some minor unhappiness amongst our group of adventurers, and we petitioned the bouncer for the reason the tunes had been killed. He responded that karaoke would be starting momentarily.

Oh goodness. That was what the undersized stage and dace floor were for!

Now, I don’t want to cast any shadows on the image of extreme manliness that I’ve been projecting thus far. But we closed that fucking bar on the karaoke stage. Once we got a good look at the catalogue, we couldn’t have done anything else. Oh, and Joel started hitting on a really skeezy woman, so the comedy factor was another reason to stick around.

Highlights of the evening:

1) Joel and Fluffy singing Don’t Stop Believing!, featuring Fluffy drunkenly ’selling’ the song, and Joel standing still with one hand in his pocket looking at the floor.

2) Myself, rocking Boyz in tha Hood (as you can see, not the good version ), as a way around my poor singing ability.

3) Ben tearing into Enter Sandman and destroying the hearing ability (and faith in the youth of today) of the other patrons.

About halfway through the karaoke, Joel passed out on the table. Ben and Fluffy were up doing Down with the Sickness when he awoke. A terrible look came over his face and he made a bee-line for the front door. I assumed that he’d be going to puke. I wanted to stay and listen, and I figured he’d be back soon.

But he never returned. There is speculation as to whether he absconded with the skeeze, but he can’t remember, and other expeditions to the Dip (to be spoken of later) have failed to find her again.

Eventually, one of the karaoke dudes came by and collected the songbooks, warning us that it was last call both for booze and for songs. We elected to close the place down with Bohemian Rhapsody and successfully convinced the 10 or so other young people who’d filtered into the bar to join us.

After that we were presented with some swag for being generally awesome. Ben took a Coors Light bottle opener, and I took a water bottle that had been sponsored by a local cab company.

After that, Ben and I continued our tradition of extremely long walks late at night (which started last thanksgiving). This wasn’t a lovely old walk through suburbia talking of old times, though. This was a ‘dude, who wants to shell out on a cab? Let’s just foot it!’ sort of walk. Ben described the distance as ‘a walk from the Boar’s Head to my mom’s place’. Now, Ben’s mom has very recently moved into my family’s neighborhood, and the walk from there is like, 15 minutes. Tops. Approximately 25 minutes later, Ben clarified that he meant his mom’s old house. Which was out past Sobey’s.

Sunday was recovery, followed by dinner at an amazing restaurant whose name escapes me. I tried calamari for the first time. Ben and I also banged out a resume for me to show to the owner of his company. I know that that sounds dumb, but I’ve only ever had 3 jobs. And none of them required an interview. The resume I made for Co-op in 2006 likely doesn’t exist anymore, so I had to dig one up from scratch, with Ben’s templating and design skillz helping out extensively.

Monday morning he and Gemma left for their places of work at 6:30, leaving me a map to get there later and keys to lock the apartment. I took a shower, read some comics, and waited for the phone to ring. I was supposed to show up around 10 or 11 once the boss was settled in for the day. A call came at 9-ish telling me to hold off until 1pm. I lounged. The TV wouldn’t work, so I was forced to compulsively Stumble for a while. I walked across the street to a gas station just before noon and bought some really shitty gas station food for lunch. Then another phonecall came.

“Don’t bother coming in. Joel and Fluffy gave you such a good talk-up that he says you’re hired and needs to know when you’ll start. I’ll see you at 5.”

I took the iron horse back that evening in triumph, and spent the rest of the week preparing for a longer trip of an altogether different nature.

Well, that’s Part 1. But this is long enough already, so I’ll make Part 2 into its own story (Thereby eliminating the problem I introduced with my prolgue).

Chow.

Episodic Post #1:(If you don’t know what that means, read the post below first)

So, here we are in Episodic Post number one, collecting the earliest storried tale that my readers have missed out on. This is the story of how Liam ended his career as an Erection Specialist and stewed in self-righteousness for a while:

So, the erection business often found me called out to strage locales. An Erection Specialist is like a Grisly bear: we’re near the top of the food chain, and we need a lot of territory in order to stay solvent. Or alive, if we were sticking with the bear metaphor. Also, it only takes a few seconds of though to realize that the sort of people who order erections like ours need to have a few thousand square feet lying around not being used. So, I spent a lot of time in the country.

Obviously, I didn’t just fly there or something. We had a large cube-van which transported tents in the back and folks in the front. Except that there were only 2 chairs. And a lawn chair wedged between those 2 chairs.

Now, this was not an issue until about halfway through August. Earlier, the boss had come with us on big jobs and his pickup held 2 passengers (if you didn’t mind the garbage). Also, there had been a lull of 2 or so weeks with only small to medium size tents going up, mostly in town.

