Month: May 2009

I was watching the new X-Files film last night (which so far is pretty good…not mindblowingly good but it brings back good feelings of X-Files) and you know when they always type what location they are in and what time it is in the bottom left hand corner?

Yeah…uhm…that font size is SMALL.

I noticed this on another movie the other day…I believe it was the Curious Case of Benjamin Button.

My only thoughts on this are that these films are now being developed on large, wide screen televisions and so there is no thought to the archaic 27″ televisions that people have in their home.

Now, this is really not a big deal if I miss a quick location text but if you have subtitles, this is getting a little on the crazy side if I can’t even read the subtitles!

So here’s a message to the film/television industry. Don’t phase out the non-widescreen LCD Plasma Whatever doohickies yet! There are still people living in the dark ages of television who want to enjoy your film!

In true Palmer fashion, I present to you, a tale of grand proportions.

On Friday, May 22, Mike and I logged in to Capital Tickets to get in line of the queue.  I was on since 8AM and Mike followed shortly after.  At 10AM, all hell broke loose and the site was crashing all over the place and the situation looked dire.

When I finally got through a few minutes later, the system allowed me to choose from either the first 15 rows, the rest of the floor and 100 Level, and then the rest of the stadium.  Well OF COURSE I went for the first 15 rows, but unfortunately, after 5 minutes of the server taking its time, it came back saying there were no more tickets in that area.

Uh oh.  This wasn’t good.  If it took me five minutes to get that message popping up, what were my odds at some good tickets at all?  I tried for the 100 Level and no such luck.  After much cursing at the computers when we couldn’t get tickets, I eventually had some in the 300 Level but then we waited too long and I lost them.  I had left it until a minute was left until they expire and when I went to process the order the server took so long that it timed out.

So then I went in again and found some in Section 309. Mike still wasn’t having any luck and considering we had no luck getting floor, 100L, 200L, we decided to buy them.

So we have four tickets in Section 309. Unfortunately they (in my opinion) are not the greatest seats as they are to the side of the stage and not in front of it so we won’t be able to see that well.

Mike then managed to get Section 305 which was more in line with the stage and then I managed to get 306 but with a closer row. So we decided to bite the bullet, buy Section 306 and sell of Section 309.

$928 later we are now the proud owners of 8 tickets to go see AC/DC.

But of course, you know me and I love to leave people in suspense so let’s talk about what happened five minutes after…

I went back online on a whim (this would be around 10:45) to see if I could get better tickets and lo and behold, Section 105 appeared in my Cart! The heavens aligned and cheered at us for rocking out so much that we already spent $928 to see AC/DC that they said these guys deserve something a little better.

But the story gets better…

I was on both my Mom’s and my own computer at the time and when I called Mike to ask for sanity in wondering if we should buy another four tickets, Mom’s computer came up with the mother lode.

And that’s how we ended up with FOUR TICKETS TO AC/DC ON THE FLOOR ROW 33!!!! AUGH!

But we also have four tickets in Section 306 and four tickets in Section 309 to sell.

All was not lost…in fact, nothing was lost.  I immediately sent out an email to the masses asking if anyone was interested.  I didn’t get any takers during the day so in a stupour of alcohol that night, I went onto Craiglist and found someone looking for 8 tix at $150 each.  Of course, being the honest person I am (the more belieavable story would be that I had a few beer in me) I wrote to this person saying I would sell them at cost.

I got an email back the next morning saying they wanted them and bingo bango, deal was made.

Here’s an interesting twist to the story…Capital Tickets had left me a message about my tickets and I had no idea what it was about.  I did find out that the person I was going to sell them to had phoned Capital Tickets wondering how they can verify if my tickets are legit or not so maybe that sent a red flag their way.  I did end up getting a message from them saying that the maximum amount of tickets per credit card was 8 and seeing that I had bought 12 (4x4x4…I suppose that’s how the computer didn’t flag me and tell me “Whoa buddy!  You’re trying to buy 12 tickets!”), they would take back four of them.  Hey, it did not bother me much as I had wanted to return them in the first place!

I did end up selling the four leftover tickets to this individual from Arnprior who was more than happy to take his family to the show.

All in all, I have no idea how we ended up with floor tickets but now I’m realizing that there are so many unknown factors when buying concert tickets.  For example, my friend Kathleen and her husband was camped out at the ticket booth since 4AM and they only ended up with 200 Level tickets.  What the heck?  If anything, I think there should be preference to the people who camp out overnight, but that’s just me.

