Wayne D's Blog

My first gripe of the new year is really an old gripe. I was flipping around the other night and came across a South Park episode on The Comedy Network that was a parody of the Lord of the Rings. I keep seeing advertisements that you can watch South Park on the web so I decided tonight to go look for the episode. I found it and got a big pop up saying that my OS wasn't supported. I forgot about the acute DRM paranoia surrounding video on the web. Sigh.

Second gripe of the new year Ticketmaster. They want a $9.25 convenience fee and an additional $1.75 for the privilege of printing out the ticket at home. That's $11 in fees on a $25 ticket. There is also a $2 building facility fee. Why isn't that built into the ticket price?

That didn't last very long. I was hoping that I could Bogart some wifi to blog on while I was in Ottawa but it was not to be, there was no way I was going to blog for three days on the Crackberry. Now I am back home with a full sized keyboard and have tales to tell. Well, not really, that's another reason I didn't blog the last couple of days. One person who read my blog said he liked my blog because I wrote about interesting things, not just what I had for breakfast. Visiting the in-laws is not grist for the blogging mill. Generally not much of import happens. We get caught up on what mundane events have occurred in our lives since our last visit or telephone update. I did manage to catch the "Deadliest Catch" marathon on Discovery. Those crab fishermen are nuts. Backbreaking, dangerous work, the money may be good but your wouldn't catch me out there. I also watched the last season of the Sopranos and got caught up on Dirt! This was a TVcentric four day vacation.

Both the to and fro trip were slower than expected due to big traffic problems, on the way down one lane of the 401 was closed at Brockville producing a ten kilometre backup. We took a detour through Brockville to avoid the traffic, I don't know if it was any faster in the end than crawling down the highway. When I stopped at Zellers to pick up some radiator antifreeze and some chips for the boys I saw pop from the Pop Shoppe. I didn't know the Pop Shoppe was still in business. This will have no meaning to anyone who didn't live in Southern Ontario in the late 70's when the Pop Shoppe was everywhere. The radiator antifreeze was bought as a precaution because the car temperature gauge shot up precipitously when we slowed down for the traffic jam. I'd never seen it do that before and was worried that we had a coolant leak as a side effect from a recent trip to the repair shop to attempt and repair our anemic car heater. They flush the cooling system and it's better for a while. I expect that a new heater core is in the cards.

We were making great time on the way home until I saw the overhead sign with the message that the 401 express lanes were closed at McCowan. Traffic ground to a halt, we got off at Kennedy and took an extra 45 minutes to make it home.

Enough for now, my legs are getting sore from sitting crosslegged on the floor to type.

Even though I am posting this on the 28th it's really the 27th since I haven't went to bed yet. This will be a short entry since I am writing it on the crackberry.

Why do people insist on driving beside another car in the left lane when they are not overtaking? Doing this when there are only two lanes is very inconsiderate and may even be dangerous as cars begin to pile behind the slowpokes. Enough said, fingers are starting to cramp.

I am prepared to brave the computer vagaries of Yahoo 360 yet again. Back from my sister's full of turkey and white wine. Watching the Sopranos, new episodes of which CTV has decided to burn off over Christmas.

I went over to the office last night to reset the router from hell which hung again and decided to take my camera along. The trip was twice as long as expected due to the detours to take Christmas light pictures. Vaughan has an extensive display on Weston Rd. between Major MacKenzie and Rutherford Rd. A sample picture is included below, the rest can be seen on my Flickr photostream. Click on the picture to go there.

Maybe it will be third time lucky. Man, Yahoo 360 is sure being wonky today. This is my third attempt at posting this entry. Stupidly I didn't copy the text before posting the last entry and it along with my first attempt was swallowed up by the big, bad Yahoo 360 machine. Maybe third time lucky but this time I'll copy the text before I hit the post button. It's a good thing I'm all mellowed out by the Christmas music and snacks we had earlier. This has been a relatively relaxed, quiet Christmas day for us. We are having roast beef and scalloped potatoes for dinner. Tomorrow we get together with my brothers and sisters for a big turkey dinner then on Saturday we do it all again with my wife's family. The boys are downstairs playing with their new Wii game, my wife is sitting at the kitchen table factoring equations for fun and I'm typing this for the third time.

Last night I went over to the church late in the evening to drop off some alter linen's we had forgotten earlier when we went over for the Candlelight service at 7. It was a very nice and well designed service with lots of Christmas carols to sing. My sister brought her grandson with her and he was quite excited by all the lights. We got there early enough that we didn't end up sitting in the very back overflow area which is horrendous. A few years ago we got to the service late and ended up sitting there and it almost made me want to give up on the Christmas Eve service. Nothing like. that happened last night, our organist even brought her harp and played it for a few of the songs.


When I went to drop off the linens I took my camera because I had seen a house with a particularly nice light display earlier in the night. I also saw another tree that was nice so I took a picture of it too. I've used those two pictures to illustrate this entry. I just posted this entry, came back to edit it and fix the spelling and it was blank. What a rollercoaster ride Yahoo 360 has me on today.

I got my hopes up when I heard that iTunes Canada had finally had some TV shows. Unfortunately all we get are some homegrown shows and a few shows from Comedy Network. They still haven't figured out a licensing scheme for the U.S. shows that dominate our programming.