Gecko Bloggle

(Posting from my Blackberry, so we’ll chalk up any sentence/grammar weirdness to Transit rage).
Hey there. Been a couple of months (seriously, MONTHS?) since I last posted but wanted a quick “Don’t delete my RSS feed yet” before I forget entirely that I even have a blog. Twitter’s been my primary method of getting the word out, and since that’s limited to 140 characters, I guess I haven’t had much word that needed getting out as of late.
Work’s good, family’s good, there’s the Olympics coming, and so Vancouver is suddenly swamped with seemingly equal numbers of teal-jacketed volunteers, and black-jacketed security/police. Come the revolution, it’ll be like game of Risk, fought in colours.
Over xmas, I ripped ALL of my CDs to MP3 format (that I had left and/or re-bought, after two break-ins in the mid 90s), and I’ve come to the conclusion that I don’t actually like very much of my music. Wait. That’s not true. I don’t like it on shuffle on my iPod. It’s like having everyone you’ve ever had a meal with come by and eat one fry with you, and then leave again.
It’s jarring, you know?
I didn’t ride my bike to work today, because it’s 1 degree out there, which means there out undoubtedly some icy bits, and I’m getting too old to have my 240lbs hit the cement from a height of three feet (at a speed of 35km/hr).
New Podcast is up at the podcast. It ain’t pretty, cause we were drankin’. Yikes.
Whoa, listening to a remix of Deelite’s “Groove Is In The Heart,” and there’s an alternate rap from Bootsy Collins. So maybe not all shuffling is jarring. Lots of stuff I have I wouldn’t think to listen to unless it was random.
Lots of life is like that.
Good parenting moment on Sunday. Rip was feeling low (tired, wanted to go home to play with his newly-purchased toys) and so we stood there in our jackets with our hands in our pockets, and instead of joining him in a mope, or telling him to cheer up (nothing makes me grumpier than being told to not be), we started having a rousing round of “elbow boxing,” which involves leaving your hands in your pockets and “boxing” your opponent with you elbows. It’s silly, but fun, and soon Ripley was throwing slow-motion haymakers with his elbows, sending me flying backwards into the nearby shoppers.
We have these little moments when it’s just us, cause we’re just waiting for something, and I enjoy making anybody laugh, but making a grumpy eight-year-old laugh is especially rewarding.
Gotta go now, Craig Fergusson is on Twitter as of last night, and somehow he totally translates to the blipvert style of microblogging.

Not so much.

So, National Blog Posting Month wasn’t exactly a action-packed thrillride adventure, but it’s good to at least feel guilty about not writing every day, so I have some reason to take note of the world around me, and at least think “Hey, I should probably write about that tonight, so I have something for Nablopomo.”  Oh well.  I think I only missed three or four days.  Not too shabby.

Today, during my ride to work, I was listening to something from an EP by Burial, and at the 3min mark of the first of two 9min tracks, I closed my eyes for a moment (I’d been reading Twitter feeds, and for some reason, sitting sideways on the bus was making me a little queasy), and was suddenly and completely taken away, lost in the track.  That hasn’t happened in a long time for me.  Music is something that keeps me motivated when I’m cycling, keeps me sane when I’m overloaded by the maddening crowds, and keeps me focused when I’m at work and there’s too many things going on that threaten to knock me off the task at hand.

But it’s been a while since music just pulled me completely out of what’s going on.  Not even an escape from, but instead an ejection of the moment at hand.  Just gone.  Used to happen when I was making music.  I’d just put together a bunch of noises, and bleeps and bloops and drums and samples and whatever the hell else I happened to have handy and then hit play and started slapping loops together.  I refuse to challenge myself to make another album, not just because I feel let down when I don’t do it, but because it reminds me of why I quit.  Not because we had a new baby in the house.  Not because I started a new job, but because at some point after my second album I actually started to get noticed, and it freaked me out.

Not because of the attention to the music, but because I didn’t know what I was doing, so I felt like such a sham.  I had the NinjaTune label ask if I could spin my own stuff, and I couldn’t so that was out for opening for someone (and I think I would probably just pass out cold if I had to stand up in front of a crowd and play something *I* made, even if most of what I made is just arrangements of sound, and not what I consider composition).  A few months later, I was asked if I could open for a fairly well-known electronic artist in Vancouver, and again said no because I didn’t know how to “play” my stuff live.  That spooked me away from live shows, and then on top of THAT, CBC2’s New Music Canada  (that’s the online component of the stereo wing of Canada’s Broadcasting Corporation) played my least-favourite song from my first album TWICE in as many weeks.

