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A Clandestine Meeting
Gail and I started a Christmas tradition a couple of years ago — on Christmas eve, we have fondue for dinner (bread and cheese fondue first, then beef fondue, and chocolate fondue for dessert), and then everyone puts on brand new pajamas, and we all do a big jigsaw puzzle. I bought some puzzles on eBay the other day just for this reason, and noticed that the seller lives in Hamilton. I asked him if he wouldn’t mind me picking the puzzles up to save myself shipping costs, and he said no problem. Once I won the auction, we arranged to meet at a Tim Horton’s (how Canadian, eh?) across from Limeridge Mall. I told him I’d wear a red baseball cap so he’d recognize me (Gail thought that the whole “red baseball cap” thing was very funny), and he said to look for an old man with gray hair and a cane.
I was going Christmas shopping anyway, so I showed up a little early and had dinner. Vegetable soup and chicken salad sandwich combo. On whole wheat. With a Coke. I finished that and then went back up for a donut and hazelnut smoothee (mmmmmmmm… hazelnut) and while I was enjoying that, a woman who was the quintessential “little old lady” came up to me and said “Excuse me, but are you the puzzle man?” I told her I was, and she motioned me over to where she and her husband were sitting. Her husband was the man with the cane – there was a large tree in between where they were sitting and where I was sitting, so I hadn’t seen them (good thing I wore my red baseball cap!). We chatted for a minute or two, I thanked them for meeting me so I could save the shipping costs, and went our separate ways.
My car still smells like hazelnut smoothee.
Harry the Fourth
Gail and I played hookey flexed some work time this afternoon and went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The movie raised a few questions: How many times can you say that the fourth movie in a series was just as good as the first, if not better? How many movies would Gary Oldman agree to be in if he was offered maybe 3 minutes of screen time, and you could barely even recognize him? How do you make a 2 1/2 hour movie out of a 700 page book without skipping any important stuff?
It had its flaws (Harry, Ron, and Hermione all look older than the 14 they’re supposed to be), and some stuff was missing (the Dursley’s and Mrs. Weasley weren’t there at all, Fleur and Krum said almost nothing, and I missed Krum’s trouble with Hermione’s name – “Herm-o-ninny”) but we really enjoyed it. As usual, the views of the school and surrounding grounds were amazing, Snape was sufficiently slimy (though less negative towards Harry than in the previous movies), Draco was somehow a bully and a chickenshit at the same time, and Ron was scared silly (though this time, it wasn’t spiders or other monsters that scared him, it was (gasp) girls). The only person who seemed out of character was Dumbledore – he seemed more angry than usual, and also seemed to have more energy than a man his age should have.
It’ll be a two-year wait, but we’re already looking forward to the next movie – Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix!
In other news, I ordered a new home gym yesterday, and it’s being delivered tomorrow. Click here, then click on Strength, and look under “Northern Lights Multi Gyms” for a model called Granite. I didn’t get the 50 lb extra weight – 150 lbs should do me for the time being (and the forseeable future). I’m not planning on entering any weightlifting or bodybuilding competitions or anything, I’m just hoping to tone a little and hopefully lose the “love handles” around my waist. I started working out shortly after Ryan was born – we bought a treadmill, and I lost 25 pounds in about 4 months. I bought a cheap little weight bench and a few free weights a year or so later, and I’ve been using them ever since, though the fact that I work out alone and don’t have a lot of time to be switching plates and stuff around meant that the number of exercises that I could do was very limited. With this thing, there are tons of things I can do, I can change weights in seconds, and there’s no danger of dropping the weights on my chest or neck or anything, so it’s safer. I’m really looking forward to this…
Things are more like they are now than they ever used to be
I remember a time, not too long ago, when a 540 MB hard drive cost just over $500 – the rule of thumb for disk storage at the time was roughly a buck a meg. Right now at Factory Direct, you can get a 250 GB hard drive for $119, which is less than 50 cents a gig. Which means that in less than ten years, the price of hard disk storage has come down by a factor of two thousand.
Our first computer (in 1982) was a Commodore VIC-20, with 3.5 kB of usable RAM, and the only storage was tape casettes. It cost something like $400. After a while, we got a 16 kB expansion cartridge, and I didn’t know what to do with all the extra memory. Eventually (maybe 1985) we moved up to an XT with an 8 kHz processor, some terribly small amount of RAM (definitely measured in kB, not MB), and two floppy drives (no hard disk) – this machine cost over 2 grand. My dad bought a 10 MB hard disk a little while later, and we were on the leading edge of computing. Now, twenty years later, there’s a far more powerful computer embedded in your average vending machine, and I have a little two-inch-long thing that hangs on my key chain that can store 128 MB.