Then we got a call for a job in Wellesley. 40 by 100 (our largest standard tent), 200 chairs, 30 tables, and a 12 by 24 foot dance floor. It takes us an hour alone just to load the truck, and obviously for a tent this big we need the whole crew (4 people at this point). So, two in the front and another in the overflow lawn chair, but that still leaves one person without a seat. That person (after rock-paper-scissors, 2 out of 3) was me.

I climbed into the back of the truck and made myself a little nest out of tarps. Now, let me make one thing clear: This was (marginally) safer than it seems. The truck was packed to the gills because of all the tables, chairs, etc. There was nowhere for the load to shift to because it was crammed in wall to wall, and I was on top of it all, with nothing around me that wasn’t tied down.

Anyway, what with the darkness and the monotone thrumming of the motor, I fell asleep, only waking up at my co-worker’s valiant attempts to reverse the truck down the country lane we’d arrived at.

It was all downhill from there:

FIrst of all, we couldn’t get closer than 100 feet from the tent-site. We normally prefer 20 or less.

The clients couldn’t decide where they wanted it. 20 feet of margin in the x and y axes, and they spent at least half an hour figuring it out. Note: The tent is always packed onto the truck last so that we can get it out and get it up first. Without a place to put the tent there was no way (and no point) to unpack the rest of the truck.

After they picked, we began laying the tent out. First come the tarps (my former nest). They’re big, ugly, dirty, and grey, and they keep the tent from getting muddy before it gets put up. People always think that the tarps are tents and start to piss their pants wondering if they can get their money back as we roll them out.

Anyway, once the tarps are down, the tent comes out in 20 by 40 foot sections. In a 100 by 40 tent that means 5 of those sections laid one after another. We’d gotten the first two sections laid out on the tarps when:

The clients decided to move the tent again.

And then it rained.

Twice.

…

I got home 9 hours later. Frustrated by a hard day made unnecessarily harder, and by the fact that I’d had to cancel a private swim client in town because the job had run 3 hours late. I ate dinner, told the story of the day to my folks, and went to bed. We had an almost identical job in Ingersoll the next day.

However, fate had other plans for me that morning. As I was checking my email and preparing for the day, my father let himself into my room (terrible habit by the way), with the words, “You can’t go to work today”.

We proceded to argue for half an hour about my job and how they were abusing my rights as a worker by making me ride in the backs of trucks. This was shortly after that incident out west, so my dad’s massive concern was understandable, but still totally unwarranted.

Yes it was touching. Yes, I would be sad if he hadn’t expressed his concern. But that really didn’t change things for me. I liked that job, and I was well aware of the things I would be doing when I joined up.

By this time I had 10 minutes to dress, eat, and bike to work. I tried to be diplomatic and shelve the argument for that day.

My dad went off the scale. He stormed out of my room, leaving me to get dressed quickly, yelling for my mom to stop him from whatever he was going to do.

When I got downstairs he had already called my boss. He’d gotten the answering machine and left a terse message regarding ‘worker safety’ and asking to be called back immediately.

As I stormed out the door and got on my bike, he was on the phone with the Ministry of Labour, who shunted him over to the WSIB.

I got to the shop where we keep out inventory just as the guys with the truck were pulling in. As I put my bike inside I explained that there could be some issues with my working that day. Likely I wouldn’t be able to go on the job, but I’d help them load the truck.

As expected, 10 seconds after I’d told them that, they got a text from the boss simply saying “Don’t take Liam on the job today”.

An hour later, truck loaded, he called back.

“Since you’re unable to get yourself to jobs [he knew I couldn't drive], we’re going to have to let you go.”

And that was it. I haven’t seen or heard from any of my old co-workers since.

So that’s part one (how Liam lost his job), but what about part two?

Well, left on my own with no employment, I really didn’t have too much to do. And, coincidentally enough, my parents had planned a major renovation of our garage for that time of the summer. Crazy, hunh? And they really needed a hand re-roofing the place.

Now, to top this off, the work is being done by a handyman. Not a contractor (Wolfgang belabours me on this point constantly), although I have been told that he has a PhD in archtecture. Or something. He’s a massive hippy. Anyway, the point is that he’s not exactly WSIB compliant himself. This is a point which almost never matters, because he works alone and always does a good job.

So if it was him up on the roof with the 40 degree slope, with no fall restraint, no resperator, no work clothes, and no gloves, I wouldn’t care. After all, the guy can take care of himself.

But no, it’s me.

And what really gets me is the flaming hypocrisy of the situation. I get fired, and my father almost takes down the entire business in the process, all because of one unsafe incident.

And 2 weeks later I’ve been pushed into working for my father, for free, in an environment which contains multiple risk factors 100% of the time. Cutting inslation with a bread knife.

While balancing on 2×4s.

On the aforementioned 40 degree slope.

Which turned out to be a piece of cake. I was really missing those 2×4s once we’d covered the entire roof in plywood and I could only stand (lying down or otherwise distributing my weight lowered friction and I began slowly sliding off the roof.

