Mission Accomplished

The show last night in Buffalo was excellent (pictures and video to come soon)!

Packed house. Great set! He opened with "I'm a window" closed with "If I was a tidal wave." He also hinted that he intends to play The future is X-rated on the upcoming band tour, which is very exciting. It's always great to see Matt Good play! It was totally worth the mission.

Speaking of which, we made it both to and from the border in about an hour and 30 minutes. That must be some sort of record! :) No hassle going through the border on either side too, which was very nice.

We went to the Apple Store in the Galleria to get a couple of phones but they were sold out unfortunately. We were considering staying overnight and driving to Rochester (the next closest store) this morning but opted not to as I need to be around here at 6pm today and couldn't guarantee we'd be back in time. Oh well... I guess I will continue to deal with my phone as it is until it can be fixed or there is another opportunity to get a new one (do they ship to Canada?).

We didn't walk away completely empty handed though. One of my friends got about $350 worth of clothing for $120. And we both ended up buying Guitar Hero III for the Wii (which is impossible to find anywhere around here) for only $89.99! And the tax was only 4.5%.

All in all it was a pretty good day, and a successful mission (despite the lack of phones). I'll write more about it later on when I've got pictures and whatnot.

Cheers.

New friend!

Courtesy of the fantastic folks over at Gus Greeper (quite possibly THE coolest people in Vancouver):

Sweet freedom!

Ready to ROCK!

Introductions...

Sitting just out of reach (the dog really thought it was a gift for him heh).

Our first jam session!

Worst picture of me ever! lol But still, he sits nicely on the shoulder :P

Thank you SO much guys! I love him already!!

Assuming he doesn't talk too much shit on our way past the border guards this weekend, he'll be taking in his first show with me down in Buffalo on Saturday! (he's very excited, I can tell)

Another package of awesomeness...

This package arrived for me this morning, but I did not have time to open it. Strangely enough, before I picked it up I swear I could hear an E-minor being played from somewhere within it... can't wait for work to be over now :P

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Thanks for advice over the last couple of days guys, I really appreciate it. There is no denying that I definitely need to be exercising more. My biggest problem is that I find it difficult to change my routines, be it adding new ones or removing old ones. I'm not making excuses though; I can and will overcome!

To Suzie specifically: I am the exact opposite of you in that respect... the whole waiting for things to NEED or be FORCED to be done. I find it the most difficult to get motivated under these conditions. I can't stand feeling like I'm being FORCED to do something... or as if I'm doing something because it NEEDS to be done; I will tend to resist this belief and neglect whatever it is that needs to be done out of spite (albeit subconsciously and otherwise rationalized). If something is going to get done, it needs to be because I'm choosing to do it.

That is actually one of the most difficult aspects of my psychology that I have had to reconcile. It's the reason I don't blog more often (as soon as I begin feeling like I have to or should write a post, it won't happen), as well as why I go through periods where I can't get motivated to work (the periods when I get very anti-capitalism in my thinking), and why I can't seem to stop smoking pot.

It's something I've thought a lot about. And something I'll write a bit more in depth about later on (hopefully).

Somehow, weekends have become the enemy...

I'm not entirely sure why, nor am I entirely sure when it began (though I'm pretty sure this began bothering me about 6 months ago), but my attitude towards the weekend are changing.

My weekends have become a time to embrace the worst of my habits, which also promotes reclusion and laziness. I'm finding I just don't get anything productive done, and beyond a close circle of friends I no longer really go out and try to see anyone anymore. I even avoid things like facebook and MSN at times, because I have become that ridiculous.

This never used to bother me before, but now I am finding myself actually looking forward to Mondays when I am back at work; forced to be social, with a "normal" routine, responsibilities and productiveness. For the longest time it was the other way around, as it is for most people... because I really don't get that much enjoyment out of my job, and yet still, since I've discovered how to mitigate my work stress, it turns out that work is easier to deal with now than not working.

