Wayne D's Blog

A warm breeze is blowing through the window as I sit here enjoying the first nice day of this year. My hands are stained with oil from the boy's bicycles. We dug them out, tuned them up and off they went riding today. The cushion for the porch swing is installed, the chairs are down from the garage loft along with the patio umbrella and we ate outside on the deck for the first time this year. Its been a long winter but I'm pretty sure we have seen the last of the snow for the year. When I retire I'm moving someplace without winter, not tropical necessarily, just someplace where I don't have to shovel snow.

I mentioned my infatuation with National Geographic's video podcasts and how I had subscribed through the website. I guess I'm used to instant response because I was worried when I didn't receive an immediate confirmation of my subscription. I worried all for nought, National G confirmed my subscription on the 13th which was about 2 weeks after I went to their website.

In the past I have opined on how social networking was a fad and didn't hold much interest for me. One of the younger women in my office talked me into joining Facebook even though I didn't think it would be any good for an old guy like me. Late last week one of the RHHS class of '80 alumni looked me up on Facebook and sent me an email. It was nice to hear from her and I realised that I have lost touch with all of my high school and university friends. Today I joined the alumni group for my high school and came across a message about my old music teacher Bud Hill. He was quite a character and a great teacher. He was a fan of whole wheat bread before it was fashionable to eat fibre and can take partial credit for me preferring whole wheat bread. Sites like Facebook make it easier to stay in touch with the people you know and remain connected. I originally thought Facebook was only for kids and I was wrong.

I picked up my new glasses today. I decided a needed new glasses because the ones I was wearing were a pair of safety glasses that ATS bought me a 4 or 5 years ago. They were OK but I think my head must be getting fat because they felt like they were squeezing my temples and they were pretty big and clunky. After I had my eye test I went to Lenscrafters and was overwhelmed with the selection. The sales staff left me to flounder on my own, maybe I should have called them over to help but after looking around the store for 10 or 15 minutes I expected them to check in with me. I'm getting crotchety on my old age and have a fairly short attention span, descended into despair and went home. I went cruising on the Internet and found a new company called Great Glasses who offer a 3 for 1 deal. I didn't want 3 pairs so they gave me a discounted price on 1 pair. They got just the right balance of leaving me alone to look and helping guide me in my selection. Mumtaz was very patient with me and put the pair I liked in a box and took my number when I told her I wanted to show them to my wife to get her opinion. The problem with picking out glasses is that when I take off my glasses to try on a new pair my vision isn't really good enough to see what I look like in the mirror. That was Saturday. Just as my wife and I were getting ready to go look at them my sister called up and wanted to come by for a visit. Monday night we were tied up so we didn't make it in that day. Tuesday Mumtaz called and left a message asking if I was still interested. Wednesday night we made it in and even though Mumtaz wasn't there we were treated very well by the staff who were working. When I picked up my glasses they gave me five gift packs of a lens cleaner along with a bottle of cleaning solution to give to my friends. If you need new glasses you should check out Great Glasses. If you do be sure to mention my name, if I refer ten people I get a free pair of glasses. Please note that even I didn't get a referral bonus I'd still recommend them.

Don't you hate it when companies change things and try to convince you the new thing is better than the old? Rogers used to have perfectly serviceable online billing and payment system. Recently they sent me an email trumpeting all the great new features of their online billing system including: the ability to see the last 18 months of your bills, view your current account balance, real time payment processing and simplified navigation. The feature they took away was the ability to schedule payments. That was the feature I liked best and used every month! It was especially useful because Rogers bills in advance, the bill you receive this month isn't due for a month. Sigh. I guess they wanted to get more late payment fees out of their customers because since they improved the system I consistently forget to pay my bill in time.

I really liked Heroes. What is the point of a network pulling a high rated show from their schedule for an extended period of time? Are they hoping that I'll find something else to watch instead of their show? I they hoping to upset the people who watch the show that they fill the time with when the main show comes back and pushes the show they were watching into a new time slot? Sigh.

I updated to Centos 5 at work today. Well actually I started the update and went home before it was finished. Stay tuned to find out how long it is before I get my system back to normal.

Tuesday night is again blog night. I arose at 5 a.m. Sunday morning to attend the CBC's Easter Sunrise Pascha Celebration. It's amazing how fast you can get downtown at 5:30 a.m. on a Sunday morning. The concert was great, the demographic skewed a little older than last year when the concert was Gospel focused. I sat between two older couples who were CBC Radio 2 listeners and expressed their displeasure with the changes that radio 2 has undergone recently. In an attempt to attract more younger listeners CBC the amount of classical music has been reduced, only time will tell if they are successful. the CBC blog has some comments about the evening changes. My question would be, why try to attract a demographics that is courted by most of the commercial stations in town? More concert pictures are available on my Flickr photostream

Enough CBC bashing for now, time for some audience bashing. Bash #1: If you don't know how to shoot with available light, leave your camera at home. There was one old guy who stood in the centre aisle with an SLR with a monster flash for 5 minutes or so blasting away. The people who couldn't see the concert because your were standing in their way were annoyed. The mirror clunk is annoying enough but there was enough natural light in the CBC atrium to shoot. Turn off you flash and see how much better your pictures look. Bash #2: If your digital camera makes a fake SLR noise when you take a picture figure out how to turn it off or leave it at home, I'm trying to listen to a concert and your camera noises take me out of the moment. I have a question for you brass players out there. One of the trumpet players looks like she split her lip at the concert, she was trying to stem the bleeding with a tissue but was ultimately unsuccessful. In my years with the Argonotes I've never seen this happen but I don't pay much attention to the brass.