So there you have it…a tale of amazingness for you all.

iplaying: Money (That’s what I want) – The Beatles (With the Beatles)

Can the summer get any better? Paul McCartney is playing Halifax, NS on July 11!

Concert season is gearing up fast and I swear everything is falling into place in regards to dates, places, etc.

The biggest news is that AC/DC is coming to Ottawa on Monday August 10. The fact that this is really big news harkens back to a story about how Vero really really really wanted to go see AC/DC in Montreal on August 8. But alas, we were going to be in Windsor for a wedding on that exact date.

So then we started thinking about going to Moncton to see them on August 6. But that would require us driving 12 hours down, watching the concert, and drive 20 hours back to Windsor from Moncton on August 7th and then see the wedding the next day around noon on August 8. This was not an ideal situation, but it would have been done in the name of rock! This also reminds me of the time Mike, Danny and I trucked down to see AC/DC on a Friday night in Toronto from Kapuskasing (!!!) and Mike and Danny decided to drive home after the concert. That’s a little crazy and if memory serves me right, they made it to North Bay.

So then I checked out other tour dates and realized that they were playing in New Jersey and Google Maps helped me determine that New Jersey is quite a bit closer to Ottawa than Moncton! So plans to go to Jersey for the weekend were starting to form.

THEN they decided to play in Albany, NY last week which is only four hours away. But the thing is, I noticed that they were playing an arena show in Albany which was unlike their ‘summer stadiums’ only clause they originally had set up for the summer. Could this mean that Ottawa would have a chance? This, coupled with the fact that the Live Nation promoter indicated on Chez that we could very well hear some news about AC/DC in Ottawa in the next few weeks led to the realization that this could all happen.

And happen it did. Tuesday morning all I hear on Virgin Radio is AC/DC for the hour leading up to them announcing the tour date. Tickets go on sale this Friday and I’m quite pleased with the date they are playing as we will be back in town by then.

Other concerts I’m checking out this summer include:
– Malajube – June 11 at the Capital Music Hall. I still have yet to get tix to this. Hopefully they aren’t sold out!
– Bluesfest – 10 Days of bliss.
– Hope Volleyball – My favourite day of the year. Bands to be announced.
– AC/DC – August 10
– STOMPIN’ TOM!!! – August 13! This is incredible. I mentioned to Mom that we should go but they ended up buying tickets to see him while they are vacationing in St. John’s, NFLD. I think I’m going to get talking to Troy and see if we should send him ‘The Stomper’ song and maybe we can book an opening slot for The Stomper himself!
– PEARL JAM! Toronto, August 21!
– Metallica! October 29…I believe?

There’s also word that Kings of Leon are hitting Ottawa so I have to figure out if I want to go to that or not. I really enjoy their new album and they seem like a top notch band.

Awhile ago, I upgraded the iPhoto software on the Mac and was anxious to use the ‘Faces’ feature which supposedly is able to scan all your photos in search of a particular face. I never got it working until last week and I must say I’m quite impressed with it.

What you do is select a photo and ask iPhoto to scan for faces. It will then find my face and say “Who is this?” and I type in my name. Then I go back to the Faces dashboard and choose my face and it will say “Here are the confirmed photos of your face. Here are a few others which need confirming.” and they throw out a slew of pictures with me (hopefully) in them.

On the first round, the software may not be able to properly match my face to a picture and would throw up a picture of Eric instead but this is because I’ve only confirmed one photo of myself so it doesn’t have much to work with as a baseline. But as soon as I confirm a half dozen more, it can rescan with all that additional data and find my face in a more refined way.

I was quite impressed in how it ended up working. I scanned for Mike’s face a few times and it even found him in the background of a few shots as well as recognized him in full out zombie makeup from Hallowe’en! Impressive. Most impressive.

All in all, I find this to be a neat feature if you ever want to make a collage of someone you know. Instead of scouring the years upon years of digital photos you have, you can simply scan for the person’s face and spend a good 30 minutes weening out the photos that are not the person you’re searching for, and voila! I say 30 minutes but it depends on the person. Naturally, while scanning for my own face, I will probably spend an hour going through thousands of them. But for a distant relative, you may only have a few pictures of them.

Another neat aspect of it is the fact that they show the pictures chronologically so you can see how you have changed throughout the years. While some people probably won’t like to see this in themselves, I’ve always been intrigued with the capture of time within photographs and I’ve also thought of starting up a photo project where I take the same head shot of myself each day for a year to see the progression.