But yeah. I still did it. it was for my parents, and I was leaving soon enough.

Stay Tuned for Episodic Post #2!

Howdy all,

It’s been too long. Really. You’ve missed so much! How can I even catch you up?

Most pressing news:

I leave imminently for the Royal City.  It’s seriously time to leave my parents’ house and I couldn’t wait any longer. Ben has been trying to persuade me for a year to move over there with him for the better part of a year, and while I’d been planning on maybe moving out in the New Year, I just realized that there was (almost) nothing keeping me here. I’d rather be in a city where I have friends who can hang out all year long instead of just during the summer, or on Co-op terms. And it’s not like I’m casting away an amazing job with any opportunity for advancement. Sure, paying $350/mp to live with my folks is a good deal as inclusive rents go, but I’m almost 22. My brother had been living on his own for 4 years when he was my age.

So yeah. Aside from Wolfgang being here on Co-op until January (the source of the ‘almost’ above) I haven’t had any reservations about the move. It’s true that I will be leaving behind all the friends I made at my old job (a bunch of really nice old people, but when you see them every day…), and its also true that wings at the Boar’s Head will become a semi-anual occurence instead of a weekly one, but I’m trading all that for new opportunities and new experiences. Frankly, I haven’t had either in my life since last year when I thought I was going to move to Banf.

For his part, Wolfgang has been very supportive. It might not seem like a big deal, but really by leaving now I’m placing him in the same situation I’m desperate to leave. If it weren’t for him I probably wouldn’t have an apartment to move to right now. And he’s also going to do most of the work of moving me into it. He’s also put out a couple of new posts lately in case that’s not news.

However, I’m now going to embark on an experiment in episodic posting. Like I said, lot’s of things have happened since my last mega-post, all of them tiny bloggable tidbits of silliness. So, I’m going to try and get them all typed out one at a time over the next few days.

Wish me luck.

PS, I am under a heavy spam assault at the moment, so your comments may not be authorized immediately.

If you pay close attention to my blog, you might have seen an unfinished version of a new post accidentally appear here. Please disregard it. It will be released in full when its done.

-God

Miss me?

I thought you might have.

So I’ve decided to throw off my cloak of secrecy and reveal life details to all of you.

Why not start with a tie-in from my last post? I haven’t come close to purchasing an EEE (not that I’ve got the money at the moment, but more on that later), but I did get my Dad to buy one (with Xandros). The man’s first ever computer, and, after some initial discomfort with having to remember passwords (and some on my end getting it to remember our WEP key), he now dutifully checks his own email, and plinks out replies all on his own. A major improvement from getting my mom to print out all his email, writing replies on those sheets, and then getting her to type out and send the replies.

Now, the few of you who have met my father will probably find yourself asking, why on earth would the man suddenly decide to get a computer in his mid-50s? Well, my dad isn’t having a mid-life crisis or anything, nor is he worried that he’s slipping behind the times or something like that.

One day he opened our mailbox and found a check for $1000. Seriously. Apparently a show that he was in a long time ago (my father is a musician, by the way, employed by the only business in this city that you might think would employ a cadre of professional musicians) is being restaged somewhere in the States. I guess they were using a recorded soundtrack and my dad was on it. So, anyway, this royalty check came his way and he was sitting around with some of musician buddies talking about what he should do with it.

Of course, almost instantly one of them said

(Cleverly seguing into the next part of my post)

“Terry, you should buy a Mac!”

And that’s exactly what he did. Almost.

Luckily after going to some place in town that sells Macs, he was confused enough that he needed to come home and regroup. When I got home from work later that day I was greeted with my introduction to the entire idea, “Liam, help you need to help your father buy a Mac”.

Now, I’ve never really written anything about Macs. I’m not really interested in talking about it. I also don’t really want to kick up any dust with the resident Mac lovers in these parts, mostly because I enjoy picking my battles. But here goes anyway (for the fanboys, this is your cue to get agitated and leave me big  comments. In fact if you’re pressed for time you can just skip to the end and leave me a comment explaining that I don’t ‘understand’):

My initial reaction was cold refusal. And disdain.  Seriously, I didn’t even want to hear about it. The last thing I needed was another annoying layer of home-tech-support added to my pile, let alone one that came wrapped in immaculately shiny white plastic.

But, my better instinct took over. After all, I’ve been called ignorant on the subject before, and I took it on the chin. Maybe it was just time to dig a little deeper and see if my innate prejudices were really in my fathers best interests.

My job involves being very social with a large number of people every day, and many of them are elderly. All of the old folks love their Macs. Why? They’re easy to use. My father certainly isn’t elderly, but he’s never owned a computer before. Maybe it was worth the time to take a serious look at what Mac had to offer. Not to me, but to my father. So I asked what had happened at the Authorized Apple Dealer that morning.

