I haven’t had a favourite song of the moment in quite a while that was of any sort of quality, so I was very happy to hear NIN’s new Discipline single. What a great song and the video is a perfect match. To top it all off, NIN was giving the MP3 away for free on their website. The song also comes with a bit of a teaser in the comment of the MP3’s ID3 tag, which states “Go to www.nin.com May 5”. Interesting. I hope that means there is more of this to come.

Okay I don’t know who the “smart guy” was at Apple who thought it would be funny to design a keyboard that conducts electricity so well, but I want them to know that they have caused me a great amount of psychological trauma. Fine, well not a great amount, but enough that I am literally afraid to touch my keyboard at certain points because of the massive static shock I am going to receive if I get any where close to the metal.

*ponders* I’m reminded of a scene in Office Space, one of my favourite movies.

Dammit, if didn’t love everything else about that keyboard… *shakes fist*

I used to be proud that I could say I had never lost a cell phone (I was close once, but I got it back before I knew it was even missing thanks to a nice cab driver). Well on Friday I decided to clip my phone onto my pocket instead of my belt loop (stupid), then I gathered up a bunch of junk in my car and took it to the city dump. You can probably guess where I’m going… yeah, I ended up losing my cell phone at the dump.

I suppose there were a few reasons I was so perturbed by this incident:

1. They’re expensive, so losing them is painfully annoying.
2. I was 1 day away from no longer being stuck in a contract with my cell phone company. I could have been free, freeeee!
3. I had a crappy 1st generation RAZR that I hated, but it worked and I was holding out for the iPhone to come to Canada (in approximately 6 months I’m told).

I decided that I did in fact need a cell phone, so I went to Rogers and “wheeled and dealed” my way into a Sony Ericsson w580i, which for the record is a really nice phone. I’ve only had it a few days, but I’m impressed with the functionality, style and general usability of the phone. It has some really interesting features such as a built in pedometer (which sadly shows me just how little I actually walk / move over the course of a day), built in AM/FM radio (neat but generally useless here in Kingston), 8GB MP3 player (the 8GB card you get free right now from Rogers as a promotion), Bluetooth, and more. Very nice, highly recommended!

Any close friend of mine will tell you that I am far from a sports fan. In fact I would say that I work pretty hard to avoid hockey, baseball, football, etc. That said, when presented with the opportunity to attend an NHL hockey game I would likely take it. I’ve attended 2 NHL games this year actually, one in Montreal (Habs vs. Carolina) and the other in Ottawa (Sens vs. Pens).

The game in Montreal was my first NHL game ever, and I must say I was not overly impressed. Perhaps because I’m not actually a hockey fan, perhaps because I was some what intoxicated during the game (a la Huron County friends) or perhaps because our seats were so high up (like above the press box high up) that I felt as thought I should be harnessed into my seat.

This is why I decided to give the Senators a chance. This game was a heck of a lot better. It was moderately exciting and they put out the Penguins (game 5 of the Eastern conference semi-finals I’m told), plus the Scotia Bank Place is a nice stadium and I could actually see the players.

I managed to bring my camera into this game, feel free to check out the photographs.

The other day I was on my way home from work (at dusk) and I noticed that the outside lights on my house were unusually bright? I mean, I had purchased 40 watt smaller incandescent bulbs quite some time ago and all-of-a-sudden they were uber-bright? Upon further examination, they were new compact fluorescent bulbs, which I have in the interior of my house.

I happened to glance next door and noticed my neighbor had the same bulbs in her fixtures, so I figured that she was being nice and energy efficient and replaced mine as well. Mystery solved, or so I thought…

Later that night after it got dark, I happened to glance out my front window and look down the street to find that nearly every house had the exact same uber-bright energy efficient bulbs in their outdoor light fixtures.

Is there some sort of energy-star, replacing our light-bulbs? It’s a mystery I tell you, a mystery. I’m not upset or anything like that, I’m happy… who do I thank? Is this a good Samaritan or my tax dollars at work?

Just thought I’d blog about Karla’s spill last week. She was running down the stairs to catch me before I left to work (to tell me that Castro was not dead) and missed a stair and fell right on her tail bone.

She’s been laid up on the couch now for 3 days and a bit… huge bruise. Sorry guys… no pics 😀

You can catch Karla’s side of the story here if you’d like.

I can somewhat giggle about it now, but half an hour ago I was some upset. On the way into my house this afternoon, I tripped on the step and knocked my 12″ Powerbook G4 a bit on the step above. It was in my nice thick neoprene laptop bag and the bump wasn’t that hard, so I didn’t thing much of it. Tonight I went to work on a few things and found that my beautiful aluminum Apple case had a large bend in it, and there was also a few small ripples. 🙁

After freaking out for a second I shut off the machine and found that the top left corner of the laptop (about 1/3 of the machine) was in fact bent out about 1 cm. Yeah, so my computer now had a good curve to it, which made the battery not sit flush in the bottom.

I ended up carefully bending it back into position with careful pressure on the wound, and it’s now straighter than ever (it never did seem to sit flat before).

I was initially peeved about the aluminum actually bending, but I suppose with the -20 degrees Celsius weather today that a plastic PC laptop would have been destroyed. Gotta love Apple.

Well if you stumbled across this post because you were looking for the Simpsons TV show episode where Bart finds Mr. Burns’ $1000 bill, then they decide to go to England on vacation (which by the way is called The Regina Monologues) this isn’t it… sorry about your luck.

Karla and I are heading to the UK, and we are pretty dang excited about it. Neither of us has ever been to Europe before and we’re going for nearly three weeks and plan to see everything we possibly can see during our stay.

My sister moved to England about 3 months ago for a job opportunity, and since this is technically her first holiday season away from the family and on her own, I thought it would be a nice time to jump over the pond and pay her a visit. While we are there I plan to visit a few clients and colleagues as well, which I’ve previously never met in person before so that will be a nice adventure.

I plan to take copious amounts of pictures on my Canon Rebel XT while I’m there as well (Sidenote: On a new 4GB compact flash card that I just bought for $102.00CAD from TigerDirect… can you believe it? 4GB’s for $100! That’s sick… I paid more then that for my 64MB SD not too long ago) so prepare for a new vacations section in my photo album 🙂

If you know of any “must see” places… please feel free to suggest them. We have no solid plans at this point, but are just planning to travel as much as possible and take in everything we can.

A quick post today about a few letters: i.e. and e.g.

Have you ever felt imbecilic for using terms in sentences that you weren’t 100% sure of? I’ll admit, I’ve used “i.e.” and “e.g.” extensively throughout my life writing technical documents, teaching and even just in day to day blog posts I suppose. I’ll assume that I have used the terms correctly because no one has ever corrected my uses, but I never did know why I was writing “e.g.” in place of “Example”. Where did the G come from? I really never even questioned it before yesterday, to be honest.

This morning before I got into my work routine I needed to find out.

Well a quick search of the net turned up Yahoo Answers, which made me happy because someone else asked this question. It turns out that this is commonly misunderstood.

From my extensive research (ha), I’ve turned up the the following:

i.e. stands for id est, Latin for “that is”.

e.g. stands for exempli gratia, Latin for “for example”.

If you previously did not know this… you do now! Lucky you. If you did already know this… oh aren’t you a smarty pants, don’t think less of others who aren’t so linguistically savvy!