Joel’s Big Blog

Well, I did eventually take the bike out. Ronya and I used our bikes to get around yesterday. As you can tell I didn’t die. Not sure how effective my hand signals were but I was reassured by having Ronya and her working brake lights behind me.

I still want to fix my own brake lights but I think I’m going to need a voltage meter or something to figure out where the disconnect is. Would be nice if it were just a simple loose wire or something.

Friday was Roarke’s birthday and the original plan was to take him and his brothers to see Monsters vs. Aliens but alas our vouchers were not valid for the show while it’s still in Imax 3D. Instead we rented a couple of videos and brought everyone to our place. We played some rock band and the boys played some Halo while the adults played some Zombies upstairs. I believe it was Ronya who finally won through the simple expedience of having the last zombie move off the helicopter landing pad. We had such helpful zombies they actually chose to move out of our way to facilitate our escape. Well, Ronya’s escape really.

Saturday I got four new tires for the Yaris. Some of the radial wire was starting to show through the front tires and the mechanic pointed out how the rear tires weren’t far off themselves, so we now have four brand new all season radials. That should last us through the next winter, I hope.

Saturday afternoon the girls put their heads togethe and made soap, which is now curing on our countertops, while I napped and observed and occasionally gave a judicial sniff to the mixture. The essential oils didn’t seem to be adding much of a scent to the soap so they wound up using a lot of it. Now we’re hoping it’s not the kind of situation where the scent intensifies over time as the soap cures. Time will tell, I suppose.

I spent Saturday evening visiting my old college friends Gordon and Leslie in their home just south of Carstairs. Apparently my coming over triggered a wave of visitation and we wound up having dinner for a dozen. It was all good food, of course, and Gordon runs his own catering business. Leslie used to work at Microsoft and was able to explain at least one of the main reasons Vista is such a big pile of Suck. Basic synopsis: it’s not her fault.

Sunday Ronya and I suited up and rode off to get me measured up for yet another tuxedo, this time for an impending wedding in July. My previous tux rental back in October worked out as a major benefit as the company has my measurements on file. I just had to make sure the different style of shoes fit (my sneakers? Size 12. Dress shoes? Size 14 and a half. WTF?) and we wound up picking a different jacket simply because the first choice of jacket didn’t go up to a size 60. It was… interesting to note that many of my measurements approached twice that of the Tracy, the Best woMan.

From there we rode to John’s place for a barbecue and some more games. I have to say, an entire weekend of visiting friends and playing games definitely appeals to me.

Ronya and I took the long road home late at night, a route that wound up taking even longer as much of 84th Street NE turns out to be permanently closed. Deciding on an alternate route in the dark was a little nerve wracking for me but we managed and got home safe and sound, if a bit chilled.

And now, off to work.

motorcycle, weekend, friends, games, fun

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May 4th, 2009 | Category: Personal, Status Updates, motorcycle | Comments (2)

The motorcycle drama continues.

On the Good side: One new and inexpensive 15Amp fuse brought the Suzuki back to life. That and having it’s battery recharged meant it started without a hitch and ran… well, it ran like a very old bike, which means lots of oily smoke and rough noise. But it runs strong.

Suzuki - They just won’t die.

On the Very Good side: Loving members of my tribe banded together and bought me a new battery for my Yamaha since the old battery doesn’t appear to exist, at least as far as the batter charger is concerned. We all crossed fingers and hoped the new battery would be the solution to the bike’s dead-ness.

On the Negative side: Hooking up the new battery to the Yamaha did nothing. Zilch. Nada. It’s dead-ness remained just as dead as… some very dead thing. A doornail, I think.

On the Very Good side: Undaunted and with a deep reserve of Refusing-To-Give-Up R managed to take the ignition panel off and traced the ignition wires to the REAL fuse for ignition. Apparently the other eight or so fuses I found in the rat nest of wires all deal with a bunch of other things. What they deal with I had no idea, but I’m suspecting I might have some clues to a couple of them.

