Month: December 2008

Yesterday I ended up working from home (which surprisingly saw a boost in productivity.  Hail to the at-home office work!) because the buses are now on strike and the roads were quite crazy as we had a ton of snow dumped on us.  I didn’t feel like taking the car out to get stuck on some side road navigating to Vero’s place.

After an enjoyable day at home working, I met up with Vero to do some Christmas shopping and then we headed out to Ruby King Chinese Buffet for some supper.  It was 8PM so they weren’t bringing out any more food but there was more than enough to fill us up.  I couldn’t even finish my plate!  It was delicious.

This morning I headed out from my house at 6:30 to work.  Let’s put a few facts out there for people who are not familiar with Ottawa.  I usually head out of my house around 6:50, make it to the Park and Ride six kilometers away around 7:00 and then get on the bus which delivers me to work by 7:30.  Total trip distance: Let’s say a good 25-30 kilometers.

For reference in this next example, it is approximately 20 kilometers to Vero’s place and I can usually get there in 20-25 minutes.

Now I present to you…my morning from Hell:

6:30 – Get into car.  Make sure Doc and Woody on Chez are tuned in.
6:32 – Realize that my windshield washer is acting up once again and it’s like it’s frozen or something.  Let it be noted that I just drained the stuff two days ago and put in the -40 stuff inside.  Clearly, this is not working out too well.
6:35 – I’m entering the Queensway.  Gatineau HO!
6:35 1/2 – I have traveled one kilometer and hit a wall of traffic.  Uh oh.
7:05 – Hey look!  There’s the Park and Ride!
7:10 – Doc and Woody are pretty funny in the morning.  I have never listened to an entire Morning Show with them.  Oh look, I’ve moved a few feet.
7:12 – I decide to move lanes seeing as they are moving faster.  Ever see the film ‘Office Space’ where the guy changes lanes and then the lane he was just in speeds up?  Yes, this is my life right now.
7:30 – The news is replayed and there’s nothing new.  But there are messages from callers “Ranting Back at Randall” who had some harsh comments about the OC Transpo strike.  Not surprisingly, all the callers shared his viewpoints with a lot of beeping of words.
7:34 – I change lanes again.  Not surprisingly, the lane I just left speeds up.  I guess I was holding them back with the power of the Mazda3.

7:37 – I’m passing by the Parkway and I smack my head realizing that it would have bene faster to take that instead.

7:40 – Hey, is that the sun rising?  Wow, it’s so pretty.  Unfortunately, I feel like ditching my car at this point and walking the rest of the way.  My right leg is cramping up.  I must get it into shape for the trip home in a few weeks.  Not surprisingly, the windshield washer finally works when the sun comes up.  Maybe they are solar powered?
7:45 – I get to the Blair Exit.  This is approximately 15 kilometers away from my house.  This means that I have been in the car for one hour and 15 minutes.  I decide that I need to get some speed before I get out and walk from frustration so I take the exit thinking that I can weave my way up to Vero’s place.
7:48 – Not bad, not bad.  Traffic is surprisingly moving quicker than on the Queensway.
7:52 – Ok, now I’ve hit some bad traffic on Ogilvie.  It’s still not as bad as the Queensway.  We have stop lights.  I’m impressed.
8:05 – I hit St.Laurent.  I’m flying.  This is it!  I feel it!
8:15 – I arrive at Vero’s, back the car up to get some good speed to hit her driveway which is full of snow near the bottom and park the car.
8:23 – I arrive at the work building down the road and wait for the shuttle to bring me to work.
8:24 – I’m wondering why there can’t be a little ‘order’ in our lives.  For example, when you go to a barber shop, you know who’s up next.  The people who were sitting there before you!  It should be the same way while waiting for a shuttle.  But no, it’s like a free-for-all savage race to the door when there’s only a dozen people standing around anyhow.  I had visions of pushing some woman into the snow because she had the nerve to cut in line in front of me, but I thought I would be the bigger man and if I ended up with no seat, I would single her out as a line-cutter and have her ejected from the shuttle.  Yes, I am a gentleman.
8:45 – I arrive at work.  Dang, I must find another way to commute.  I think I shall live at Vero’s until the strike is over.