That was all becoming more and more intense, and while it was exciting, it was also scaring the shit out of me, ’cause I kept wondering when the unmarked helicopters of audio engineering were going to show up and take away my mouse so I couldn’t do it any more because I wasn’t a “real” musician.

And then I joined the one-day music group, Immersion Composition Society (Neptune Lodge).  If you can call participating once “joining.”  I mean, I met Tricky once, even shook his hand, does that mean I’m in his band?

The point is to make a brand new piece of audio in a single day, and play it for a group of other folks that evening.  You could do anything you wanted to, using whatever method you wanted, but you had to go from nothing to something in that one day.  It was terrifying, and exhilarating, and inspiring to hear the sorts of amazing weirdness that geniuses like Dave Cheong can come up with in a day.  But mostly, I felt like I failed.  Felt like what they were doing was awesome, and what I was doing was crap.  That everyone had something to say about the other pieces (myself included) and there was discussion and dialogue, and then when it came to what little bits of audio lint I’d scraped together, the collective response was “Huh.  Well.  Next?”

It hurt.  What made it worse was that it’s not like anyone was being a dick or anything, they were just responding with whatever they’d felt, which was, it seems, not much.

Haven’t done a full single track since, and that was almost eight years ago.  Woof.

Back to where I started. Buhbye biker dude.

In other news I shaved off my Movember moustache.  Planned ahead enough to get one last photo before I went two miles up and nuked the place (it’s the only way to be sure), didn’t actually look at whether or not the “before” picture was wildly out of focus before I grabbed the shaver and went crazy on the ’stache.

Whoops.

Oh well, thanks for reading, and if you’re not someone who’s commented before, drop a line and I’ll add you to my RSS feeds.

Helped Jonny Vancouver moved yesterday, but he was so planned that I was 30 mins late to get to his place to help load the truck, and he was already gone by the time I got there.  Now THAT is fast.  Many many years ago I moved out of a place on Pacific, but I was such a packrat I had WAY too much stuff, hadn’t thrown out enough, and hadnt packed in a reasonable way (too few boxes that were too big).  The fact that Arwen didn’t leave me during that move is just further proof that uh, that she… uh… that I…

Yeah, I’m just really REALLY lucky she didn’t leave my ass that day.

Tate and I went out to the mall together, which I was happy to do, ’cause he and I rarely get time to hang out just the two of us.  Funny, too, to find out that half of the stuff that Tate and I did that *I* thought was new stuff for him was stuff that he does every time he goes to the mall.

Tonight we’re we had dinner with Crankenflaire, which was nice, ’cause we get our collective acts together about once every two years to have a meal and conversation together.  Fun.

One more day of this moustache, and good, ’cause I’m about done with the vaguely distinguished biker look.

Was watching a commercial tonight for Disney, and it opens with two Dumbo cart things flying through the city.  As they swing past us in that opening flight shot, there’s a lens flare, and…

…and I start thinking about lens flare, and I was thinking that Ripley and Tate don’t know what lens flare is, as they haven’t yet seen movies that uses gigantic lenses for the, for the glass of it, y’know?  Lens flare is an artifact of using glass lenses, and is something that’s become a cliche for computer-generated film folks, as it’s one of the first tools that people started playing with in Photoshop while making the pamphlets for their illegal rave, or their new Business Improvement Project, or whatever.

But it’s supposed to invoke the reality of an actual camera filming something, to make you think you’re watching film of Dumbo flying over the city.  That’s all well and fine for ME, ’cause I know what a camera looks like from the shoooter’s side, but do my kids know?  They have always known digital cameras, with framing your shot by looking at the little 1.5 inch screen on the back of the unit, and not looking through the lens, but only at what the result will be.

But with 3d movies and IMAX and jumbo televisions, I wonder if lens flare makes sense for kids’ films any more.  If I’m watching something like A Bug’s Life, and I’m pulled in.  When I watch Final Fantasy – Spirits Within, I’m in there, ’cause it’s so pretty, and the motion is so well done.  I’m good.  I’m there.