The fuse she found was on a black wire and encased in a black in-line fuse case and tucked deep between the frame and the gas tank, so it’s no surprise I never noticed it. Once pulled, though, it was the obvious point of failure. The fuse wasn’t just blown, the fuse casing was partially melted and the wire burned through part of it’s insulation. Evidently the surge was huge, but just as evidently the fuse did it’s job. The point right before the fuse was the center of the melted bits, everything after the fuse was intact and unscathed. Let us all bow our heads in a moment of respect for the poor selfless fuse who gave up it’s life so that the bike itself would live.

Bless you little fuse. *snif*

We attempted to find a similar fuse assembly at Canadian tire, but no luck. We thought we’d found a usable casing but it was actually too small for the replacement fuse. Still undaunted R took a pointy tool to the old casing, scraping all the burnt pieces away, trimmed and re-attached the wire, and managed to seat the new fuse in what remained of the old casing. A judicious cocoon of electrical tape served to seal the deal and we installed the home made fuse assembly into the bike’s hidden innards. It might sound risky to you, but trust me the rest of the wiring is just as … “special”.

Putting the whole deal together we turned the key, made sure body parts were clear of all electrical and potential moving parts, and hit the button. First off, the good news was that all the lights came back on when we turned the key. The second bit of good news was that the starter turned over quite energetically when the start button was pressed. We did bite our nails a bit, though, as it took a good pair of minutes to get the bike to actually start. The gas in the tank, it be a bit old.

So, it runs.

I tucked all the rasta-dreads wiring back into the frame as best I could and replaced the side panels to hold it all in. Imagine picking up a wad of cooked spaghetti with salad tongs and you’ll have a pretty good impression of what the whole setup looks like.

And thus we took off for our first ride of the season, a quick jaunt to the belt-line to join some friends and family for dinner at Chianti’s. And lo it worked. Well… mostly.

There are still a few hitches.

The original battery had some additional wire attached to it that connected to some lead from the display panel. The new battery has no such wire. While the bike still runs without it there’s a status indicator on the bike’s dash that I think is trying to tell me I have no battery.

Ah well, I can ignore that.

The second hitch relates to the gas tank. I think I may have jostled some other wire that connected to a gas tank sensor because the instrument panel also tells me I have no fuel, even right after I’ve filled up.

Ah well, I can live without a gas gauge.

The Suzuki doesn’t even have one. With that bike you simply reset the travel odometer when you fill up and keep in mind that you generally have 180 to 200 km worth of fuel, depending on how you drive. When the travel odometer gets to 150 km you start thinking about fueling up. Not quite as convenient as a fuel gauge but you get used to it.

Sadly, the travel odometer on the Yamaha doesn’t work.

Ah well, I thought, I’ll just mentally note what the real odometer is set at when I fill up and keep a target number in mind. That will let me know when I need to start looking for a gas station.

So, we filled up the bikes and took off down the road. I took note of the odometer reading, added 150 to it and set that as the number in my mind.

After far too short of a ride we arrived at the restaurant and found parking nearby. I thought to check the odometer to see how far we’d ridden and thus estimate how much gas I had left.

The odometer reading was exactly the same as it was at the gas station. Apparently it isn’t just the trip odometer that’s busted, the real odometer is busted too.

*sigh*

Okay, now I just have to be paranoid about filling up frequently.

After dinner R and I chose to take a very roundabout route home to get more riding time in. We ventured up into the NW before coming down Sarcee to Glenmore and eventually home. Along the way we tested out our bike radios and found them a bit… touchy. We’re definitely going to have to play around with the VOX settings so that speaking will set them off but road noise won’t. I expect it’ll be a while before we get it just right.

In the meantime R pointed out that my brake light doesn’t work when I hit the brakes. Okay, that will need to be addressed right away. The last thing I need is some sleepy driver flattening me to the pavement because he can’t tell I’m stopping.

Hopefully it’s just a bulb and not another fuse in that horrendous rats nest.

The adventure continues.