The options were buy or lease. Simple enough. My father was leaning towards the lease, because it works out better for tax purposes (the self-employed are able to claim things like computers against income tax. If the machine is leased you just discount the ammount you’ve paid to the lease that tax-year. If you buy it outright, you can still claim it, but you have to factor in depreciation of the asset). I thought this was a grand idea as well. “Great, so if he doesn’t like it, he can just end the lease.”

Actually, no. Leasing a Mac is actually buying a Mac. You just spread it out over a number of months. If my dad had wanted to drop the lease and buy another computer, he would have had to buy out the lease and then sell the Mac himself. How fucking useless it that? And as far as I know, that’s the standard across the board, not just something that was happening around here.

But still, his buddies were pretty confident that he’d like it. I didn’t want to let those leasing shenanigans get in the way of my judgement. So I soldiered on to the Mac website. Now, I’m looking for a laptop. I’m also not looking to kill myself on the price as this is a starter machine. Now, let’s try and look past the fact that Mac has a staggering variety of 3 desktops and 3 laptops to choose from. Like I said, I’m looking at the low-level laptops, which takes me to the MacBook. Luckily, again I’m not being confronted with too much dangerous choice here. Just 3 laptops with incremental price differences. The last one being an extra $200 for a black shell and some more hard drive.

Speaking of hard drive though, let’s get into the specifics. After all, I’ve been bitching about a lack of choice, but once one selects a system (the MacBook 13-inch White 2.1GHz, if you’re following), you’re taken to a pretty standard ‘trick out your computer’ type page.

In spite of being overpriced to begin with, this is apparently where Apple actually makes its money:

RAM: $100 for an extra gig

HDD: $150 for 140 gigs. In case that doesn’t set of warning bells for you, my computer has 1000 gigs and that only cost me $200

Want an external display? of course you do! It’ll only cost you $600 for a 20inch display, and at an additional $100 per inch, it’s a real fuckin bargain to go all the way for a 23 incher. Oh wait (and not to keep holding up my computer as a paragon of awesomeness or anything), I got a 24 inch monitor at the same resolution as Apple’s 23 for less than the 20 inch on offer here.

Oh, what? You don’t just want the monitor to sit on your desk and look pretty? Then you’ll need to throw down for an adapter, sold separately. Yes, it’s the next item on the list, but do you seriously want to nickel and dime your customers like that? You just persuaded someone to shell out enough money to buy another computer somewhere else — just on a screen — and then you tell them that it’s gonna be $20 extra for an adapter? (although, to their credit I was browsing the desktop section and I saw that the Mouse-with-More-than-1-Button is now shipping stock)

So, at this point, I navigated away from the Mac site. And you should too (if only to keep up with my story).

Now, here I was caught in a bind. I was now back where I’d started. I had no desire to help my dad with this purchase. But I knew that if I took the time and built him a nice non-Mac laptop on some other site, or at some other store in town, I’d never hear the end of it if anything went wrong. I’m not saying that anything would, either. I’ve got a 6-year-old Dell connected to my living room television (came with an adapter, incidentally) thats never needed service of any kind, even after years of abuse by all my siblings, my mother, myself, and even Ben. I’ve never even cleaned the damn thing. My mother’s laptop is similarly 4 or 5 years old. Windows has never failed her. She’s replacing it this year because all the keys are falling off and the battery is shot. Not to mention that her ‘unfillable’ 20 gig drive… isn’t.

Now, I’ve never claimed to be the smartest man alive, and I must give credit to Ellen (sadly no longer blogging) for suggesting the EEE.  I believe her exact words were “what about that little computer you were telling me about in [that local computer store]?”

And what a perfect solution it was. The EEE is relatively easy to use, and totally adequite for any of the tasks my father will set for it (that exclusively being checking email and Googling things at this point). But beyond all that, its so friggin cheap its OK to be wrong. I mean, seriously! Macs are expensive! The old people tell me that their customer service is second to none, but what first-time user should be forced to take that chance? I’m not interested in starting a revolution. I just want my dad to be able to check his email.

But on that note, I’m sure you might like to know why I dislike Macs so. I mean, I started this little story by stating that I wasn’t a big fan, so my resultant disappointment could easily be explained away by that. Now, I tried to be truthful and really give the Macs a chance there, but perhaps that doesn’t come across through the vitriol hindsight has granted me (or perhaps the hindsight vitriol has granted me… hmmm).

I mean, now that I’ve started, I really might as well say my whole piece and just take what comes my way. So, for your perusal, here are some other things about Apple (not just their personal computers) that rub me the wrong way:

Price: I already mentioned this, but if anyone can give me 5 good and broadly applicable reasons why I should pay so much more for a good Mac, I’ll maybe consider buying one. In fact, since its only about double the price, I’ll settle for only 2 good and broadly applicable reasons.

