Friday, March 30, 2007

The Environment (or how we f’k’ed Planet Earth to death)

So you may or may not have seen the movie The Inconvenient Truth, the documentary featuring Al Gore (yes, the almost next president of the 2000 election). If you have, you know what I’m talking about and will nod your heads in unison when reading this post. If you have not, you should get your butt out of the computer chair and rent/buy it from your nearest DVD store!

Yes – the title of this post does contain harsh language designed to chock and awe you. It’s harsh because we as a collective human race is not really stopping our pursuit of instant gratification in terms of huge luxury cars, gas-guzzling monsters, oil burning factories or other types of production facilities that is geared towards providing the masses with pre-packed convenience in bulk.

Without going into details (because I’m writing this offline and can’t really dig it up online right now), we as a species was slowly killing off the delicate environment that we live in. I state “was”, because we have gone beyond that point a while ago – shutting our government ears to the scientific community screaming for more attention to our nature, climate and the habitable environment. We are now rapidly slaughtering our only place in this universe (so far... it’s pretty damned big and we have barely search billions of a fraction of it so far for habitable planets) that is not openly hostile for us to live in. W

We don’t have to have pressure suits, bring our own oxygen/nitrogen environment (or artificially create it on site) or constantly be afraid of the surroundings (unless you live in New York) changing your living arrangement.

And that we are taking for granted will last forever… foolish humans! Climate Crisis is not the word to use now… it’s Climate Triage and you need to select what you want to live without, cause if we keep this up, we’ll either have luxury surrounding us in the limestone caves that will form our legacy lifeboat for the selected few humans, or discard the luxury – get more environmentally conscious and push for people to change some of the habits that is causing the Climate change.

Time to take a smoke – planet earth is exhausted and need a break before we get deep and dirty in her again!

*mutters profanities and tries to figure out how to reduce my own carbon emissions to save planet earth*



And yes - It's my twisted opinion only... hey.. It's my blog! =)

Thursday, March 29, 2007

Morning Commute

So a lot of people are almost horrified when I start to describe my daily commute, and when I normally go up in the morning to go to work… While I usually explain in broad strokes on how my travel is, I’d thought it be interesting to go into a bit more details, hence today’s post.

06:05:

Mleh! First alarm goes off (a series of 2 more to be expected if I miss the first one) and hopefully I’m awake enough to zombie out to the bathroom for the normal stuff.

I won’t bore you with the details of my morning routine, but if you have met me, most likely it does not involve shaving… I’d be way to scared handling a blade in the morning when I’m still in Zombie mode. I want my skin to be not horribly disfigured, thank you very much!

06:48ish:

Out of the door after hugging my daughter goodbye (if she’s awake)… rushing to get to the first bus stop 50 meters (or is it more than 50? Can never judge distances…) before the bus arrives around 06:55ish. The bus takes a grand tour of the eastern side (I think it’s east – mental note: check compass direction on Google Earth) of St-Jerome before getting to the train station (Gare Intermodale – look mom! I know French! Woot!) at about 07:18.

07:25:

Train departs from the station… funny how we had to wait more than 7 years for the train to be pulled up to St-Jerome only to have four (!) departures in the morning down to Montreal (FOUR!!) with the last one being the one I take. WTF! So you would proably say “But you then have 4 in the evening going down, right?”. Nope! Wrong-O! De-nied! It’s four trains transporting you down to Montreal in the morning and five that transport you back up to St-Jerome. If you go all the way up to St-Jerome, don’t expect to be able to get on the train in St-Jerome to go back down to Montreal, cause the train is just off loading and then travels down the track to park for the night. Again – WTF?

08:14ish:

By now, (hopefully) the train has arrived at Bois-de-Boulogne and I will have jumped off (Only missed the stop twice, embarrassing to say the least) and started running to the stop. I say running, cause usually the 171 will be passing by with 3 busses between 8:14 and 8:28, provided the drivers are not competing in the STM Rally, in which case they all arrive almost at the same time and you can just bet your wallet content on the annoying fact that they will drop off their load and leave before I make it to the stop. If I’m lucky, I’ll make it just in time for the 8:18 and get a seat somewhere, hopefully not next to the 400pound old man that sings to himself in a way that makes you wonder if he knows English to begin with (and yes, apparently he s from Israel, and was a real bad-ass when he was there – if you would believe the story he tells to the poor drivers he starts to talk to).

08:42ish on a good day:

If this has been a good morning, I’ll arrive before the 216 departs from Cote-Vertu Metro station… which makes the rest of the travel to the office REALLY painless. It essentially stops outside the office which tends to be nice when it’s pouring down and you forgot your umbrella (again).