I can barely believe I am even writing this.

I need to find something to occupy my time during evenings and weekends that doesn't allow for my indulgences. Ideally, it will have a paycheque associated with it, though I wouldn't be surprised if that doesn't remain a requirement for long.

I need to stay busy. I cannot be left to my own devices. I just get too bored and make these damaging decisions. It's a routine I'm stuck in that I need to find a way to change.

Anyone have any suggestions? :)

a PC compromise...

Happy Thursday! I can't tell you how glad I am that tomorrow is a holiday. I just found this out at the beginning of this week. What perfect timing it is.

These last couple of weeks have really flown by. Primarily because there's been this one project at work that has demanded my complete attention for practically every day. I'll be happy when this is finally put to bed. I know the headache from it is far from over and will surely continue into next week as well; but at least the worst of it is over.

I had a great time this past Monday night. I even wrote a post about it but didn't post it right away and when I came back to it suddenly it didn't make as much sense as it did originally and I feel like the window of relevancy for it has now passed. Oh well; here's a picture anyway:

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In other news, I think I'm going to be building a new PC tonight. I did a little number crunching, and given the few trips planned over the next few months (including Halifax next month, which is now booked!!), if I were to get a $2500 macbook on top of all of it, [barring an infusion of additional income] that would put me in the red until AT LEAST July. Considering I can get a decent enough PC that fulfills all my non-Mac specific needs/wants for around $1000 (which is much easier on the bank account), I've decided that this is just the way it has to go.

I'm not letting go of the mac idea entirely though. If/when I end up moving to Vancouver; a macbook is definitely going to be part of that deal.

A shame I know; but I can't have everything I want whenever I want it now can I?

Old friends...

Happy St. Patricks day!

It's currently 7:45pm... I'm still at work, getting myself excited for a little bit of drinking tonight.

Gonna be seeing some old high school friends... which is very rare, since I usually make it a point to try not to see anyone (outside of my regular crew) from high school. It's not so much that I had a rough time in high school, because really, I had a great time (some say too great). No, it's more that I think I'm happiest having that be a [n almost] closed chapter of my life that doesn't ever need to be gone back to.

Except on nights like this.

Because once every year or two, I like to go out and see these guys. They are fairly smart, young guys, on their way to being professionals. No idea who they are still but that's okay. Because the nostalgia they bring with them is usually great.

We'll drink and smoke and laugh about all the old teachers and people and how these guys would never, ever, drink or smoke. They'll catch us up on what our other old high school pals are up to (wait. Who just got engaged!?!?).

I always enjoy it because with guys like these the interactions are always so casual and fluid and laughter-filled that it's almost as if we've all been best buds since the very beginning. I'm sure it would ruin it if we all made the effort to see each other more though, so on the one hand I'm kind of glad we don't. We're all aware that we're each just a phone call away anyway, and we all seem happy enough in the circles we've got so... just for tonight I'm going to go and hang out with them and I'm going to have a great time!

Cheers people. Hope none of you get too sick before the night is over! haha.

Towards Utopia

"The theory is that people can and will make rational, well-thought out decisions when provided the tools necessary and environment conducive to do so."

I spend way too much money. But it's worth it.

Looks like a short trip to Halifax may be in the works for next month.

Looks like another trip to Vancouver is in the works for June.

Looks like I'm going to be buying a Macbook (Pro?).

Looks like I'm going to need to be replacing my phone.

Looks like there are a few upcoming Matt Good shows.

And I'm supposed to be saving $10, 000?

...shit...

I think I'd better buy myself a new 42-inch flat-panel television too.

Update: +$500 for the damage to the woman's car the other day. She got it quoted for $830. I appreciate the deal.

Before you read any further, Tony Pierce wrote a really excellent piece yesterday that you should read if you haven't already. He touches on something that I have a lot of strong ideas about (and that were supposed to be the focus of this blog originally) that I won't get into now, but still intend to eventually.

