Falling Sky

Love the Gadling pics of the day:

Weekend Magic

Did you take full advantage of your weekend? Some of us certainly did! :-)

Killing Time On The Stuttgart S-Bahn

In three weeks I'll be back in Germany for work, studies and of course, the World Cup. There's going to be some travelling going on and I'm sure there's going to be more than my fair share of Stuttgart S-Bahn rides to and from all my favorite hot spots: CBP, Schlampelickplatz and the perch. Tonight I was remembering some good times on said S-Bahn, sometimes those rides the best part of the night:



To all my European posse... see you all soon, start pouring that cold hefe ;-)

The DaVinci Code

Went to see "The DaVinci Code" movie yesturday, it's not near as bad as the critics say and not near as good as the book... and it's long. That's my professional review ;-)

Saturday Smiles

I'm still feeling like crap but it's starting to get better. Of course this post by Vowe certainly made me laugh, from the vault of great company names:

Boxes

It's day 10 of my brutal pneumonia and I just found out when collecting the garbage that I've gone through 9 full boxes of Kleenex during that time and I'm already half way through boxes 10 and 11! There's 200 tissues per box meaning I've sneezed, spit and goobered into over 2000 pieces of tissue over the past 10 days! Yikes!

You Again

So the good news is that I'm not totally crazy or just acting like a wuss. The bad news is that somehow, in 15-20 degree celcius weather, I picked up pneumonia. After physically being unable to stand up without pain and dizzyness for 4 days combined with a steady increase in coughing and flem, I decided it was fine time to go to the doctors this weekend. Blood tests, urine tests, reaction tests you name it. Well the results are in: pneumonia :-(

I've had pneumonia once before, during a broncial infection when I was in grammer school. I was out 3 weeks and it was not fun. Thank god I'm older now and they expect the meds to start helping within a day.

The other "good" news is that apparently the worst is over. I'm still in pretty bad shape, but with this amoxicillin they've got me on they say I should be back up to 80% in a couple days or so. I'd be happy just to be able to frigging get up to get a glass of water without physically exhausting myself!

Speaking of exhaustion, one great side effect of the meds is that instead of feeling an exhaustion in which I feel somehow working hard internally to maintain like the past week, now the exhaustion is a nice sleepy type of exhaustion. Ok I'm not making any sence, and I just wrote sleepy...

White Flag

After missing 4 days straight of work I was hoping the May 24 long weekend with it's opening of Hess Village patios and beautiful weather would be the perfect solution. Remember how mysteriously when you were young you'd be sick right up until there was something you really wanted to do ;-) Well apparently it doesn't transfer to adulthood. Day 6 of my total inability to get out of bed without significant pain, dizziness and nausea combined with near continual coughing all night long (I don't want to mention the yellow and green flem, that would be gross...) has convinced me that this isn't no ordinary flu.

Consequently I'm off to the hosiptal to get tested for mono or whatever else they think it might be. Surely I will have to brave a needle or two (yes I am a total needle wuss), but I'm basically missing the biggest weekend I've been waiting for since setting down in Hamilton.

I guess there's always May 24 Hess Village 2007... :-(

Anyone?

Falling Out Of Reach

Last time I talked to you,
You were lonely and out of place.
You were looking down on me,
Lost out in space.

Laying underneath the stars,
Strung out and feeling great.
Watch the red orange glow,
Watch it float away.

Down here in the atmosphere,
Garbage and city lights,
Gonna save you’re tired soul,
You’re gonna save our lives.
Turn on the radio to,
Find you in satellite.
I’m waiting for the sky to fall,
I’m waiting for a sign.

And all we are...
Is all so far...

You’re falling back to me,
The star that I can see.
I know you’re out there, somewhere out there.
You’re falling out of reach,
Defying gravity.
I know you’re out there,
Somewhere out there...