Lens flare though?  It puts a camera between me and the story.  I’m not IN the story, I’m watching a movie of the story.  I’m outside, at arm’s length, watching from my seat, not even looking through the lens.  I wonder why that is, (for me, at least).

Oddly, the opposite happened in Surf’s Up, when they rigged out the action in virtual space, and then put a real camera operator in a room, and captured his “filming” of the action, ’cause that’s what he was seeing through the eyepiece of the camera.  Somehow, that made us feel more like what we were seeing was immediate and real.  We were there, even though it was totally fake.  Our eyes know real camera work when we see it, I guess.

Neat.

Weird.  I just watched 8 minutes of utterly scripted material with Henry Winkler on Craig Ferguson.  I don’t even know why he was on as a guest, ’cause it was just a string of premise/joke non-stop the whole time.

Arwen’s been pointing something out to me over the last few months (maybe longer, and it’s only sinking in now) and it’s about violence.  In specific, it’s about me having violence as the go-to when it comes to why certain things just shouldn’t be done.

I was talking about something I saw on the Skytrain last night: The train was crammed on a rainy Vancouver evening, and at one of the stations, a few people tried to squeeze in, and managed to just make it in, and then there was this one last guy who came running across the platform like a linebacker, and crashed into the half-dozen folks in the doorway.  There were shouts of “Hey” and “What the hell?” and a moment later, a transit greenjacket pulled the guy off the train, and the doors closed.  The train pulled away without further incident.

So I told this story to Arwen, and was saying that it was probably a good thing they pulled the guy off the train, ’cause I thought things might’ve actually gotten violent on that train if he’d stayed.  Arwen suggested in no uncertain terms that this was the least likely thing to happen on a transit car full of commuters on a rainy Wednesday evening in Vancouver.  Dirty looks.  Rolled eyes, maybe, but then everyone would go back to their iPhones, Blackberries, and newspapers, and generally forget about Mr. Shove.

This is something Arwen has pointed out to me before: To hear me tell it, it would seem that in my day-to-day life, I’m generally a pretty easy-going and “no-no, after you” kinda guy ONLY because my primary reason for not being a pushy line-cutting* butthead (at least when storytelling) is to avoid getting my teeth punched out.  Don’t get me wrong, I don’t walk around out there thinking I’m going to need to duck a punch if I step on someone’s shoes, nor do I think I’m going to partake in fisticuffs if someone steps on my toes.

Let’s face it, there’s a fair amount of truth in the joke “How do you make a Canadian say sorry?  Bump into them.” so I wonder why my first thought is often that you need to avoid the violence inherent in the system.

Two of my male friends have also said things to me over the years that make me wonder.  One of them was more about the strength of my hands, as in “Holy geez, look at those meat hammers – I’d hate to be on the wrong end of that.” and the other friend (who has waaay too much Aikido training) was just referring to my internal violent imagery, as in “You’re a nice guy and everything, but I can see you’ve got that crazy demon in there, and you need to get back into training to get that thing under control.”

So now I wonder if it’s been in that head-patting “Yeah, yeah, you’re rill rill scary.” sort of way.  I wonder what I think the point of those stories spun that particular way is supposed to be?  That I’m the Defender of Justice, so I wish people wouldn’t be assholes so I wouldn’t have to hold back the mob of angry villagers with the pitchforks and torches?

Huh.  Interesting.

Maybe it’s time for me to get into karate again.

Either that, or stop talking about people being pushy buttheads out in the world.  Just let it go, y’know?  There’s the studies that say that people build up stress and then have explosive rants because it releases all sorts of cool something-amine into your brain, which feels good.  So feeling stress is bad, but having stress but then freaking OUT is good.  At least, it feels good to do, but then leaves everyone around you with the impression that you’re this dramafest, when actually, you’ve let it go in the moment (at least in the instance of who/whatever was making you crazy).

…and now, I sleep.  Don’t wanna be a grump tomorrow, or I’ll uh… I’ll what?

Yeah, I’ll probably… nothing.  WooOOoo, scary stuff, eh kids?

*Queuing is Canada’s secret National pastime.

I didn’t go to last night’s AGM at Mole Hill.  Not only did I not run for re-election, but I didn’t even go to vote.  Show’s how little faith I have left in whether or not the board is still a functioning part of the Society.