It’s almost scary to think what computing will be like 10 or 20 years from now. This post kind of reminds me of the book The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, which I read a year or two ago (and inspired the album Spiritual Machines by Our Lady Peace). Kurzweil talks about how much more powerful (and cheaper) computers are getting, and eventually, they will be as powerful and fast as the human brain — and what happens then? Will people start getting microprocessor implants to enhance memory, intelligence, or even things like strength or muscular endurance? How many such implants can one have before the line between human and machine gets blurry? A really interesting read.
Ovechkin and Ponikarovsky
I’ve heard quite a bit about Alexander Ovechkin recently. He was the first pick just before the “season that wasn’t”, but then seemed to have been forgotten about, what with the lockout and then the end of the lockout and then the whole Sidney Crosby mania. He won’t be forgotten about for long though – he’s rivalling Crosby for most points by a rookie this year. The way they talk about him on the radio is impressive – he’s a scoring machine, who has as good a chance as anybody of scoring 70 goals in the next couple of years. Considering 50-goal scorers have been rather rare in the last couple of years, this would be quite an accomplishment. Anyway, I heard an interview with him the other day, and he said that he wants to play as much as possible – forward, defence, on the PP and PK, anywhere. He just loves to play. His coach said that he’s adapting to life in North America quite well – he’s working hard on his English, and even turned down an offer to be roommates with one of his Russian teammates, figuring that if he’s bunking with a native-English speaker, his English will improve that much faster. Nice to hear about a hard-working athlete who is playing because he loves to play, and doesn’t consider himself God’s gift to his sport (are you reading this, Terrell Owens?).
Also heard another nice story about the Leaf game yesterday – Carlo Colaiacovo took a shot towards the net that Alexei Ponikarovsky seemed to deflect into the net. Ponikarovsky was given credit for the goal, but immediately went to the ref and told him that he didn’t touch it, and that Colaiacovo should be given credit. He also knew that it would have been Colaiacovo’s first NHL goal, so he went and grabbed the puck. After talking to the ref the second time, he gave the puck to Colaiacovo, and credit for the goal was changed. He could easily have just taken credit, but went out of his way to make sure the right person got the goal. Attaboy.
New Toys and Psychic Nikki
On Mix 99.9 this morning, they had Psychic Nikki on as a guest – she comes on now and again and they get people to call in and ask her questions about their love life, job, financial situation, stuff like that. What a crock. Every single person who calls gets a positive response – yes, your money situation will improve. Yes, you will meet the person of your dreams within a few months. Yes, you will get promoted or get a new job. This morning she was also doing “past lives readings”. Humble Howard apparently was a German fighter pilot in WWI named Deiter. The funniest part was the very first caller – she asked about her past lives, and Nikki told her she was one of Henry VIII’s wives, who was beheaded. Puh-lease. There are approaching 6 billion people in the world today, and the first person to call the Mix this morning happened to be one of Henry VIII’s wives in a past life? Come on. I get a kick out of Psychic Nikki whenever she’s on – it’s such crap.
Now for the real fun stuff – toys! I went out to Factory Direct yesterday and picked up a PVR card and DVD burner for $60 each. I need to put a cable TV jack in the office now, but there’s one in Ryan’s room which is on the other side of the wall, so I could probably just cut a hole in the office wall opposite the jack in Ryan’s room and move the jack over. Then plug the cable into the card and voila! I can record TV shows on the computer, then burn them onto DVD. I have anothor thing called a Dazzle, which plugs into the computer, then you plug the video camera into that, and it allows you to transfer video tape to the computer. Now we can transfer our video tapes of the kids to the computer, and then onto DVD. This will obviously make watching them easier, but will also allow us to put the original video tapes in the safety deposit box – backup and offsite storage is a critical part of disaster recovery, dontcha know.
The PVR card also has a FM tuner in it, so I was able to listen to the radio through the computer yesterday as well. I’m sure I won’t use that feature all that often, but it’s cool nonetheless.