Hope you remember me,
When you’re homesick and need a change.
I miss you’re brown hair,
I miss the way you taste.
I know you’ll come back some day,
On a bed of nails I wait.
I’m praying that you don’t burn out,
Or fade away.

And all we are...
Is all so far...

You’re falling back to me,
The star that I can see.
I know you’re out there, somewhere out there.
You’re falling out of reach,
Defying gravity.
I know you’re out there,
Somewhere out there...

You’re falling back to me,
The star that I can see.
I know you’re out there...

You’re falling out of reach,
Defying gravity.
I know you’re out there,
Somewhere out there...

You’re falling back to me,
I know, I know.

You’re falling out of reach...

I know.

~ Our Lady Peace

Sympatico Blows

Despite having poured thousands of dollars into internet fees over the past 10 years to Bell Sympatico, they somehow do not value my business. The latest in a long list of poor customer service examples (including a line error technician visit, still waiting now after 70 days...) they have now done something that requires me to soon end the relationship permanently.

One of the big reasons I stuck with Sympatico was that the high speed connectivity, while hardly near as fast as they advertise (they have a long list of bullshit excuses, I've heard them all in 3 different locations) is quite stable and reliable and I've always used my sympatico e-mail as my primary personal address so changing that would be a real pain in the A$$. But now the integrity of their e-mail system has totally shocked me.

Today after experiencing a problem with logging into customer self care, we (the phone customer service agent and I) changed my pop and smtp servers back to the originals from 4 months ago. You see it was about that time that I was offered a special package of ulta-high speed (never came, they reverted me back to regular and as mentioned above am STILL waiting for a technician to come and figure out why) and a new "MSN wireless modem/router". Gravy.

Actually no. They switched over my mail servers to the Microsoft passport servers (the ones the originals "supposidly" automatically forward to and from) and everything seemed fine, that is until today when upon changing my server info back (which is not supposed to make any difference according to the customer service agent) I recieved an additional 4 e-mails from the past week that I hadn't seen before. This is scary.

Since I send hundreds of e-mails every day and they've all (assumingly) worked fine, why all of a sudden am I recieving extra mails that weren't recieved on the day they were sent but only after changing server info?!? So now I don't know when I am and am not recieving all my e-mails to that account, and have no idea for how long this has been going on or how many mails were lost in the process.

My rage at this situation and the lack of any (plausible) explaination, fix or guarentee that this will not happen again from the customer service reps (who seem to know less than I do, which in itself scares me beyond belief) is beyond explanation.

Sympatico you have lost the confidence of a long term customer who also happens to have set up and recommended your service to over 15 of my non-techie friends and family. I will be advising them all to switch as soon as possible.

You make me sick.

PS> If you never recieved an e-mail responce from me in the last 4 months, there's a good chance I'm not ignoring you, I probably didn't recieve the message. Just resend to my gmail account (same beginning @gmail.com)

Now That's Class

The Edmonton Oiler fans, instead of booing the American anthem in responce to the San Jose fans booing the Canadian anthem at the last game in San Jose (USA), cheered during the American anthem and never stopped.

Now that's some kind of Canadian class.

All Class

Just great. San Jose fans booed the Canadian anthem at the opening of game 5. Don't they frigging realize that a significate portion of their own team (including their two best players) are Canadian!?!

Retards.

This might actually make me laugh if I wasn't so frigging sick. Three days horozontal in your bed too weak to do anything but stare at the roof tends to make one grumpy :-(

I've Got An Idea

Here's an idea. How about all the flu bugs in my system that has left me an utter cripple take a frigging hike. Seriously, since when does eating right combined with daily exercise lead to a flu that makes circumcision look fun.



Ok I'm totally grumpy today. Immobility tends to do that to you :-(

I'll be back to my regular annoying self soon...

I Eat Babies

Baby carrots that is ;-)

Time Rolls On

The sun sets on another week...