Of particular note, this feature will probably only be useful to people who use their camera to take pictures of different people. As for Maren who is expecting her first child soon, I highly suspect there will only be one person in all her photographs. 😉

In my new job, I’m working on the technical team which looks after the Working in Canada web portal which relays free information concerning immigrating to Canada.

Of particular note in reference to this entry, is the topic of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) which deals with making your website get the most out of using keywords, title tags, etc. in order that search engines (like Google) will rank your website higher. There’s no public knowledge as to how Google ranks your website, but it is known that it’s a combination of using keywords in the website, having titles that accurately portray the meaning of your website, and how many people link to you. There’s a slew of other things to take into account but for now, let’s just leave it at that.

To understand fully how powerful changing a keyword or title could be, I decided to use Uncle Greg’s Home Inspection website as a test case. He has recently opened a home inspection business and would definitely love any marketing that he can receive. By the way, his website is www.pattersonhomeinspections.com and he services the geographic area around Peterborough, Marmora, etc. I’m sure the mere mention on this website will send the masses to him for some aid in home inspection! At the very least, it will give him a few visitors.

Anyhow, I decided to take a look at where his website stood within Google. I typed in the search criteria ‘home inspection ‘where he’s living” and I found his website buried on Page 3. He was sitting at the #22 spot in all the results for our search criteria.

The goal of this project was to get him onto the first page of Google. The first page is worth a lot in exposure as there are surely a lot of people looking for home inspections on the web and if you’re not on the first page of Google, maybe they won’t find you hidden on the third page.

First off, I used Google Insights which is a tool which compares keywords. For example, I compared the terms ‘home inspection’, ‘home inspections’, ‘home inspector’, and ‘house inspection’ to see what people would generally search for. The results of the search are here and they show that the term ‘home inspection’ was the winner by a wide margin.

With this knowledge, we now know that it’s better to use this term throughout Uncle Greg’s website to maximize the amount of people finding his website through the search criteria ‘home inspection’.

After obtaining the login information for his website, I went ahead and did the following changes:
– I changed the Home Page title from ‘www.pattersonhomeinspections.com’ to ‘Patterson Home Inspection – Home Page – Home Inspector serving Peterborough, Madoc, Marmora, Belleville, Bancroft, Tweed Ontario’. I thought this may do the trick as the #1 Google Ranked home inspector for that area had the same thing within his own site. Google likes how you list out the meaning of the website ‘home inspector, home inspection’ as well as any keywords you want (such as the areas you cover).
– Anywhere I could, I removed the ‘s’ in ‘home inspections’
– I changed the company name to Patterson Home and Mold Inspections from Patterson Home and Mould Inspections Inc as per Uncle Greg’s request. It was quite interesting to see how many people searched for ‘mold’ vs. ‘mould’. I personally never knew that mould was the correct spelling?  It may not be…I haven’t checked in the dictionary yet.

On Wednesday, May 13, I believe the site incorporated the changes and within an hour, the site fell down one spot to #23. I had no idea how this happened and was not impressed! But I figured I would let it sit and see what would happen.

In the end, as of Tuesday, May 19, the website is now sitting on the first Google results page if you type in the search criteria ‘home inspector ‘where he’s living”. It is sitting at the #10 spot.

I would definitely say that this experiment was a grand success with the goal of reaching the first page of Google. I have yet to try out different search criteria (such as ‘home inspection ‘some other place”) but that will be the next task. It may be more difficult as there may be more home inspectors advertising that they service the Peterborough area rather than where he’s living.

***Update***  I have somehow become the victim of my own success.  I went to see where Uncle Greg’s page stood as of Thursday May 19 and lo and behold he was not found on the first page of Google any longer!  But the reason for this is that this blog entry had somehow taken over the third spot and pushed him out of the first page!  Argh!  What have I done?  So I went and removed certain keywords in this particular entry to see if it will remove itself from the Google results for that particular search.  I swear this is a plot from a bad b-movie.

The May long weekend was not spent camping like yesteryear, but traveling to Montreal to see Philipp. I haven’t seen him in quite a few months (due to both of us being busy) so I knew it was time to make the trek as the stars aligned and we both had nothing of importance going on that weekend.

I tested out the new bike rack for the car once again in hopes to have a bike ride around Montreal, but alas, the weather was horrible and I brought it up for nothing. At least I got a taste of what it felt like to haul the bicycle up three flights of stairs to his apartment!