Also, Keira-Anne has a very poignant piece about a man she met while walking the dogs in the park and the difficulty of getting established/living well in Vancouver for most, and the importance of maintaining perspective for those of us who are more fortunate.

They both deserve your attention.

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Yesterday I got approved for a $5000 Aeroplan gold visa card!

$5000 as a limit is wayy too much for me. There's no way I could cover that over a couple of months even, so I'll never plan to spend to the limit. It IS nice however, to have the opportunity there. I could feel comfortable now saving $1000 for a Mac, and putting the rest of it on the card and paying it off over a month or two.

I need to look into virtualization on the mac now... which from what I understand isn't too difficult and works pretty well. It looks like our office (and our online properties) is/are going to be moving to the .NET platform, so I'd need access to a Windows environment from home. That appears to be the final hiccup in this PC vs. Mac debate.

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I tried fixing my iPhone once again this past weekend. Again, no luck.

And starting Sunday night, it appears that a number of my songs won't play. On some of them it says it's playing but there is no audio output. On others, it won't even let me push the play button. Yet the rest of them seem to work fine.

Slowly but surely this phone is losing all its functionality.

I'm going down to Buffalo on March 29th, should I replace it?

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I bought some compressed air last night and tried blowing the shit out of my Wii in hopes that it really WAS a dust issue and flooding the thing with air might fix it. No luck on this either.

My friend with the same problem is currently in the process of burning a downloaded copy of the game, so I'll know within a half hour whether or not this game will ever be playable on my system or not.

If the downloaded copy doesn't work, I am thinking I might sell my Wii. It's a fairly drastic decision, but I play it so little as it is, and have justified keeping it around up to this point by saying to myself 'just wait until Smash Bros. is out.'

I think I could use the $800+ I could probably get for it more than I could use the little amount of joy I get out of only looking at the damn thing.

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Finally, another thing I did this weekend was update my recorded play counts, and I intend to do a long post about this today/tomorrow so look forward to that :)

That is all. Thanks for reading!


UPDATE: IT WORKS!!!!!

And in the end, it wasn't such a bad day...

Let me set this up by explaining the night before (Saturday):

We've been getting pounded by snow for over 24 hours. It's bad out there. No one is going anywhere tonight.

Tomorrow, a video game comes out that a pretty significant number of gamers across North America (myself included - though I'm not much of a gamer anymore) have been waiting for for over 5 years. Super Smash Bros. Brawl. It's the main reason I bought my Nintendo Wii. I plan to buy that tomorrow, after I get my Wii back from my cousin's (who I lent it to for the last month). I'll get them to bring it to their hockey game (which I'll watch). We're also having a big family dinner tomorrow night. And, I said I would get a bunch of work done from home this weekend that has some pretty short deadlines going into next week. I'll be sure to get the work done in the morning and early afternoon; I think the hockey game is at 4; dinner will be around 6:30/7; and so the rest of the night can be spent chilling out and playing Brawl!

My day yesterday:

Woken up at 9:30am.. 'Dan, can you please get up and please go help your mother shovel the driveway?' ... Sure, of course...

8 hours of sleep. Nice. 9:30am... If I shovel this out quickly I'll still be able to get a good start on my work before the afternoon. Where's the coffee at?

Oh wait. Daylight savings time you say? It's really 10:30? Okay fuck the coffee I'll grab that after. Let's do this!

'Oh look at Norm and Kim's driveway. They're buried! And she's out there all by herself. We should go over and help her.' ... Sure, of course. We are good neighbours.

11:30am... Called up the cousins. The game starts at 1:30pm!?? Shit.

Get showered. Get ready. Pick up a friend of mine. Head to EB games to buy Smash Bros. (not letting this one go). No time for lunch, pizza at the arena it is.

We got there 10 minutes late.

We won 6-4!

'We've got to go to this hockey party [for the other cousin], would you mind taking Mitchell home?' ...Sure, of course...