08:58ish on a good day:

Arrived! Coffee!! Anti-Zombie Drug #1, double shot Espresso, 3 cream, 3 sugar in my trusted stainless steel mug.

And so begins my morning, with hopefully no major issues to deal with in the first 15 minutes of De-Zombie-fication… and make sure you don’t stand in my way for a second cup if it’s a really tough morning. :)

Monday, March 26, 2007

Life is Hard?

Last night I was busy doing absolutely nothing in front of the TV, watching TLC as always, when the story of Abby and Brittany Hensel was aired.

For those that don't know these two girls, I can start off by saying that they are conjoined twins, and they are both amazing!

I cant (and I'm pretty much thinking not many people can) think of how hard it must have been for these girls to grow up... and to discover that they are pretty much unique in most things. It's awesome to see that they don't really mind people asking them questions, discovering that they are in fact two real people stuck together and that they dont like the same things, clothes, food and (I'm pretty sure) boys.

And then people, in full control of their body, complain that life is hard? Really?

Life is what Life is.

Friday, March 23, 2007

I (heart) Firefox

//Begin Random Dump

My Firefox and me - we are new best buddies...

It does what I want it to do, it displays and allows me to seamlessly integrate new and fun addons (Hey! My FTP program is my browser!) and even have a smart replacement system if I like the del.icio.us system better than conventional bookmarks.

----

Got Gmail? Add an extension called Gmail Manager and you'll always be able to see by a quick glance if you have new mail... and you can add multiple Gmail accounts to check at the same time!

----

Have a component in Firefox been updated? Have a flaw been detected that is severe enough (or not that severe even) to cause concern? No worries! Firefox will Update itself! (Eat your heart out, IE7!)

//End Random Dump

And yes - I had a problem figuring out what to write about. I've been out of it for a few days now... hopefully it will pass.

Oh, almost forgot... get a Facebook account!

Thursday, March 22, 2007

Can't Sleep?

Can't Sleep? Learn about Insomnia - National Sleep Foundation

Well... here we go again. Late. Damned Late!

So I was browsing around when I suddenly remembered a show on TLC about sleep disorders and problems, and figured I'd check out the site (Link above).

While reading about the problems of insomnia, I stumbled over this little tidbit:

Insomnia is a risk factor for the onset of depression and can significantly affect your quality of life.
*Gasps* No! Really??

I'm getting depressed just reading that line... and I already know how it is affecting my quality of life.


*Mutters about silly doctors who probably laughs while falling asleep without any problems*
Yes, I'm cranky at 2:45am...

Wednesday, March 21, 2007

Widescreen

With my daughter's recent marathon viewing of Men in Black II, and the worms comment "Once you go Worm, thats what you'll Yearn", I've come to realize that I now hate one of my 3 monitors at work.

Yes, 3 monitors. One is my Laptops built in (hey! it's a laptop, ok!) 15.4" WS Screen, and it has an external 17" Monitor set up as well. On my test computer, I am stuck on an old 17" SyncMaster 750s that have that nice "Ouch my color is draining from my eyes" kind of feel to it.

But then I think of home, and to my recent purchase (Thank you DELL Canada!) of my latest baby...





... it is SO true. Once you go Widescreen, that's what you'll yearn!

Insomnia Sucks...

Honestly - what is worse than insomnia? I'll tell you - 98% Insomnia.

98% Insomnia is the cheating form of insomnia that leaves you with some sleep, but severely lacking any benefit of sleep, and it also rob you of the delightful (?!) feeling of staying up past the 32hour mark... It plain 'ol suck, is what it does!

Tuesday, March 20, 2007

8 Days - 1 Reboot

I'm not sure if this is something I want to think about.. my baby (not the human kind) is summering from dust and is plagued with reboot pains.

Reboot pains?

Yea... you start the computer, only to hear the CPU Fan, HDD and other various components rev up to normal operations, but nothing appears where you normally would see your post-boot text/graphic.

This Boot is Dead! Diseased! Cut Power and Try again! Rinse and Repeat 80 to 400 times before you succeed in getting your boot sequence to launch.

What does this mean for me?
24/7 computer running - fan doing it's normal loud sound in the middle of the night.


*Sigh*

Life and It's Inevitable Doom...

Well.... with a title like that, what else can be said...

First, I'd like to say that thanks to Sizel (http://www.lunarstorm.se/Sizel), I am yet again blogging. I'll probably fail at it eventually, like I have in the past... but until then - Wohoo! Blogging!