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April 21st, 2009 | Tags: motorcycle, wiring, xj1100, yamaha | Category: Humor, Personal, motorcycle | Leave a comment

Amazon Rank

amazon rank
Function: verb
Inflected Form(s): amazon ranked

1. To censor and exclude on the basis of adult content in literature (except for Playboy, Penthouse, dogfighting and graphic novels depicting incest orgies).
2. To make changes based on inconsistent applications of standards, logic and common sense.

Etymology: from 12 April 2009 removal of sales rank figures from books on Amazon.com containing sexual, erotic, romantic, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or queer content, rendering them impossible to find through basic search functions at the top of Amazon.com’s website. Titles stripped of their sales rankings include “Bastard Out of Carolina,” “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” prominent romance novels, GLBTQ fiction novels, YA books, and narratives about gay people.

Example of usage: “I tried to do a report on Lady Chatterley’s Lover for English Lit, but my teacher amazon ranked me and I got an F on grounds that it was obscene.”

Alternate usage: “My girlfriend wanted to preserve her virginity, and I was happy to respect that, then she amazon ranked and decided anal sex was okay.”

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April 14th, 2009 | Tags: Amazon, Amazon Rank, censorship, Rank | Category: Commentary, External Links, Humor | Leave a comment

I’ve always felt Sam Rockwell deserved a dramatic lead role for his own, and now it appears he has one.

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April 10th, 2009 | Tags: moon, movie, must see, sam rockwell, video | Category: External Links, Very Cool, video | Leave a comment

Listening to some very old tunes in a mistaken attempt to track down the original creator of Sarah McLachlan’s “Black”. Silly rabbit, it’s hers all the way.  For some reason I thought it was related to the Stones’ tune “Paint It, Black”.

The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again”… what an anthem of defiance. I especially love the ironic ending:

I’m finding my buttons are particularly reactive these days. I’ve been pondering this ever since I read a comment in Randy Cassingham’s “True” newsletter in which he wonders why so many atrocious columbine-esque crimes seem to happen in April. Theories abound, of course… everything from April being close to the end of the traditional North American school year and thus the lead edge to the stress ramp of finals, all the way to psychologists noting that winter’s depressive weather is enough to keep certain behavioral aberrations in check simply because the subjects find themselves too depressed to actually do anything. Spring, it seems, could be considered appropriately named because it releases peoples emotions like an over-wound mousetrap.

People don’t just snap, they launch.

Right now my mind drifts, like a lost scrap of tissue paper on the interstate, from one topic to the next. Again, just like being on some twisted narcotic, my head cold has left my brain in a contra-lucid state that seems to preclude any ability to stick with one coherent thought for more than a few sentences.

Jumping Jack Flash now brings back images of Whoopi Goldberg gettin’ jiggy. Not that that’s a bad thing, but do you think The Stones could have possibly predicted such an association when they first wrote it? Here, boys, here’s a tune that’ll make a black woman jig in a movie about how she becomes an accidental spy by chatting with some unknown guy over a banking network.

Jumping Jack Flash, the movie, predicted how the internet would chew up staff productivity. How weird is that? Must tweet it, see if I get a response.

*crickets*

Ah well, I though it was interesting at least.

I’ve now downloaded a collection of Echo & The Bunnymen just because of one song and have been listening to various tracks for the past fifteen minutes or so. Very melodious.

April 9th, 2009 | Tags: contra-lucid, random, thought | Category: Personal, Philosophical | Leave a comment

Sometimes when an applications says “Beta” in it’s title it means “Warning, will blow up, do not touch”.

I’ve been trying to find a way to update the calendar on my smart phone directly from my Google calendar without having to first update my outlook calendar before plugging my phone into my laptop. I’ve got a direct data connection, I should be able to communicate both ways without some intermediate hardware or clunky manual manipulation. This is the information age, isn’t it?

I like Google Calendar because all of the principle people in my life use it to schedule their major events and we all get to see when each of us is or isn’t available. It’s central and convenient. I want to extend that convenience to my phone. If I want to plan an evening out … okay, had to suppress a chortle there… I haven’t planned anything myself in months… but if someone wants to invite me to something I want to be able to a) find out if I am indeed available that evening and b) book that time directly through my phone if I am. Then I want that information to show up on my Google Calendar right away so other principle people in my life will have access to that info right away without having to wait until I get around to updating my laptop first.