Biz Card Funnies

Hugh MacLeod draws small cartoons on the back of business cards (usually business/blog related) . In his own words:

"hugh “cartoons drawn on the back of business cards” macleod is a creative director who writes about the new, post-internet realities of marketing, advertising, the “global microbrand”, using blogs to make money etc."

And sometimes his "business insights" hit the nail on the head:

Deep Thoughts

Sometimes you need to carve out some time for deep political contemplation... OR you can watch this great documentary on "Why We Fight" posted by Vowe that really makes you think.

Girlfriend Software Problems

An oldie but a goodie, software probelms:

Can you please advise me. I'm having some problems. I'm currently running the latest version of Girlfriend and I've been having some problems lately. I've been running the same version of DrinkingBuddies 1.0 all along as my primary application, and all the girlfriend releases have always conflicted with it. I hear that DrinkingBuddies won't crash if you run girlfriend in background mode with the sound turned off. But I'm embarrassed to say I can't find the switch to turn the sound off. I just run them separately, and it works okay.

Girlfriend also seems to have a problem coexisting with my Golf program, often trying to abort Golf with some sort of timing incompatibility. I probably should have stayed with girlfriend 1.0, but I thought I might see better performance with GirlFriend 2.0. After months of conflicts and other problems, I consulted a friend who has had experience with GirlFriend 2.0. He said that I probably didn't have enough cache to run girlfriend 2.0, and that eventually it would require a Token ring to run properly. He was right --- as soon as I purged my cache, it uninstalled itself.

Shortly after that, I installed girlfriend 3.0 beta. All the bugs were supposed to be gone, but the first time I used it gave me a virus. I had to clean out my whole system and shut down for a while. I very cautiously upgraded to girlfriend 4.0. This time I used a SCSI probe first and also installed a virus protection program. It worked okay for a while until I discovered that GirlFriend 1.0 was still in my system! Then I tried to run GirlFriend 1.0 again with GirlFriend 4.0 still installed, but GirlFriend 4.0 has a feature that I didn't know about that automatically senses the presence of any other version of girlfriend and communicates with it in some way, which results in the immediate removal of both versions!

The version I have right now works pretty well, but there are still some problems. Like all versions of girlfriend, it is written in some obscure language that I can't understand, much less reprogram. Frankly, I think there is too much attention paid to the look and feel rather than the desired functionality. Also, to get the best connections with your hardware, you usually have to use gold-plated contacts. And I've never liked how GirlFriend is totally "object-oriented". A year ago, a friend of mine upgraded his version of GirlFriend to GirlFriendPlus 1.0, which is a Terminate and Stay Resident version of GirlFriend. He discovered that GirlFriendPlus 1.0 expires within a year if you don't upgrade to Fiancee 1.0. So he did. But soon after that, he had to upgrade to Wife 1.0, which he describes as a "huge resource hog". It has taken up all of his space, so he can't load anything else.

One of the primary reasons that he upgraded to Wife 1.0 is that it came bundled with FreeSexPlus 1.0. Well, it turns out that the resource allocation module of Wife 1.0 sometimes prohibits access to FreesexPlus, particularly the new Plug-Ins he wanted to try. On top of that, Wife 1.0 must be running on a well warmed-up system before he can do anything! Although -he did not ask for it, Wife 1.0 came with MotherInLaw 1.0 which has an automatic pop-up feature that he can't turn off. I told him to try installing Mistress 1.0, but he said that he heard if you try to run it without first uninstalling Wife 1.0, Wife 1.0 will delete MSMoney files before doing the uninstall itself, Then Mistress 1.0 won't install anyway due to insufficient resources.

Can you help??

Google Virus Alert

What is going on? If I try and get to Google they give me this error:



Now I'd admit that I go to Google constantly during the day, but I'd hardy consider that virus-like activity! :-(

Leo Lake

For my main man Leo in Munich, this sign is somewhere in the middle of nowhere here in Canada en route to Hamilton from Ottawa:



See you in Munich for the game in less than 2 months buddy!! Proscht!! :-)

Go Sens Go!!