Last night I put that take-home exam to bed.  For some reason there were a few things that weren’t working whereas they were working the day before.  I had to scramble to fix them up but I would say that the thing is in high working order.  There is still the issue of the bumblebees not moving around the screen but I figured I shall take a break for a week and if I get ambitious I will take a look at it again.  The only reason I’m not too worried about this is the fact that the scoring sheets for the previous projects didn’t have a massive point spread, meaning that on the previous assignment I handed in I couldn’t get something to move right and I lost one lousy mark.  Granted, this is the final exam so maybe I’ll take a bigger hit.  We’ll see how I feel next week after the Christmas party and shopping for the remainder of this week.  But at this point, I would say it’s 99% done and when I make the decision to forget about the movement of a bumblebee, it’s 100% done.

The exam did take me longer than I thought to finish it.  I didn’t finish coding the thing until 9PM last night and then I celebrated with a beer.  Now I can catch up on a few things, like shovelling the driveway.  Already with only two snowfalls there is a nice mound forming at the bottom of our driveway and I figure it’s time to get rid of that now before something slushy comes our way.  I heard there’s a major snowstorm heading towards us right now for the next few days so I’m sure the shovel and I will be come close friends.

Tonight I believe Vero and I will go get some shopping done.  I am hoping to see the new James Bond film sometime soon as well.  I have a free pass from my copy of Casino Royale that I purchased last month.  Can’t let that go to waste!

May I also point out that The Dark Knight (new Batman flick) is out on DVD today?  Man, that was a good movie.  I would still say I enjoyed Iron Man more this year.  But not by much.  They are both excellent films.

Iplaying: Fake Empire – The National (Boxer) – May I point out that this is an amazing album?  If you are looking for something to take a chance on this Christmas for a music fan, buy them this album.  They will not be disappointed.

IMG_4295, originally uploaded by palm0014.

Back in 2003, I had this really great digicam; the Canon Powershot A60. I loved this thing. It took such nice pictures and it had this great feature where it could panoramic shots.

The problem was that something went wonky inside it and images came out randomly distorted. The picture within this post demonstrates what would happen (in fact, we both were smiling in this photo originally! How did they make us look like devils! The camera is possessed! How did we get those goofy looking hats?). I sent it in for repairs and it came back but nothing really was fixed and then the shutter broke on it and voila, it was rendered useless so I bought another camera.

Fast forward to last night when I’m chatting with Dad about how their camera was acting up in the same manner and I knew this would happen as all the Powershots seemed to be doing the same thing. I have a few friends who bought the same type (or future model) of the camera and they all went wonky.

Turns out that around 2005/06, there was a recall issued for the CCD (which is the image sensor inside digicams) and they would replace it for free. Bonus! Dad sent his in and I shall send mine in as well. Now I get a bonus camera!

Here‘s some information for you in case you have a Canon camera which is acting up in the same manner.

iplaying: Ada – The National (Boxer)

Friday morning I had my exam for my Pop Culture exam.  I must admit I wasn’t confident going into the exam as I felt that my brain could not absorb any of the notes I had studied for the past week.  But I’m realizing that this is just the way I feel after studying for days on end.  Either way, the exam wasn’t TOO bad although I had to really think about what I wanted to say for the essay portion and I also blanked out completely on a few points comparing youth to pop culture.  I thought I had that one in the bag!

Friday night had Vero and I go to my work Christmas party over at Brooke’s place out in Aylmer.  I manged to pick up some good priced beer at the grocery store while driving there and we showed up when the party was in full force.  The appetizers were tasty and I especially enjoyed the cinammon rolls which reminded me of Mom.  The gift exchange was fun and Vero and I ended up with the Jack Ryan movie collection (four films!).  Bonus!

On Saturday I lazed around Vero’s place for awhile until realizing I should really get up and start working on my take-home exam for Multimedia.  I hadn’t even looked at the requirements yet but I knew that I had better get cracking at it sooner than later as there are a ton of Christmas parties coming up and I haven’t even finished my shopping yet!  No sooner than I arrive back home that I realize that Vero’s purse is in my car along with her wallet and keys.  I had to turn around and return them to her.

I didn’t get working on my exam until 5PM that night.  I sat myself down, put on some good tunes and started reading the requirements.  Animating a children’s book?  Oh lord.  This won’t be good.  But then I started to get on a roll and things started coming together.  Part of animating is trying to figure out the puzzle of how you’re going to make something work…for example I needed to make the dogs eyes blink when you rolled the mouse cursor over them.  Well, how does one animate an eye blinking?  Well, I’ll just put a circle of red coloured fur over his eye and that can be his eyelid.  That works fine but his eyelash stays on top of his head…that’s not right…ok, I’ll swap the position of the eyelash to the bottom of the coloured circle.  Voila!  It’s not pretty, but it works!