So, to that end, I did a bit of searching and found what I thought was the perfect solution: GMobileSync. It’s designed for Windows Mobile and will synchronize your Google and phone calendars both. If you have something on your Google calendar that you don’t have on your phone, it will update your phone. If you have something on your phone that you don’t have on your Google calendar, it will update your Google calendar.

Perfect.

Except… well, it’s in Beta right now. There are some… quirks.

The first time I ran the application it updated my phone with events from my Google calendar. But it didn’t just grab *my* events, it grabbed events from every single calendar my Google account is subscribed to. So it grabbed events from friends’ calendars as well as public group calendars. Suddenly my phone was telling me I had to volunteer at some school this morning after which I’d be taking a firefighting course. It also reminded me that I was hosting a monthly meeting in Calgary, Edmonton, and Vancouver.

Okay, so… madness. Not helpful.

The application itself has no option for choosing which specific calendars you want information from so I tried changing a few settings in my Google calendar to see if I could somehow prevent the application from copying *everything* from *everybody*. Inconvenient, but I was willing to put up with a little less flexibility if I could make the two way updates work the way I wanted them to.

Well, the second attempt was more convoluted than a Marvel Comics Super Summer Special retcon plot line.

Since the appointments already on my phone had no indication of ownership beyond just being on my phone the application assumed they were ALL mine and very helpfully uploaded them all back to my Google Calendar under my own account. Then it went through and checked to see if there were any new events on the rest of my calendars. Finding a whole bunch recently added, it very promptly downloaded them back to my phone again.

Okay, so… Monster Madness. And considerably less helpful. Now my phone was bulging with hundreds and hundreds of appointments, none of them actually mine.

Some of the principle people in my life were starting to poke at me, wondering what the hell I was doing in Vernon BC this Saturday and why I hadn’t told them. And why was I getting a massage at 3 in the afternoon?

So, jaw set firmly in grinding teeth mode I set about systematically deleting every single appointment from my calendars, both Google and phone.

Automation is so very helpful, sometimes, and other times it just likes to magnify your mistakes. In this case the magnifying was set to full on burning ant mode and was bigger than the Hubble telescope.

Every time I deleted an appointment from my phone calendar it would very helpfully send out a notification to all participants that said appointment was canceled This happened whether the appointment was actually mine or not.

So today I’ve been fielding e-mails from a handful of group calendar moderators asking why their members have been receiving helpful notifications from MY Google account stating that a variety of upcoming events were being canceled

Joy… now we’re into Lovecraftian Madness with just a smidgen of public humiliation.

So, I entreat you, if you ever happen across an application called GMobileSync, DO NOT install it. At all. Ever.

And if anyone has a suggestion on how I might actually do this correctly on an HTC Touch I’d greatly appreciate the suggestion.

Now I return to writing my apology e-mails…

review, gmobilesync, htc touch, calendar, beta, software, warning

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March 26th, 2009 | Tags: beta, calendar, gmobilesync, htc touch, Review, software, warning | Category: Review | Comments (1)

Sitting here trying to create some new discs for the house stereo. I’m trying to find new stuff, music to set and change moods that we haven’t all heard a million times…

So naturally I download an entire Gary Numan retrospective.

“Down In The Park” still takes me to places I’ve never been, and probably never will see beyond my own imagination.

I had a very odd friend back in high school. Well, okay, I’ve always had a lot of odd friends. It’s funny to realize I’m generally the most normal person in my circle.

Danny was… indescribable. A bum, quite likely, yet also a fine conoiseur of alternative music before there ever was Alternative Music. Hell, he was a massive collector of alternative music before anyone ever coined the term New Wave. David Bowie at his most Ziggy was just standard background stuff for Danny’s tastes.

Danny used to be a roadie for Pat Benetar, if you cared to believe him, before he wrecked his back forever. It was hard to believe him, of course, but he did have his ear and nose on some of the weirdest stuff to ever escape the depths of New York.