The Ottawa Senators are struggling down two games to none in the second round. It's time to "Rev Up the Red"! Bizare.

Burger Breakup

The end is near... The Burger King and Brooke Burke have broken up. Is there no love left in the world?!?!



Sorry King, don't worry about that money grubbing pub hound, she was a slut anyways.

Brooke: call me.

;-)

Koh Lanta Dreams

The France version of Survivor is called "Koh Lanta" and is set on an island... well somewhere over there by Thailand on an island called Koh Lanta. One of the best travel blogs "The World Is Not Flat" which documents a couples travels during their year off has hit the island and has some great pics/commentary:



I'd love to go over for a South Asian tour, but right now there's just too many trips above it on the list including a bunch of Europe stops (also study and work related), North Arctic Canada, Australia early next year, Africa and India. With pics like the one above, I just might have to reconsider the list ordering :-)

CBC Good, Millen Bad

An open comment to the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation), our nationally owned broadcaster (TV, radio, etc.) that produces the most prized 6 hours of television for every Canadian every Saturday night: Hockey Night In Canada.

Please replace Greg Millen's commentary with the scratching sound of nails on a chalkboard as it would illicit considerably less pain to your viewership. Millen's "insights" display the acumen of a blunted club while producing ten times the damage to my brain that the former could ever hope to achieve.

In addition, if you can explain what drug you were on when you hired this tool in the first place the stoners in B.C. would be eternally grateful. How someone who is booed off local Ottawa radio can get a national television gig truly demonstrates why humanity should believe in miracles.

PS> I just found out this pylon has a website. I have to go and barf now.

That's Not Rain

I was told prior to the weekend that it'd be a wet couple of days. Not so, I originally had this great plan to cross off a bunch of stuff that had been lingering on my to do like posting a bunch of stuff and also cut down the stack (digital "stack" in fact) of links I've been meaning to get to.

Again, not to be.

Yesturday was beautiful. Today is beautiful. Yesturday I took it in, assuming that I'd resume the list parring today, but today is amazing too. I've already hit the trail for 2 hours this morning and came back with some fresh groceries I picked up on the way for an amazing lunch. I've got to get back out there. Sorry folks, the e-mails and posts are going to have to wait. I'll post a pic later tonight when I get back.

Enjoy the last of your weekend everyone! :-)

Update: Just got back, come step into my day... starting with the path into one of Hamilton's many parks and trails, this one along the escarpment in the opposite direction that I usually take from the downtown. Yes, this is the start right from downtown, about a 2 min walk from my appartment and a 5 minute walk from my work. For those of you with a math degree like me you'll know that I live a 3 minute walk from work, no joke. Welcome to Canada:



I wasn't the only one enjoying the day, there was about 20 of these small birds enjoying the sun. Unfortunatly only one of them had the balls to stick around after I scared most away trying to get my camera out:



The trail was rocking, I could have gone for the rest of the night but my stomack had different ideas (I'll certainly bring some extra snacks next time!). The long hikes this weekend have definatly given some time to put some things into perspective, including some upcoming projects both in my professional and private life. More to come soon, which path will YOU choose? :-)



I hope you all took advantage of the day. Time to wrap mine up with a nice BBQ steak, cold beer and (hopefully) an Oilers second round game 1 win :-)

Cheers.

Blogger Nav Bar

I think all new Blogger blogs have no choice but to display the Nav bar at the top, you do get your choice of 4 spiffy colours however. Ugh!

Germany Rocks!

I often get asked why I chose to study in Germany for 2 years. I think this article explains everything you need to know:

"A brothel has become the first in Berlin to offer special deals for virgins with prostitutes trained in the delicate art of catering for customers who have never had sex, a German newspaper reported today."

Virgin coupon discounts. I am shanking my head from side to side right now and I think there's a tear in my eye.

Seriously, sometimes I really do think the world is crazy and I am going insane. Also from the article:

"They need to be aware of how much courage it takes to go to a brothel the first time," the operator said."