Actually, you know what? We're going to kidnap him and bring him to dinner with us. Besides, he too is almost as excited for Smash Bros. as we are anyway. (by this point; it was very apparent that I was going to sacrifice getting work done in order to get some play time in before dinner)

We are T-minus 3 minutes from my house... I can almost feel the controller vibrating in my hand already as I'm driving...

And that's when some crazy person started swinging his grocery bags in the middle of the road. Like a crazy person.

So naturally, the woman in the SUV in front of me hesitates, then decides to SLAM on the brakes.

Her brakes turn out to be much, much better than mine. And I, slide right into the back of her car.

At a low enough rate of speed.

Damage was minimal. Nobody was hurt. The woman was cool and apologetic herself. She won't be calling insurance, but I'll still be paying for her damage. And mine.

So now it's about 4pm. I drop my friend off and we finally make it home. We tell the crash story 5 times. We set my Nintendo Wii back up (in it's rightful place on top of the TV heh).

Pop the disc in, watch it spin... hear it spin... watch it spin... watching it.... watching it...

"Unable to read disc. Please consult your manual."

Well fuck.

Cousin and I jump back in the car and head back down to the EB, while people in the house jump online searching for possible problems/solutions (my Wii is modded you see; so there was a bit of concern over this).

Get to EB around 4:30... grab their 2nd last copy of the game. Apparently, more than a few people have been having this problem.

Missed 3 calls on my cell phone that doesn't ring. 'Can you pick up a lime from the grocery store?', 'A lime? A single lime?', 'Yeah', 'No!'

Get back home... try the new copy of the game. Still doesn't work.

Try it again. Still nothing. Again. Nothing. Again. And again. And again. And again.

As it turns out, this is the first game to be burned on a dual-layer DVD for the Wii, and according to Nintendo, a little bit of dust or smoke on/around the laser that reads the discs will prevent it from work. Ship your Wii to them (for free) and they'll fix it and ship it back. Well that is convenient. Or would be, if not for the mod. And the fact that I want to play this NOW. Not 6-8 weeks from now. Why did no one warn us of this when we were buying the game? Apparently this was a major problem in Japan too when the game was released there a few months back. And if you think that EB games is going to be nice about it and give me my money back? Well, you've just never shopped at EB games, have you? Fuckers.

Anyway, turkey dinner time (free, thanks to my work). At this point, I have given up on the game (for the day); and am wondering why I've spent so much money on my Wii at all over the year. And cursing my damn phone for having me miss 2 MORE calls (first call back, 'Sorry man, about to have dinner, will call you afterwards if I'm around.' second one, 'Sure man, about to have dinner but I'll call you afterwards and will come drop off the money I owe you').

Dinner was excellent! My mom is a great cook!

After dinner I had to drive my cousin home. My sister and her boyfriend who live in the city need a lift to the subway station. Sure, of course!..

Go over to my buddy's place. Drop of the cash. Chill for a short while. It's now approaching 9pm... Shit! I still have SO much work to do...I need to get home!

So it's now about 9:30pm...and someone I really want to talk to is online but I've got to work so she says go work so I'm hoping she'll stay around until I'm done.

And she did :)

And not only that, but my good friend Dan who's in Australia also came online and let me in on some fantastic news! (that I'm not allowed to share)

In the end I ended up getting about an hour/hour and 1/2 worth of work done. Not enough; but better than nothing.

Went to bed feeling pretty good around 11:30pm...fell asleep probably around 1:30am.

80 Notes...

Just realized last night that on top of all the pictures I lost in my latest iPhone fix attempt, I also lost the 80+ notes I wrote in the damn thing.

That more than anything pisses me off (not really). Some of them were important! And they appear to be unrecoverable :(

Well I WAS leaning towards a PC...

So as I've been debating PC vs. Mac for a bit now...and I was leaning towards a PC (30 minutes ago I was sitting at around 85/15)... then I heard that Apple announced the iPhone SDK. It comes within a developer's package that includes an iPhone simulator that is Mac-specific.