That’s the sort of thing that one has to think about when animating things.  The prep work is pretty incredible.  For an eight page storybook, each page took about 30 minutes of prep work…cutting out images, making the colours brigther, etc.  Then the next 30-60 minutes is spent on animating the images and making sure everything lines up.

I was definitely on a roll on Saturday night.  The moment was right.  At one point I grew hungry and I couldn’t find anything so I ordered a nice Jamaican Jerk burger from The Works and picked it up a half hour later.  Awww yeah!  This is high livin’!  I powered through the exam and ended up with three of the eight pages animated before heading to bed.  I planned to wake up early the next morning and attempt to complete the majority of the exam.

The next morning didn’t work out as planned.  No electricity!  I groaned and settled down with my laptop but it only had 30 minutes of battery power.  After the laptop died, I wrapped some gifts, shovelled the driveway and read some comics.  I sat wondering when the power would come back on so I could get cracking!  It did flicker on around 10:30 and I worked on the exam only to have the power go out after ten minutes!  Argh.  I sat around for awhile longer but then realized it was senseless to wait around so I packed up the car and headed to Vero’s place.

The rest of my day was a long, drawn-out, grueling ordeal of animating the project.  Each page was at least an hour’s work.  It was getting tiresome.  I would finish one page, then take a break and start another.  Around 9PM I finally finished all eight pages and was happy.  I would say 95% of the work is done and all I have to do is change some button designs.  I couldn’t get some butterflies to move around the screen but I realized that it’s not worth my time to spend hours trying to get a fly to move across a screen.  I do have until December 19 to hand it in so if I’m up for it, I will try and get the sucker to move around the screen.

Vero then gave me a much needed haircut that night and then I called home to ask Mike if the power had been back on.  He wasn’t home which I found odd so I phoned Eric and he told me the power still wasn’t on!  I decided to stay over at Vero’s for the night considering I had no idea when the power would be back on and it must be quite chilly back home.  Turns out that the power had come back on around 8PM by Mike’s estimates.  Broken transformers!  Bah!  That’s quite the long haul without power.

So now I’m hoping to finish up the exam tonight but I’ll take my time from this point out.  But at least the bulk of the work is finished and it’s now opened up the next few weeks which I assumed would have been spent working on a take-home exam.

So what’s on the agenda for the next few weeks?  Three Christmas parties, shopping and planning to head home for the holidays.  Not too shabby.

…and play some music of course!

Cool!  This is one of the classic bands that I’ve been meaning to get into.  I guess this is a good time to start!

Info here.

iplaying: I Alone (Live) – Live (Radiant Sea)

This past weekend was a bust for me in terms of studying.  I had no ambition to hunker down and study for Pop Culture.  The reason for this is that there was an exam review coming up on the Tuesday and that’s usually a better indication of what to study rather than me look through everything.  In the end, I did spend a few hours each day perusing through notes and catching up on some readings but it wasn’t until last night when I started drafting some study notes.

On Saturday, Vero and I hit the town on a shopping spree for Christmas as I realized I won’t have much time to do any shopping considering my time will be devoted to finishing up my take-home exam due on the 19th.  I’m hoping to be completed before then, but who knows if that will happen.  In the end, Vero scored on finding many items but I walked away with one lowly item for a gift exchange.

We did head home and had a great meal and settled in for a viewing of…Predator!  Man, what a great action film!  Vero inherited a boxful of old VHS tapes from a colleague so we picked this gem out to watch.  Turns out she had seen it before but it was fun nonetheless.  The actors in that film have biceps larger than my head!

On Sunday I woke up and studied a little more and started backing up a lot of television shows onto DVD as Mike’s main repository of a hard drive had little space left.  I managed to free up 70GB of data so that will hold us over for awhile!  Keeping in mind that a snowstorm was heading our way the next day, the Christmas bug bit me and I decided to hang up the Christmas lights.  This, in turn, led to me cleaning up the garage for the winter.  Then I pulled out all the Christmas decorations and Mike, Vero and I started hanging them up all over the place.  Vero did convince me to get some more garland so we headed out to Canadian Tire to buy some thicker garland.  There was none to be found so we bought some regular sized garland and just expanded on the existing stuff we had.  I also found a good Rudolph doll to add to the Christmas collection.  As I mentioned to Mike and Vero, I’m in no rush to build up my collection of Christmas items…but I like to get a bit every year.

The house is now looking very Christmasy and our leg lamp (ala Christmas Story) is coming along great.  Mike and I revel at it’s beauty every time we walk by it.  All we need for it now is a high heel shoe and some frill for the lampshade.

iplaying: Ain’t She Sweet – The Beatles (Anthology 3)