Wayne D's Blog

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.

When I logged into Yahoo 360 today to write this blog posting the three blogs shown below are what Yahoo offered me as interesting pages that I might want to explore on Yahoo 360. I know it's Beta but it seems that suggesting that non-English speaking pages would be interesting to me might be a bit of a stretch. I have included them below to illustrate my point and to further decrease my female movie star to other pictures ratio.

Die Gipfelstürmer: hier begibt man sich in eisige Höhen... by Die Gipfelstürmer

Blumes Blog: ♥¸.•*...♥ ♥ der alltägliche Wahnsinn einer Frau über 40 ...♥ ¸♥ .•´¸.•♥ by ♥ Blume ♥

Le méli-mélo de Charlotte: ou comment je suis partie à la découverte du monde du blog et de ses millions de possibilités by Charlotte

I finally got to sleep in this morning. The cold I have been suffering through the past week and a half has made my right knee sore and I hadn't been able to catch up on the sleep deficit I have been suffering through. This had made me grumpier than I should be as the people I work with can attest. Two weeks ago it was March break camp at Scanlon Creek. Last Saturday it was the Sportsman's Show with the Explorers. I bought a new winter sleeping bag, a canoe paddle and two cloth wrapped summer sausages. They are dry, they are pungent but they sure taste good. Before I went canoeing last year I tried to find some locally without success. None of the supermarkets around here had it and I couldn't find any at the deli's I checked. I asked the woman I bought it from and she told me the deli guy had a place at Vaughan Mills Shopping Centre so when the two sticks I bought are gone I'll know where to get a refill. I have included a picture below to make your mouth water.

Yesterday I got a haircut for the first time in two years. Well, that's not strictly true, it was my first professional haircut in two years. A little over two years ago I decided to give up the battle with my receding hairline, fore-go a comb over and just get my hair cut really short. One of the wait staff at my Tuesday night trivia hangout was a budding hair dresser and after a few false starts one night she was there, I was there and a pair of hair clippers were there. Jenn decided that cutting my hair in the bar might get someone in trouble so we trooped out back to the attached shed with a bare light bulb. Things were a bit tense when we had trouble finding a socket. With one of her friends recruited to hold a plastic bag, my drinking companions standing by watching, she took clippers in hand and gave me a good buzzing. Digital pictures were taken but they have never surfaced so you'll have to take my word for it.

After that I bought a $20 pair of clippers at Walmart and have been doing it myself since. My wife helps me do the back but I don't get her to help often enough. I ran into the hairdressing server a few weeks ago and decided it was time to have her cut my hair under more normal circumstances. She told me what hours where the salon where she works are open but I neglected to get the number. Tuesday night I stopped by on the way home from the bar to get the phone number. I think she was a bit surprised to see me when I walked in the door Friday just before closing. She hadn't connected me with the name in the appointment book but she quickly regained her composure. My hair was soon washed and I was ushered to her chair. Jenn told me that I was getting two pony tails back there as I sat in her chair showing how wise my decision to seek professional help was.

Haven't seen the trailer for Black Sheep the Movie? Go watch it right now.

Tom Merritt of Buzz Out Loud talks about now being able to buy a TV show. He ends up skirting the edges of legality and he lives in the U.S. where you can buy digital content online, unlike here in Canada.

A patent for linked lists issued last year. Huh? What have the boys in the patent office been smoking?