Summer was in the air so I put on my sandals for the first time that year and hit the road. By the time I hit Rigaud across the Quebec border, it had grown chilly and I realized that I was foolish and I believe one of my toes may have fallen off due to the frigid temperatures. I was smart enough to haul out some socks once I hit Montreal though.

The night was spent catching up with Philipp as we had not been able to catch up via email for the past few months. Unfortunately for me, Philipp will be leaving Canada around August as he is done his PhD here. He’s been here for…perhaps five years now in Canada? So it is due time for him to continue on with his world travels. We shared a few beer, I met Erica and saw Gregoire and Claudine and in true Montreal fashion, we headed out to a pub around 1:30AM. I had forgotten that Montreal closed it’s doors around 3AM so the body needed to grow accustomed to that. May I also point out that the entire weekend was spent speaking French as it was the only common language that all of us could speak. It was strange to interact with Philipp in French as we had never done so before.

We headed to Honey Martin’s on Sherbrooke West which is a tiny, tiny pub but had this amazing 1950s style rock band going on. I wish I had a picture of the evening as the band was playing on the floor in the back, I was directly in front of them dancing away (and bumping into the guitarist once or twice) and the bathrooms were right next to us. It was quite cramped but loads of fun and I even purchased an LP from the band on my way out the door.

The next day was calling for rain and Philipp and I scoffed at the idea that the clouds would dare go against our plans of a bike ride but sure enough, after Erica and I fetched some food at the grocery store, it started pouring and it didn’t let up all day. Philipp said there was something to do with three different jet streams of weather hitting Montreal so it’s hard to predict what will happen.

Philipp and I ended up watching Righteous Kill with Robert DeNiro and Al Pacino. It was alright but nothing earth shattering. Catch it if you can for free. We then had some supper (some nachos caliente dish which was great) and headed out to Thorben’s place which was down where Philipp used to live in Montreal near Mont Royal (probably my favourite spot in the city) and we had a good kitchen party along with a FOG MACHINE that they purchased a few months back! Who owns a fog machine? This was amazing!

We then headed out to La Tulipe for 80s night and the bar is like a triple sized Barrymore’s and was quite fun. What do I love about Quebec? They have one of my favourite beers on hand at all times…Molson Dry. By far, the superior beer in comparison with Molson Canadian.

The night bid us good night and we headed home and had a bite to eat to ensure our survival the next morning. The next morning was quite cold and windy so that messed up our cycling plans again and we decided to watch Quantum of Solace (the new James Bond film) which I had not yet seen. It was decent…started out strange and hard to follow but then found it’s pacing near the end. Definitely wasn’t as good as Casino Royale, that’s for sure. My favourite part in the movie is when James Bond is drinking a beer and Philipp and I had a good laugh because 30 minutes beforehand, Philipp mentioned that the only reason he couldn’t fully love James Bond is the fact that he never drinks a beer!

I loaded up my gear after the film, said adieu to Erica and Philipp and hit the road. It was a nice relaxing weekend although I think my body still hasn’t got accustomed to going to bed at 10 instead of 4:30 in the morning!

When I got back to Ottawa, I headed out to Matt and Karilee’s where we watched Terminator 3 along with Holly, Alex, James and Ferda. It was a nice evening filled with great ice cream and dill pickle chips.

On Monday, the first nice day of the weekend hit us and I took advantage of it by washing the windows (which, somehow failed as I clearly didn’t use clean water as they are definitely worse off than before!) and cleaned the gutters. I have some mild hopes of selling the house sometime this year so I figure it’s a good time to start some work on the house!

Thanks to all those in Montreal who showed me a good time! I will definitely be back before August for another grand time.

On Wednesday, I needed to get a haircut for an interview on Thursday and seeing that I was hanging out downtown to go to play bingo for Trish’s birthday, and the fact that Vero was not around to cut my hair, it only made sense to seek out a barber shop.

I asked Ben for any tips on places to get a cut on Elgin Street and he pointed me towards a shop he went to across from the Pizza Pizza.  Lo and behold, I spied the barber shop pole outside and entered…

And found a corner store.  But not just ANY corner store…one with a barbershop taking up the back half!  There was one barber cutting away and so I sat down and waited next to another gentleman and when the second barber was done serving at the cash, he came in and the gentleman next to me said I could go ahead as he was waiting for the other barber to be done.

Warning bells went off in my head…”Is the other guy THAT good?  Should I also be waiting for him?  Is there something wrong with Barber #2?”  I conceded to the fact that I couldn’t very well say no this person’s offer so I sat down and asked for a trim.  I’ve been out of the barber shop for so long that I couldn’t even remember what a tapered back meant!