Courage. That's right, C-O-U-R-A-G-E. Those brave, brave souls... I have seen it all now.



Even better, in my search for a good pic for this entry I found one on the first page of Google results from my very own EuroRoss site (pictured above). Only problem: it's because I spelled Moulon Rouge wrong :-( Oh well, c'est la vie...

Link O Colour

I changed the colour of links to blue as some people were saying the purple just wasn't very visible before. I also ordered the rest of the world to spell colour with a "u" like we do here in Canada... they told me to shut up and go back to watching the NHL playoffs. I did. End of story.

Bomber Time!

Well indirectly, it's actually reunion time! The BMath 01'ers have a reunion on Saturday, September 30, 2006 at the University of Waterloo. Doesn't look like I'm going to be able to make it as I'm scheduled to be in Germany that weekend, but man would it be great to hit good old Bomber again for a cold one! Alas, my drinking days are now far behind me... yeah right! ;-)

Microsoft End User Agreement

You know those end-user licences you have to click "I agree" on before the software will load? How many of you actually read it? That's what I thought. Those things could have "sign over your first unborn child" clauses in them and nobody would know... until now.

This guy breaks down the Microsoft XP Home edition licence agreement into plain english. Go check it out.

Hockey Country

If you weren't watching the game tonight then you missed out. Despite the first game second round loss (I still think the sens will come back and win it) the game was absolutely amazing. Just take a look at the scoresheet:

- A goal 35 seconds into the game
- 2 goals 15 seconds apart 3 mins later for Ottawa to take the lead
- A goal 2 mins into the second period
- A goal 16 seconds into the third period
- 3 goals in the last 2 minutes of the third, one in the last 10 seconds to send it to overtime
- Overtime winner 18 seconds into the period
- Scoring from 10 different guys

Awesome! (offensively that is)

And who is more clutch than Chris Drury? That guy used to score winners when he started with Colorado and just keeps on doing it where ever he goes. Wow, what a hockey player!

I can't wait until game 2, but we all will, because it isn't until Monday night due to a scheduling conflict. What with you ask? "Dora the Explorer" childrens show... ... ... WTF?!? Now Saturday Night HNIC game?? Is this hockey country???

Monday it is: REVENGE!!! :-)

Hamilton Life

Dallasfriesen's got the Hamilton core in his sights:



If you squint real hard you can see me on my patio with a cold beer and tongs enjoying the sun and BBQ :-)

Again: Weekend Links

I got asked if my link post was a weekly occurance. Ask and yee shall recieve...

If you don't know who Colbert is, seen the Colbert Report before or watched his address at a Presidential event, you're in for a treat as he systematically makes fun of Bush and his entire administration right to their faces.

Stamp that ad.

"Bayern Munich president Karl-Heinz Rummenigge has called for a Europe-wide salary cap designed to curb Chelsea's dominance in the transfer market". Hilarious, Bayern complaining that other teams are controlling the market and playing overpowering money games to win championships... what the hell has Bayern Munich been doing for the last decade in the German Bundesliga!?!?! What a bunch of hypicritical wine-ers! Of course it doesn't help my mood that they dominated my VFB Stuttgart team handily this past weekend... doesn't help my mood at all.

That's a load of C.R.A.P.! German gets this one in.

A great quote scammed from Cameron's blog who scammed it from wikipedia:
"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it's just the opposite."

And finally, some universal truths from the man himself - Einstein:

Not Right

There are some things in this world that are just not right. This would be one of those things:



I don't even want to mention who e-mailed this to me... it's certainly been "one of those days"!! :-)

Stuttgart Frühlingsfest

The Stuttgart Frühlingsfest is in full swing, and with this type of weather you'd have to be crazy not to take advantage of it (although it did get a bit cool and windy this past Sat). Besides, the beer is fantastic :-)



Frühlingsfest, ich liebe dich ;-)