I don’t feel like I’ve given everything I can, but I do feel like I tried to fight the good fight, and that (most of) the folks on the board I was really in direct opposition to are now gone.  Initially it was because the Executive Director was really sketchy, and had a really suspicious background that had obviously not been checked.

I went in swinging, and fought for four months straight before the ED left citing health reasons that made it impossible to fulfill his duties.  Funny that it didn’t stop him from finding a new job two weeks later somewhere else.  The treasurer quit shortly thereafter (or was it just before?) after a heated flamewar in which he told me that “living at Mole Hill, and having cheap rent was a privilege, not a right.”  Lovely.  Just freakin’ lovely.

Been a long two years.  Been a lot of sleepless nights.  A lot of pretty atrocious things said in person and in email.  Some of them to my face, and some of them said by me.  The time approximately half of the board met with BCHousing to discuss the “extraordinary rent increase” (the first of two annual ones they were planning), I was  not invited (nor told about the meeting), but found out about it while walking down the lane, and bumped into another board member (one somewhat infamous for lurking around the block.  Another tenant noticed that there was a meeting happening, but I wasn’t in it, and so it became public that I wasn’t attending this meeting, due to exclusion by the “Executive” members of the board.

The next time I went to a meeting, and someone had sent in a letter asking why not all members were invited to all meetings, the room was told that we were not doing our duty by keeping the inner machinations of the board secret…

Ugly stuff…

Glad there’s a new board coming, and I wish them well, I really do.

Oddly, I haven’t been able to receive emails from the board list since I told them I was no longer seeking re-election.  I guess the Chair took it upon himself to remove me from the list before another “outburst.”

So yeah, I’m done.

This stuff is just too gross to even think about, still, so I’m going to bed.

Most people can make their eyes pop out, but can you make your GLASSES do it?

HelLO, and welcome to another episode of “I’ve Reflanged the Barkolounger” with your host, Rupture Q. Throngboggle PhD, PTSD, NPC.

Tonight to change thing up not at all, I’m going to tell you about some surfing I did.  One of those things I do all the time is try to figure out how to get things to connect to stuff they’re not already connected to, and this often leads me to wondering how I get popular communications device A into protractive retrogrunion B.

This evening, when I was in transit home, it occurred to me that my Blackberry has Bluetooth, and my Netbook has Bluetooth, and I’ve heard about people using their Blackberry to connect to the Internet when they’re in the middle of a field or something, so I thought to myself “Are we home yet?  Did I miss my stop?  Have my ears popped from coming out of the underground tube of Canada Line yet?  Florence and the Machine is better than you think it’s going to be in the first four bars of any song.  I wonder if I can get my Blackberry to use my Netbook’s wireless connection to get onto the ‘Net instead of the other way ’round?”

“Wait.  Dude.  What?”

“Yeah, no, really.  Remember the Nokia N-Gage, with the totally ludicrous phone functionality?  It had software that gave it a Bluetooth Internet Gateway thing, so it stands to reason that TCP/IP over the Bluetooth stack should be possible.  For free.  Also, I want pizza pops.  Red Eyed Treefrogs are the perfect fridge magnet shape when they’re all tucked in.”

“You’re right, I should try that when I get home tonight.  Or maybe Briggs would know.”

“Shh. Can’t talk.  Pizza pops.”

About 45 minutes of Googling, installing, reconfiguring, de-un-re-anti-con-platifguring, and just plain looking it up in field repair guides and stuff came up snake eyes.  Not even snake eyes.  No dice, no table, no casino, you’re voted off the island, and Pluto sends its regards.

Probably because any of the Blackberry devices that are worth having have built-in wifi, so trying to bridge via Bluetooth across another device would be extra steps, and would mean the BB would be dependent on another device in the immediate vicinity.  Goes against the grain.  Causes seizures in succulents.  May lead to thoughts of super-suede.

So, what else?

Stumbled across Percussion Lab tonight while looking for some information about JDilla and the mind-blowing Wonk Funk mix by KPER.  They have it, but they also have not only a whole schwack of other stuff that I’ve never heard of, but lots of other world-class DJs and set that might have been around for the last ten years, but I wouldn’t know it.

