Wayne D's Blog

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.

As I was barbecuing the Christmas Eve burgers tonight I realized a few things.

• Lighting the barbecue is harder in the winter time
• I need a new burner assembly for my barbecue, and a new grill to set the lava rocks on, and new lava rocks. Hmm, maybe it's time to buy a new barbecue
• The compact fluorescent floodlight bulb I bought to replace the old floodlight bulb is brighter than I thought, I regret my disappointment over it's performance

e didn't buy the wine yesterday so I ended up going to the liquor store to stock up on Christmas wine.

Last night I went on my second annual Christmas light walk around in my neighbourhood. You can see the results of my efforts in my Flickr set of Christmas Lights 2007. I did last year's walk in the rain, this year it was cold and windy, I had to hold the tripod down to keep it from tipping over in the wind.

Right now I'm watching It's a Wonderful Life in glorious black and white and drinking wine. George Bailey in on the bridge ready to jump. Clarence just saved George.

I posted my previous blog entry before spell checking it to prevent it from disappearing as has happened with Yahoo 360 in the past. The strange thing is that when I clicked the edit button it brought up a blank article. I was worried that Yahoo had yet again lost a blog posting because when I went to my blog the posting wasn't there. But then it reappeared. I just tried again and this time I can edit it. I think that Yahoo 360 may be having trouble propogating posting across their server farm, I refreshed the article disappeared, I refreshed again it reappeared. After posting it this article disappeared too.

I'm waiting to hear from my wife if Longo's in Vaughan sells wine because she is going there to buy cheese anyways. If it does I am freed from my wine buying duties.

I don't feel bad about missing yesterday now, two postings in one day makes up for the missing one yesterday.

Perhaps not daily but frequently is what my blog postings will be during the holidays.

My kids get Hunt's Pudding packs for their lunches and for the last while each for pack has included a card for a free track at Puretracks.com. If you like pudding it's a good deal, Puretracks offers wma format music but also has a fairly extensive listing of mp3's available if you have an iPod which doesn't support wma's. You can use the cards without even providing your credit card information. When I went there to use my free track credits I stumbled across their Christmas sale page. Twenty-nine albums on sale for $6.99, ten of them available as mp3's included KT Tunstall's Drastic Fantastic and Serena Ryder's If Memory Serves you Well. Considering single tracks sell from $0.99 to $1.29, $6.99 is a great price. Of course my single track cards couldn't be used to buy albums so I ended up buying Drastic Fantastic. I did redeem one of my free track cards though. I think that I have been sucked in by successful marketing. I'm still maintaining my emusic.com membership but I will drop by Puretracks.com occasionally to see what's on sale since emusic.com tends to be heavily weighted to independent artists. I just hope more music labels go the mp3 route, I would have bought Mika's Life in Cartoon Motion which is also on sale but it is wma format only.

I've been fooling around with Daz Studio, a Poser clone. The hook with Daz Studio is that the program and basic content is free, Daz hopes that you will come back and buy additional models and props from them. If you want to try out simple 3D modelling with characters then you can give it a try. Unfortunately it only runs on Windows.

Time to go buy some wine for Christmas dinner.

I've been too busy to blog since the Grey Cup, well maybe not too busy but too tired and lazy. Its been very busy at work and I have been snuffling with a cold that doesn't get either better or worse for a couple of weeks. Why the humbug? December has been an expensive month this year. Last weekend our dryer broke down. Our dryer repair guy says it's too old to get repaired. Tomorrow our dog gets an absessed tooth removed which was discovered at her annual check up. Four hundred for the dryer and four hundred and fifty for the tooth are unexpected expenses in what is already an expensive month. Sigh. During my Christmas break I am going to try and blog everyday. Wish me luck.