All was going well although I was in the mood to chat and this barber most certainly was not.  But then a strange thing happened.  Someone came into the corner store and my barber put down the clippers and went and processed their lottery ticket.  The bells go off, ‘Winner, Gagnant’ is cried and the person walks out with their meager winnings and the barber comes back, takes a look at my head with a look on his face saying “Now where was I?” and then starts all over because he can’t really remember.

This happens fifteen other times and I must admit that I am quite the patient person in life but I’m sure glad I had nowhere to go in a rush!  I also believe that because of these customers coming in, my hair is probably a lot shorter than it originally was planned to be!

Nonetheless, it did not look bad at all.  I paid the gentleman, went to the Sir John A pub down the street (which is excellent for the reason that it has some great fish and chips and carries Mill Street beer on tap) and then Krista, Ben, Jill and I headed to Vanier Bingo.

Now, I’ve never been to a bingo hall before, or at the very least, none that I can remember.  Perhaps my mother frequented the bingo halls in Fraserdale and that’s how my education was paid for, but I’ll never know until she reads this and writes back to me.

On a random side note, may I point out that I don’t know how to take the email from my father the other day.  It said something like “Hello, can you check out the price of ‘object x’ in Ottawa.  By the way, four working days left. – Dad.”

Now, I don’t know about you, but to say this to someone who probably has 728,199 more working days left in him, this is just uncalled for!  Sure, I’m happy for him approaching retirement, but Dad, lay off the emails will you?  🙂

Anyhow, so we enter this bingo hall and it was another world altogether.  Or…pretty well like what you imagined.  People strewn across tables with good luck tokens, a bag full of bingo dabbers and yesterday’s best attire.  We went to the counter and asked how bingo worked and she spewed out some information that still didn’t make any sense to us so we decided to buy a ‘regular’ sheet for $10.50.  Near the middle of of night we realized how the other bingo games worked and bought a few more.  This was solely to push off extreme boredom as there was one game where they played ‘full card’ which meant that you had to dab every spot on the card to win and I figured if I didn’t have that playing card, I would have been sitting there for 30 minutes looking around.

When I say looking around, I really mean it.  As in, I would be silent.  I thought bingo would be a rocking fun time chatting with old ladies next to me and threatening to dab B11 on their card when the ball came up…but no.  The place was like a morgue.  We got glares whenever one of us would speak to one another, so we had to laugh in hushed whispers.  It was quite surreal but I realized that regular bingo players take their night quite seriously.

In the end, no one at our table won anything but Trish ended up getting a piece of cake and a free bingo bad filled with bingo paraphenelia which was quite nice of the bingo hall.  Heck, the woman delivering the bag even kissed her!

So all in all, I must admit that I’ve always wanted to try bingo, but I don’t think I really care to try it again.  I found it a little boring and at times I swear I was falling asleep.  This is not to say that I did not have a fun night (as Trish is probably thinking right now!) but it’s just to say that bingo ain’t my thing.

Some of you may not know this, but Vero left for Italy this morning! Her work is sending her there for two weeks to film some veterans who are over there taking a look at the ‘Hitler Run’. Not knowing what this is, I shall take a look on Wikipedia right now and find out. Huh…I didn’t find it. Clearly, I am mixing up the words and I’m sure Troy will correct me with the correct terminology of some infamous Hitler Run that took part in Italy.

Let’s be honest here…everyone reading this is quite jealous right now. Where’s some of the cooler terrain you’ve been sent to on this Earth? I know Joe travels up to the Arctic quite a bit for work which I always thought would be a fun trip. Rob has been quite a few places around the world to teach people the correct way to handle nuclear thingies, I have been to Halifax.

Where have you been to?

iplaying: FEZ – Being Born – U2 (No Line on the Horizon)

I had two really great laughs this weekend that I want to share with you all and for the purposes of me coming in here in the future to have a laugh eighty years from now.

– On Saturday night, we went to see Star Trek. Holly was eating dinner and gave me the Vulcan hand sign and said ‘Live long and posture.” I never knew Vulcans prided themselves on proper posture!

– On Sunday night, I was watching How I Met Your Mother (Season 4, Episode 19 – Murtaugh) and there was this scene where this kindergarten class was getting obliterated by the other team and out of nowhere Teen Wolf appears and starts slam dunking against the kids. I love Teen Wolf.