The real gem in all this though, is that apparently, Apple themselves will be hosting and selling all these legit third-party applications. For free. And sharing revenues at a 70/30 (you/apple) split.

Which potentially turns a $2000 expenditure into a $2000 investment....

Cause it's been 30 minutes and I'm already bursting with [seemingly] viable ideas.

Hmmm...

Ten Thousand Dollars

That's right. I am actually setting a financial goal for myself! If I can reach $10, 000, then I can feel safe picking up and moving somewhere. Somewhere... like BC maybe. Or Australia maybe. But BC, probably.

The owner of our company gave me her "official" endorsement yesterday to live and work out there. She asks, "why don't you just move out there and set up a home office and work for us from there? You don't need to physically be here in order do work do you?" No, no I don't.

So now I'm thinking that maybe going to school in BC doesn't have to be the end game in order for me to go there. Maybe I can just go there and be there and get a dog and walk the sea wall every day just for the hell of it.

Hmmm...

The other voice in my head...

(these kinds of thoughts are of the recurring type in my head, but for the record, this particular post was inspired by reading: http://citizenreporter.org/2008/03/nothing-like-christiania/ who was linked to by http://hitthejagspot.com/ who I don't really read but am starting to wonder if maybe I should).

People are doing things. I have two friends in Australia. And another one somewhere in south-east Asia. And another couple somewhere in England.

People are doing things, going places, seeing things...

I am trying to save $100, 000 (not a real figure)... and I'm not sure why.

In fact, I'm not really sure why I'm doing practically anything.

But I do know, that I COULD do practically anything.

So I'm a little confused.

And I'm a little bored.

And I want to jump out of a plane at 30000 feet.

And glide to the ground and remember that for the rest of my fucking life.

But instead I'm sitting here writing an email to a client who's really just a middleman wondering what the fuck is wrong with his client's survey even though he won't be able to tell me anyway but hey, I'm just doing my due-diligence, protecting our corporate asses.

It seems wrong.

And it seems wasteful.

Am I wrong?

Three stoners in a home...

One of my good friends needs to be out of his place by the end of May, so there are starting to be grumblings within a few of my friends moving into a house together. I said I would think about it and get back to them.

On the surface, it seems like a pretty cool idea. I wouldn't mind moving out of my house; and I could certainly afford it. For about $800 a month in rent and other living costs (on top of my $200-300 in fixed expenses already) I could be out on my own, living it up with my friends in a pretty sweet place.

Upon further thought however I'm not sure how good of idea this would really be though. Any hopes I have of saving even more money over the next 6-18 months would probably have to be forgotten. And increasing my monthly fixed expenses so much would require me to change how I look at my job (I would essentially be committed to continue working). Also, the two guys that I would be moving in with are regular pot smokers, which I'm sure wouldn't bode well for my habit. And do I really want to be living in that kind of environment anyway?

Still though, I am thinking about it. I'm sure it would be a fun time. And I'm sure we could pull it off. We'll see where this goes....

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In other news, I attempted to fix my phone this weekend and nothing I did seems to make any positive difference at all. Not only that, but I lost all the pictures I had on my phone. All my Vancouver pictures, all my wine and vodka tasting pictures, all my vapor lounge+video games live pictures. Everything.

I'm not mad about this, though I probably could be frustrated... this is the second time this has happened. In the future I will not update/recover my phone (backed up or otherwise) without first saving all the pictures to my PC.

What I am a little frustrated about, is that I can think of only one more thing that I can try in order to get this phone back in working order and if that doesn't work, I think I'm going to have to get a new one. That is the risk one takes when hacking and fucking around with a complicated piece of hardware though, so if that is the route that I have to take then it will have been my own fault ;)

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There was one other thing I wanted to blog about but at the moment I can't remember what it is. I'll have to get back to this later when I remember.

I hope everyone's having a good day today :)

Cheers!