What the heck is going on at IMDB? They reworked things and completely screwed it up. For example the entry for Trading Places the 1983 movie with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd doesn't mention either Eddie Murphy or Jamie Lee Curtis on the cast list shown on the movie's page. I don't know how they ordered the cast list, there seems to be no apparent order. Maybe it's time for someone to launch a new IMDB like IMDB used to be, sane and helpful.

I'm so excited, I've got my first non-work related Facebook friend. Granted she is my niece but she added me first so I don't feel like a pity friend. I'm not going to post my Facebook id here because I only want people on my Facebook who actually know me, I'm not a friend whore. If you are on Facebook and want me to be your friend look me up. I'm not going to grovel and beg you to add me, I don't want pity friends.

Google is so cool sometimes. I managed to rank 23rd for the phrase "up skirting pictures", it came from the phrase ... He ends up skirting the edges of legality and he lives in the U.S. where you ... and my references to the word pictures in my posts. Now I think I understand where my hits are coming from, annoyed webizens looking for naughty snaps.

Having a blog is liking having a hungry monster. If you don't feed it dies. It seems that more than I like recently I have had great ideas for blog topics that I forget to write down and by the time I get to the keyboard I have lost them. I am experimenting with making notes but I tend to have these ideas when I am in the car or in the bed at night and I'm too crotchety to keep a notepad and a pen around all the time. That is way too obsessive for my tastes.

Time for some more CBC bashing. Now I love the CBC but sometimes they can be so irritating. Last year I went to their Easter Sunday Gospel choral concert. They plugged it like mad and had a PDF poster for it on their website. They are doing another concert Sunday morning, April 8th at 7 a.m. in the Barbara Frum atrium of the CBC building in Toronto but you wouldn't know it from their website. The main Choral Concert website is still plugging a concert from last December. On of the reasons CBC said they were messing with their radio schedule was because they wanted to attract a younger demographic. Doesn't the CBC know that anyone under the age of 40 is most likely to use the web as an information source? I probably should have blogged about this earlier in the week so the search engines would have had time to index it so people searching the web would have had a ghost of chance to find the information.

I saw Mika perform the other night on Jay Leno. The music is poppy and frothy but it grows on you. This afternoon I watched Mika live in concert from London on msn.com. By the third or fourth song I was hooked, I will be buying his CD. One strange thing I noticed is that there are two version of Mika's album on iTunes with slightly different track lists.

This months emusic downloads included about half of Wanda Sykes Sick and Tired, some John Williams movie music, My Sweet Lord sung by John Gary Williams, a Weird Al Yankovic track, a few of the shorter Monique Marvez tracks I left behind last time because they were less than a minute long and some other stuff I have forgotten about.

I did get a clue on why my traffic might have spiked, due to unusual confluence of posting I was the 10th on Google when searching for Kristin Chenoweth topless. I expect all the visitors who came to my website left disappointed.

I made a terrible error in judgement today. I had put my battery charger on the "car in the driveway I'm trying to get rid of" because it had sat for a few months and the battery didn't have enough charge to start it. This morning when I went to work I decided to unplug the charger because I didn't want to overcharge the battery. My big mistake was leaving the charger under the hood with the hood closed almost all the way but held open a few inches by the battery charger body. Someone walking by my house today decided that they needed a battery charger more than I did because it was gone when I came home from work. I didn't make a conscious decision to leave such an enticing piece of equipment unprotected but I might as well have wrapped it up in a red bow with a big "STEAL ME" sign on it.

When I first joined emusic.com, the legal MP3 download site I asked one of my friends whether he was interested in becoming a member. It wasn't a completely altruistic gesture, if he signed up I would get 50 additional downloads. He checked emusic out and was ready to sign up until an artist who's music he was particularly interested in downloading disappeared from the emusic catalogue. A few month a go I downloaded an album from the Pipettes called "We are the Pipettes", it's no longer available. A friend told me about Serena Ryder, her music weren't available to Canadian emusic members. Hmmmm

I have become addicted to the National Geographic video short podcast, so much so that I decided to subscribe to the magazine. You can go to the National Geographic site and watch their podcasts even if you don't have a iPod. They have a deal on now, $20 a year for Canadians. I went to their website, filled out the subscription form and waited for a confirmation email. Nothing arrived even though the form said I should get one. I checked my spam folder in vain. I guess I'll give their customer service number a call and see what's going on.