Sad that radio in Vancouver just doesn’t play anything like this.  Of course, if my ability to make anything I like at Body Shop be instantly removed from the shelves (they had a liquid soap that smelled EXACTLY like fresh-cut grass, and after I bought my second bottle, it was gone) applies to music, it’s probably good that I don’t hear much that I can stomach on radio.

I think this is the first shot I've had that actually show's the 'stache.

So yeah, ignore the double chin (I come by it honestly, I assure you) but take note of the little Lemmy going on down there.  That’s not a goatee, that’s my mo.  It’s getting hi-…

What the hell’s going on with my hair?  I know I’m shooting through my wide-angle lens at a 90°, so that’ll make weird “tall angle” shots, but still.  Th’hell?

When I had long hair, it was always kinda sticky-outy on the sides, and that’d make me insane, but this little “wisp of hair at the tip of my egg-shaped noggin” is a bit much.

Everybody but me got the H1N1 shot today.  Tate was asking where the “bugs” were in his arm.  I’m not sure whether or not he was asking where the shot was administered, or where the pre-defeated virus was in his body now.

Wake. Work. Food. Clean. CDW5. Kids to bed. TV. Tea. Here.

Hi.

Remember when Avril Lavigne was a singer?  At least, that was her listed profession?  When will she get back to that, instead of doing dippy digital camera ads.

While we’re at it, can all the comedians who are still doing the “I hate my wife” routines?  Just. Leave. Her.  It’s not funny.  Move on.  It’s 2009, and that stuff stopped being funny right after it stopped being shocking that not all couples are happy.  Shortly before television started broadcasting in colour.

Tonight, I’m going to play with Google Wave, ’cause I don’t get it yet.

That’s all I have to say about that.

I want the sun to come back now.  I wanna start cycling again.

Also, Facebook on my Blackberry has lost its tiny mind.  It’s sorta funny to watch.  Reminds me of when Tate used to start telling a story and then get lost in the weeds and have to finish with “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

• Up at 7:00am… well, to be honest, up at 7:07, 7:15, 7:23, and finally up and out of bed at 7:30
• Finished reading a short story by Stephen King last night about a guy who has OCD because he’s guarding the world from destruction, and because I always read in bed right before falling asleep, it took me a few nights to get through the story, and every night I’d take about a page to remember what the story was about.
• Went to Quaker meeting today.  Sat in silence for 45 minutes with a group of people who are also sitting and thinking (or not thinking) about whatever comes to them.  Sometimes people talk about what they’re thinking, but mostly it’s just silence.  It’s interesting, can be meditative, but can also be surprisingly… what is it?  Apt.  Apropos. From outta nowhere, yet outta somewhere.  I described it today as hearing a song you don’t quite know, and when the 3rd verse starts, having someone else say that first word, and suddenly you’re clicking into it too.  Interesting.  No pressure.  Very little “Lord Christ Jesus” vibe.  Very unlike my experiences in Chilliwack.
• Lunch at WhiteSpot,with Pirate Packs for the kids, and theywere out of something for the sundaes, so they used Gummy Penguins instead.  Awesome.
• Saw “500 Days of Summer” tonight.  It was good.  Quite good.  Sweet.  I felt like I’ve come a long way baby when I could see the point when the “boy” in this boys-meets-girl movie makes the mistake of asking her where they were going in the relationship, but does NOT say specifically why he wants to know.  What it is exactly that he’s afraid of.  20 years ago, I would have equated this guy with Ducky and thought “girl” was being deeply unfair, and that he was doing everything right.  Now, I see him pushing.  Interesting.
• Totally unrelated, but why does the Media-Center thing that pushes data to my XBox360 have more problems and worse performance than the 3rd party Vuze/Azureus, which is a torrent download/search client?  It’s open source, so you’d think Microsoft could figure out what Vuze does right, and do THAT.
• Tonight, we had home-made caramel corn for dinner.  With grapes, to there was nutrition in there.  Peanuts in the popcorn count too, right?
• 1am, my Blackberry’s freaking out, ’cause every system starts yammering about what kinda day it had.  Bing bing bing bing (go to bed).
• Night all.
• Today’s pic is on the Movember (Mo’09) page.  Go look, and donate a few bucks, if you have ‘em.  I don’t think the stache is gonna get any better though, sadly.  I think Emma’s comment wins, but mostly ’cause I think it’s the ONLY comment.