Top 10 Great Album Names for Bad Albums
| 10. | Songs about Fucking – Big Black |
| Honestly, I have no idea what this band sounds like, but you just gotta love the honesty of the title. | |
| 9. | Eat ’em and Smile – David Lee Roth |
| 8. | All the Best Cowbows Have Chinese Eyes – Pete Townshend |
| 7. | Vigil in a Wilderness of Mirrors – Fish |
| Not that bad an album, but not nearly as good as his stuff with Marillion. | |
| 6. | The Spaghetti Incident? – Guns ‘n Roses |
| After Appetite for Destruction and the Use Your Illusions, this one was a bit of a downer. | |
| 5. | Counterparts – Rush |
| Not a great album, as Rush albums go, but the album art plays on the word “Counterparts” very well, listing a bunch of words that go together, as well as pictures of things that go together, and other things like a blueprint of a kitchen sink and parts of a clock (get it? Counter parts?). | |
| 4. | Happiness Is Not A Fish That You Can Catch – Our Lady Peace |
| 3. | Badmotorfinger – Soundgarden |
| I loved Superunknown, and had heard lots of good things about this one, so I bought it. It’s OK, but Superunknown blows it away. | |
| 2. | Sailing the Seas of Cheese – Primus |
| Tommy the Cat and Jerry was a Race Car Driver are both good, but the rest was rather forgettable. Frizzle Fry is a much better Primus album. | |
| 1. | Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence – Dream Theater |
| Again, not a bad album, but not as good as other Dream Theater albums. Awesomely cool album title though. This one gave me the idea for this list. |
Update: Honorable mention to The Worst of Jefferson Airplane by (who else?) Jefferson Airplane. This one’s good not only because of the good name, but because (I believe) it was their debut album.
Maybe next I’ll list the worst album titles for great albums — pretty much any self-titled album (that’s not a debut album) or numbered album (Chicago II, Chicago III, Chicago IV, …, Chicago XVII, …) would count here.
Optical illusion
Check out this optical illusion – takes a few seconds, but it’s quite cool.
Blogging
Here is a comic about the blogging craze. Makes me wonder why I write in this blog – is it for the money? No, though it’s kind of nice. For the chicks? No, though, again, that’s a welcome perk. Because my thousands of devoted readers are clamoring for more of my innermost thoughts? Um, no.
I don’t really know why I have a blog. Sometimes I think it’s kind of a historical document – so in a few years, I can read what I was thinking way back when Figgy died, or when we went to Vegas, or something like that. Other times, it’s just an outlet for me to vent about stuff (ObVent: if someone passes you on the right, in all probability it means that you’re in the wrong lane, not them!), and sometimes I feel like I want to share my opinions with someone, but I don’t know who, so I just post ’em here.
It’s funny – I’m not sure if Gail even knows I have a blog. It’s not a secret – there’s a link to it on our own web site fer cryin’ out loud – and I’m not trying to keep it from her, I just haven’t made a point of telling her about it. And I know why I haven’t — the first thing she’d ask is “why?”, and I don’t really know the answer.
Gambling and lotteries
I read somewhere that while gambling is legal in Nevada (there were even slot machines at the gate in the airport), lotteries are illegal. This is misleading, though, since there’s a game called Keno available in every casino we saw — and even in some restaurants. Keno, which has the highest house advantage (see below) of any game in Vegas, is simply a fancy version of Lotto 6/49 – you get a card with numbers, pick a bunch of them, turn your ticket in, then a computer picks a bunch of random numbers and depending on how many numbers you got right, you win varying amounts of money. There are lots of different ways to win, but it’s essentially a lottery.
The “house advantage” is the amount you can expect to lose at a particular game over a long period of time. For example, Keno has a house advantage of something like 30%, while slots are under 10% and poker and blackjack are under 5%. Roulette is pretty high as well, but I don’t remember the number. Basically, the more skill you require, the less of a house advantage. My problem with gambling is that I get bored at slots because there is no skill involved whatsoever, but games like blackjack or poker require more skill than I have (to do anything other than lose consistently), so I’m outta luck. I did have fun playing video blackjack though, and had some luck the first night. I would like to learn more about blackjack though, and maybe next time I’m in a casino, I’ll have the confidence to actually sit at a table with a real dealer!
One thing struck me as funny while gambling in Vegas — the number of people who are frighteningly uninformed on games of chance. People who won’t play a slot machine because it paid off recently – or try to play machines that have not paid off recently, figuring they have a better chance of winning there. The funniest thing was the big video board next to each roulette table, listing the previous 20 numbers that came up — like this gives you any useful information whatsoever. One board I saw showed that four of the previous seven spins had been 1. Question: does this tell people to bet on 1 because it’s coming up a lot, or don’t bet on 1 because it’s already come up more often than the “law of averages” allows? Answer: It tells you nothing. On a wheel with both 0 and 00, the probability of getting 1 on the next spin is exactly 1/38, regardless of whether 1 has come up recently or not. I wonder how much money casinos make because people can’t seem to figure that out?
Cut The Chatter, Red Two 