Monopolizing Nonsense: I’ll admit freely that Macs are decent products, and that Apple carries this decency to its other products, namely the Ipod. But here’s the thing: You manufacture almost all of the hardware yourself . You use proprietary software and file formats, designed by you. If the shit didn’t work well you’d have to be ruthlessly incompetent. Am I missing something here? It’s not like Apple has to consult with other hardware or software companies before it launches a new product. If the stuff doesn’t work when they put it out, then who else is there to blame?

The other disgusting facet of this policy is the way power is now leveraged against Apple customers. Say you want an Ipod, because they kick ass. You just don’t want to use Itunes, for whatever reason. Maybe you like Winamp better. Is that a crime? Apparently yes. Say you have a strange perverse attachment to WMV files. Sorry, out of luck if you want to play those on an Ipod. Where are the snorts of derision and outrage from the people who were happy to paint Microsoft as a monopolizing bully for the same behaviour 10 years ago? At least I’ve always been free to install something other than IE to browse the web. Every time someone comes up with an alternative to Itunes, Apple just sends out a new patch to stop your Ipod cooperating with it. So you can either never again update your Itunes (and encourage piracy by being unable to use the store) or stay under Apple’s soft white iJackboot.

Let me give a more personal example: I’d love to watch the Watchmen trailer. In fact, there are plenty of trailers I’d like to watch. However, if I want to download Quicktime, I can’t just get Quicktime. It’s been a while since I tried to do it, but as I recall, I was forced to accept Itunes and something called Bonjour. Who even knows what the hell that is? Having just started reading the blogs again, I see that Binks was facing a similar problem not too long ago. (although, thank goodness, someone has finally been given rights to show the trailer on Youtube)

The Hipster Bullshit: I don’t want to offend anyone here, but a company that has to invent a mythos to sell its product probably isn’t selling the best product. Don’t even bother claiming that Apple didn’t invent the hype and doesn’t continue to fuel it as strongly as it can. Its a pathetic marketing ploy to bring in people who weigh  the ‘coolness’ of their computers equally against performance, and are therefore willing to pay up to get both.

I like the adds. They’re funny. The one with the cart that I linked to above is really funny. As long as you know nothing about computers. Have you ever encountered a syntax error when doing something other than coding a program? I haven’t. And the part where they imply that a ‘fatal error’ will brick your computer? Priceless! Almost as funny as implying (or downright stating) that evolution’s status as a ‘theory’ puts it on equal footing with Intelligent Design. Really hilarious, except for the part that it is incredibly stupid, not to mention disingenuous.

Of course, I can prattle on and on about how I find Apple’s popular image to be total bullshit, but I guess I don’t need to when things like this are happening.

However, I should probably add a personal spin, just so that I’m making myself clear. The problem that I have with Apple’s spin is the same problem I have with lots of things: If the hype is ‘up in my grill’ when I see a product for the first time, then I’m either going to believe it or I’m going to be turned off and actively pushed away. Am I cool enough to own a Mac? Every add I see seems to ask just that. Is it so much to just ask for some proof? All Mac add campaigns are either targeted at making Mac users seem cool (successfully?), or users of every other possible computer system seem retarded.

I mean, maybe my problem is that I already have an identity, one I’m pretty secure in. You know? So when I see Mac adds with douchebags hand-talking and trying to explain whats so awesome, I’m immediately turned off. 1) it’s like the Stepford wives. It’s great that the meaning of life for you is owning a Mac, but I’m just not sure that that will be the case for me. 2) As I said, I already have my own identity when it comes to computers/technology. Mac adds that imply that that identity is stupid are not likely to make me buy a Mac.

To cap it off, just let me say that the adds are important. I could just ignore the adds and buy the product if I like it. But actually, I can’t. Apple is a huge corporation, and their advertising division are pretty important to them. So, bear with me here, but all Mac advertising is directed towards a specific audience. The fact that all Mac advertising brings bile to my throat leads me to conclude that I’m not in that audience. If the marketers have serious control over everything Apple does and says, I can only assume that they’re not wasting their time selling Macs to the wrong people, and that the product is tailored towards the audience the adds are aimed at. So why would I buy one if they aren’t meant for me (and cost a fortune)?

But who cares about Macs anyway? Let’s move onto something more important.

I said I had no money before, and that’s true. You may remember that I was employed full-time in a concrete box. That was all well and good during the winter, but I found myself going a little squirrely once sping and summer began to set in. So I arranged a leave of absense for myself for July and August, the two months easiest to cover for me since all the highschool employees would be able to come in during the day.

But in order not to be totally destitute I did have to take on another job.

So I’ve taken up an active role in the erection business. My erections are huge. Seriously. They go up for days on end, and they usually service hundreds of people in that time. The only real drag about my erections is keeping them clean. If my erection goes down and I put it away when its even a little wet, then you can bet the next time I bring it out it’ll be covered in mold.