Low-key day. Made breakfast for the kids, which included a smoothie. We opened up the fridge, crammed banana, blueberries, an orange, some baby carrots, two icecubes, and some milk* into the cup thing for our brand new immersion blender we picked up at the Supastow yesternight.  Time to fire that baby up, and see what it can do, yeah?

Oh great and powerful OZ was it loud at 8am. Milk with bits of blueberry was flying everywhere, it was making a huge mess, Tate started yelling “WoooOOOOOOooooOoOoOo” in tune with the blender (are kids trying to do some sorta noise canceling when they yell in harmony like that?)

So yeah, after I cleaned up the cutting block thing, and poured it into cups for the kids, Ripley scarfed his down, but Tate (who’d wanted the smoothies in the first place) wasn’t convinced after maaaaybe one sip.

*Didja spot the mistake I made there?

Watched TV with the kids and alternated between telling them they couldn’t have candy at 9:30 NOR could they play with the computer.  I’m the meanest dad in the whole wild world.  Ignored my Saturday Blackberry calendar item that’s been there for about a year and a half that says simply “GO DO SOMETHING” at 10.  Was probably a bad idea.  Rubber boots and big puddles would probably have been a good idea for the kids.

Lunch was grilled cheese sandwiches with ham in ‘em, but the little tiny sandwich griller iron thing must’ve not been entirely cleaned from the last time I’d made french toast, ’cause lunch had a distinctly cinnamon-y vibe.  Just… odd.

Also.  When was the last time I made french toast?  Couldn’t have been too TOO long ago, ’cause I think I’ve only used it about six times, ever.  Still, ew.

After lunch, Arwen took the kids out to Richmond mall, and I slept.  Well, I washed a load of laundry, and put it in the dryer first, but once THAT was done, I lay on the couch “watching” Aliens.  Seems that I’ve programmed my brain to knock me out cold if anything directed by Ridley Scott is on, ’cause I made it to the landing where the eggs were before I was out, and woke up for a bit just in time to catch the chest buster scene (kept hearing “Hello My Baby, Hello My Darlin” in my head) and then crashed out again until the very VERY end of the movie.

Kids home, I made spaghetti with tofu chunks (Tate’s fave) and Arwen headed out into the night to go visit with the ladies, and do ladies things.  Good for her.  Glad she’s out for an evening to have some fun.

9 is a very cool movie.  Looking forward to whatever Tim Burton’s doing next.  There wasn’t a huge amount of emotional impact for me, but I was so busy being sucked into the world they’d created, I didn’t have time to feel much of anything in the post-apocalyptic world populated by Matrix-esque badguy machines, and Little Big Planet-like main characters.  So pretty, but so sad an environment.  It was like HDR film meets videogame action, with a nicely “but what does that mean?” story.  Didn’t suck.  Style for the win.

Alien Resurrection is on.  Arwen and I saw this as a date in 1997 when it came out, and I remember the gootastic ending, and both Arwen and I walking outta there feeling like we needed a shower.  Geiger was missing from this one, let me tell ya.

Oh, and Shaw Cable Systems?  Quit putting editorial content in the first ten words of your synopsis for the Guide for movies and TV shows.  I’m tired of almost always having to push the Info button to get more plot than “Sigourney Weaver returns as tormented…” or seeing Daily described as “Irreverent skewering of…” while leaving out who the guests are.

With some of the movies, they also will say things like “This deeply terrible film…” or “Unintentionally funny cheese…” and similar things.  Look, if my job was to write that stuff up, I’d probably start putting in my own editorial comments too, but I’d put them at the end.  Maybe even a spoiler or a warning “Don’t bother…” “People over 14 will hate this…” but I’d put it at the END of the descriptions.

While I’m providing an irreverent skewering of Shaw, why is the volume on their OWN AD for their own 30 year anniversary set at slightly below 10% of everything else?  It’s like one of those screamer things on YouTube you see once in while, when then try to get you to turn up your speakers really loud, and then suddenly have  really loud scream, and put a monster picture on the screen.

So yeah, whoever’s in charge of the volume, way to go there, cowboy.  Doing a heck of a job.

Oh wait, gotta go.  Dave Matthews is on SNL tonight.  It’s like Tom Hanks lost his mind and stole Sting’s voice after swallowing Kermit the frog.

While angry.