I put up tents, by the way. Up to 4000 squarefeet. I work with my 50-something boss, 2 wellfare bums, and a 17-year-old dropout. I’m always in the sun (except when it rains) and it’s always a good time.

But I never get hours. I worked 3 times last pay period, for a total of 11 hours. That was it. The trouble is that the above-mentioned bums take all the hours. Only the biggest tents need all 5 of us working together, and the boss likes to be called in as little as possible. There are other tens that should have 3 or 4 people working them, but sometimes the guys just mysteriously go off and put them up without calling in anyone else.

But this doesn’t piss me off too much. It’s left me open for plenty of Xbox and other pursuits. Of course, the best way to have fun with no money still eludes me, but who has time for that?

So what else can I tell you about?

I installed Ununtu on my computer yesterday. It was a good time… But I’m not sure that its all its cracked up to be. This is just a few observations after using it for all of an hour, but there were a few things that irked me. I’m sure that these issues can be resolved, but I may not be interested in the effort it will take to do that.

1) Dual screen support. When I was setting Ubuntu up, it just cloned my large monitor onto my small monitor. This was annoying, obviously, because cloned monitors are useless, and because my small monitor couldn’t even display the whole picture. Ubuntu asked me if I wanted to download and run some Nvidia drivers, but warned me that that placed me in the hands of Nvidia, who don’t place a priority on updating their linux drivers very often I guess. Upon rebooting, the small monitor recieved no signal, and stubbornly refused to be discovered in the display manager. But I did consider it an improvement over the clone.

2) Media player. Seriously, 19 times out of 20 all I do when I turn on my computer is open Firefox and Winamp. Now, maybe I’m spoilt by the fact that all I need to do with Winamp is drag tracks into the playlist, save the playlist, and listen to my music. The fact that I have Winamp globally hotkeyed is just icing on the cake. The first thing I had to do was download codecs. This was cool. It was far from the only thing I’d needed to download, and even then the whole installation process was still far faster than Windows. But it didn’t support my playlist files, so I had to import all the music. And then I realized that I actually needed to transfer the music to the linux partition and stick it in my Music folder (I also took this time to transfer my pictures into their equivalent folder in order to generate my ridiculous screen saver) because otherwise it all disappeared every time I rebooted the system.

3) Remember how Firefox is my other most-used program? I decided to check my email, and saw a blog comment from Wolfgang. I replied, and ended up going on a blog-tour to see how things were going (So you could say that Wolfgang is responsible for my return). And I just can’t get the fucker to play videos. I wanted to watch the ‘ground rainbows’ video, and I downloaded all 3 of Firefox’s suggested plugins. None of them worked. I decided to soldier on, until I got to The Box. Now, Granite and I have had disagreements in the past. I think we both handled them well. But apparently my computer is holding a grudge. Opening The Box caused my entire system to shudder to a halt. I’m not kidding. The music stopped, the mouse froze… and then there we were. And this nonsense repeated itself every time I opened another page in The Box. Click, wait, freeze, new page. it was at that point that I rebooted back to Windows.

I didn’t even bother trying 4) which was to see if I could get on Xbox Live through Ubuntu. Currently my Xbox goes into my LAN port and then it and my computer communicate with my router through onboard wireless. This is done simply using ICS (internet Connection Sharing), and then I switch my big monitor over to its analog input and start playing. After everything else, I figured it would just be asking for trouble.

So what do you people think about that? What are the advantages to using Ubuntu? I was looking forward to a more secure browsing experience, but if I can’t watch videos or listen to music while browsing, then I’m not sure that its worth it. Also, my computer has serious muscle, and aside from a better boot time, that really wasn’t showing here. I tried to go through every single system and admin option to see what I could figure out, but nothing was really coming through. Yes it has 2 desktops, but that’s kind of offset by its not recognizing my 2 monitors…

Well, that’s all I’ve got for now. Three and half thousand words is enough to be starting back with.

Until we meet again.

HAHAHA!

Want to put OSX on your Eee? How about trying to figure out which Linux distro you’d like to swap out the original Xandros for? Well I don’t fucking care, because the best news ever for classless PC putzes like myself has just been announced (last week)!

Finally, a reason to get into the low-cost laptop market!

And now, having posted something about computers, I feel like a real RCGer!

Here’s something to keep you busy while I dick around and don’t post:

First, this is the most decent online comic I’ve come across in a while. It’s updated with 2 pages every Tuesday. I mean, the fact that it has a character names Zomgz should be enough on it’s own. The fact that Zomgz only talks in circuit diagrams should just be icing on the cake.

Second, The Badass of the Week is probably the best site ever made. This was the entry that I Stumbled onto, but give the archives a good look-through. I’ve been reading them in my spare time for the last 2 weeks.

Lastly, here’s a small update on what I did last week:

1) I bought Dawn of War: Soulstorm, which is the third massive expansion to the original Dawn of War title. Buy it. I’ll try and post a full review later (which is sort of a RCG type thing to do). I’ve got to keep playing it compulsively for now.

2) I spent the weekend playing Halo3 with Wolfgang. As you may know, I bought an Xbox360 for the specific purpose of playing that game, so I’ve been trying to get my money’s worth. This weekend was the DoubleXP Griffball Weekend. Since likely none of you know what that means, just let me say that it was time well spent. And since everyone was playing it that weekend the wait times between games were slim to none. Also, since Wolfgang and I seemed to be winning more than 50% of the games we played, we recruited Tinglez and her friend Jon to fill out our team (instead of having Xbox Live randomly match us with 2 asshats), going as far as to buy Tingles 1 month of Xbox Live membership. That was the lineup. It was awesome. The best game we had was one where the other team all lagged out and stood still, resulting in us murdering them numerous times in order to score really hard to get medals  (revel in my 1337ness).

After that, we spent 45 minutes getting to Bentleys, most of which was us shovelling out Wolfgang’s driveway and then pushing Jon down Wolfgang’s cul de sac until we got to a plowed road.

I’m going to play more Dawn of War now.

I’m gonna keep this quick. Here’s the facts:

1) I am god.

2) Likely you will never read anything better than this.

3) There is a real post coming soon. Of intense length. Get into it.

4) I bought a new computer on Boxing Day and really should have discussed it earlier:

My computer is the greatest thing I have ever owned. Coincidentally it is also the most expensive. The box itself came in at roughly $1200, and I grabbed a 24inch monitor from Dell for another $350 or so. This computer came about sort of by accident. I was planning on buying a new computer back in November, it was good. But not as good as this one. Wolfgang and I spent a week back and forth on the phone budgeting and looking at parts on NCIX, Tiger Direct, and Direct Canada. And for what it’s worth, Direct Canada is the way to go. Their website is shitty, their ordering process is shitty, but they have the best prices and if your order is over $300 and under 100lbs you will get free shipping. And there’s no PST since they’re based in BC.

Anywhoo, Wolfgang and I finalized this computer order, and I put all my info into the thingy, and ordered it.

Then I got an email. It said that in order to expedite my order I had to click a link which would take me to a secure page showing a 4 digit PIN number. Once I clicked that link I would be contacted within 5 minutes by an automated telephone service and be asked to input the displayed PIN. I did this.

And then I went to bed.

And waited.  And waited. And waited some more for an email informing me that my order had shipped. It never came. It turns out that my credit card was declined. But I didn’t see that until I’d gone into the order tracking website, and even then it wasn’t exactly calling attention to itself. I was instructed to phone a 1-800 number in order to sort it all out, but by that point half the stuff I’d ordered was either no longer on sale or out of stock or the mail in rebates had expired. I was all, “fuck that nonsense”, and as far as I know, the order is still pending. I’m not too worried.

In order to have my revenge though, I now began thinking about a super tricked-out computer that I would scoop hot off the internets as soon as the clock ticked over to midnight on boxing day.

Which is exactly what I got.  Start with an ASUS P5Ke MoBo, strap it to an Antec 900 case, hook on 2 500G SATA2 drives and 2 LG SATA DVD writers, stick in 4 Gigs of beautiful OCZ RAM, an Intel C2D e6750, and an EVGA GeForce 8800 GT, and then power it all up with an OCZ Stealth XTreme power supply, and you would have the same computer as me.

Now, before someone intelligent jumps in and tells me that I installed too much RAM, thanks. I know. Some dick at a computer store told me that after he made fun of my case. Then I followed him home and pissed in his dresser drawers while he was asleep.

So yeah. This computer does anything I ask it to. And it does it bloody fast.  I wanted to be a big hotshot and install XP, Vista, and Ubuntu, but the last 2 decided to be cocks and not work for me. Oh well. I’ll have to stay with a familiar operating system that runs anything I want to use. Shucks.

Well, that’s basically it. I also bought an Xbox 360 for the sole purpose of playing Halo3, so if you happen to own one, feel free to send me a friend request.

I think I’m gonna go play some H3 right now actually. Keep yourselves healthy.

Once, long ago, I posted a link to a video called Daft Punk Girl. Jordan (Not Granite. This is going to get confusing) responded in the comments that that girl would be his wife.

Well… free up your testicles, Jordan. I present the simultaneous successor to Daft Punk Girl and Daft Hands. And the best part is that there’s two of them.

Enjoy.

So, I promised Jordan that I’d put something up last night about XKCD. But I guess that this is really a post for Blake.

You’ll notice that I haven’t supplied a link to what XKCD might be for the unknowing. There’s a reason. XKCD is a webcomic, and it kicks ass. The reason that I didn’t post about it last night was that I was still busy trawling through the archives, which I have recently finished.

Sooooo…. Let me cut to the chase: In addition to being one of the best webcomcs I’ve ever read, XKCD has an unusual secret. Whoa Hold on. I just had a strange revelation: Unusual may be the only word in the English language that goes u-consonant-u-consonant-u. I challenge “U” to disprove me.

What is this unusual secret, you ask? It’s URL. While most people (like Jordan and Google) will find that the comic’s URL is xkcd.com, I happened to run across it being hosted on an entirely seperate and much funnier one:

cu.nniling.us

(that’s right, you’re going to have to type it in if you don’t believe me)

Isn’t that the best URL you’ve ever seen? It made me laugh only because I was busy poring through the archives absentmindedly for about half an hour before I even saw it.

Now, what is even stranger is that the nniling site is almost an exact copy. When at xkcd.com, all facets of the site (comic, archive, forums, blag, store, and about) are linked through xkcd.com, but when at cu.nilling.us only the blag and forums are linked through xkcd.com (for the obvious reason that updating the two in parallel would be a hellish waste of effort), while clicking archive, store, or about, will take you to a totally identical but seperate page hosted from nilling.us.

I find this incredibly cool. That is all. The only real question is why does this comic have two URLs? And why does the less funny one show up in Google?

Moving on:

Another aside: I was killing time thinking about what to write next, so I opened a new tab and hit the StumbleUpon button. It took me to an XKCD comic. Then it took me here.

Oh, this might be a good time to announce that the war is over. I’d love to say that I won, but it’s a little more complicated than that.

Here’s how I like to think of it:
1) Jordan’s post was so badly written that I easily misinterpreted it.
2) Based on those misinterpretations I declared war and launched an offensive.
3) Rather than rebuffing my offensive, Jordan published a highly reformatted version of the original post which effectively removed the whole reason for declaring war in the first place.
4) I can now claim that I won because my attack went by undefended against and unchallenged. However, Jordan can claim that he didn’t really lose either given that I wasn’t actually attacking his ideas.

Things are pretty much like the war of 1812. The US will always claim that it won the war because they won some pretty good victories against Canadian troops on US soil (and because they’re ignorant of most other parts of history as well). Canadians will sensibly claim that there was no winner given that neither side lost any territory. Although we could claim that the US technically lost given that they didn’t fulfill their objective of taking over Canada, whereas we technically won given that we fulfilled our objective of not getting taken over. But it doesn’t really matter anyway.

What I also wanted to clear up in this post was a lingering idea that I wanted to get to but didn’t have time for: The whole basis of the conflict was totally irrelevant for 2 different reasons.

1) It was an American conflict. Girls here in Canada can already get on the pill with no problem by visiting their doctors. Every girl I knew in highschool who was on the pill, with the exception of one, was on it with parental knowledge because they had “really bad periods”. Now, that may have been true, but it’s also a rather convenient excuse given that it’s impossible to disprove as well. The reason that this is an issue in America has a lot more to do with religious conflicts. Do you want to know why the girls getting the pill in this article were all “middle-school” and not “high-school” students? Because in the states if your highschool teaches any method of contraception except abstinence it immediately loses all federal funding. So, when your normal perspective is that contraception is immoral, then the idea of giving it to teenagers for free without their parents necessarily knowing is pretty scary/newsworthy. If that isn’t your perspective, the article comes across with more of a “hmmm, saves them a trip to the GP I guess”.

2) Contraception is already ubiquitous (although I suppose ‘in Canada’ may be important to add here as well). Who cares if kids can get the pill at school? If you’re too afraid to make a doctor’s appointment and get on the pill, all you need to do is go to the Health Unit. While they can’t give you the pill (which is really a good thing, given that it’s a prescription med), they will give you all the condoms you want, as well as the “morning after” pill. If you’re too shy to go over yourself, you can send anyone to get condoms for you (or buy them anywhere), and any woman to get the MA pill (I think. If they make you take it there then I guess you’d have to go yourself). Seriously, a minimum of effort is involved already, why is it a big deal to make things slightly easier?

And that’s all I have to say about that.

Let me cap off this post with some announcements:

1) Wolfgang has begun posting again. Read it, leave a comment, and maybe the next one won’t be 10 months in the making.

2) Also, I didn’t properly ring out the fanfare for Tingles (or Wolfgang’s girlfriend), when I put up my link to her. This would be a good time to check her out since her latest post is a humourous look at Halo-themed pillow talk.

So, tune in next week when the Liam is the Awesome tour resumes, and I head back to beautiful Waterloo to see Wolfgang, Tingles, and some leftist radicals (and any RCG boys who want to get in on the fun). The weekends after that are open, but I’m going to try and spend some time in TO since I haven’t been there in so long and there are so many people worth seeing.

Toodles.