He lived on welfare and worker’s comp because of his various injuries. He rented a room from a gay landlord who was constantly trying to sneak in to his bed at night. He would have loved to have moved out but the rent was the cheapest anywhere so he just kept his door shut tight and alarmed the stairs to his bedroom with a random scattering of boxes and foil wrappers that were impossible to get past without making some kind of sound.

He walked everywhere and ate the cheapest food possible. He was socially awkward to the point of eccentricity but managed to avoid the line that crossed into offensive. Being slight of frame he managed to clothe himself from whatever he could afford at the salvation army.

All in all I suspect he managed to survive on about 100 bucks a month, including rent.

The rest he spent on records and, occasionally, gaming material. His room was like a hobbit hole dug out of a strata of vinyl, cardboard and paper. There was just enough room for him to sit on the floor next to his bed and stereo so he could make mix tapes.

Living in the small town of Saskatoon (city of 150,000, sophistication of a town of 15) we’d never heard of any of the artists he collected, like Nina Hagen and many other German punk imports. He never bought the regular commercial stuff. If there were any bits he liked he’s just borrow it from the city library and tape it for himself. He reserved his hard scrounged cash for stuff you couldn’t find anywhere else.

By the time I’d heard Gary Numan’s “Cars” and gushed with boyish glee about it Danny already had a half dozen of the man’s albums. When he found out I like Gary’s single hit he mixed me a couple of tapes of his better stuff. I immediately fell in love with “Are Friends Electric?” and set about trying to find original copies for myself. I think I managed three tapes in all.

For a couple of years Murray and I gamed with Danny, gathering in Murray’s basement every weekend. We’d start sometime on Saturday afternoon and usually finished up around six in the morning. I’d spend most of Sunday just sleeping to recover in time for school.

Good times, good times.

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March 24th, 2009 | Tags: friends, gaming, good times, Melancholly, memories, past | Category: Melancholly | Leave a comment

Listening to Iio: At The End. I’ve missed sitting and listening to music on good headphones. It really does take me to another space.

D and I were having an interesting discussion the other day about what it means to be an Adult, capital “A” strongly emphasized. Being an adult, little “a”, is simply a matter of age, a purely technical specification. Over the age of 18? Technically, by this country’s legal standards, you’re an adult. You get to vote, drink ( in this province, anyway ) and make some seriously huge financial purchases entirely on your own. You’re allowed to get married and have children, not that the government has any way of preventing people under the age of 18 from having children but I digress…

An Adult, capital A, means … what? Being Responsible? Being Mature? Being… Wise? Experienced? Capable? Respectable?

The whole discussion came up from a problem I’ve battled with all my… heh… adult life: I still react to confrontation with the emotional reactions of a child. Not that I get into tantrums or anything like that, but if it’s a confrontation with someone I care about or respect then my emotional “perspective”, for lack of a better term, is that of a child. I feel like I’m “in trouble”, that I’ve done something wrong and I need to apologize for it, correct it, make amends, or at the very least feel guilty for whatever it is the argument is about.

This, as I’ve learned, is not productive. Not only does it seize me up, making it almost impossible for me to argue back or make any kind of mature assessment of my own, it also lays the responsibility of resolution at the other person’s feet. I’m waiting to be told what to do.

But I’m peeling off at a tangent again. I was talking about what it means to be an Adult.

D and I started with the realization that our society, in general terms, doesn’t have a firmly established “rite of passage” that tells us when we’ve made the transition from children to adults. In smaller cultural groupings there are such rituals, the Jewish Bar Mitzvah for example, that publicly states “now you are an Adult.” But now not only are such rituals falling into disuse, their meanings and methodologies are warping to more accurately reflect general society’s opinion on what it means to be an Adult. Sure, you can have your “passage into adulthood” ritual at the age of 14, but you’re still not going to be allowed to drive until you’re sixteen, vote until you’re eighteen, and in some regions you won’t be able to drink until you’re 19, or even 21. So your ritual may declare you an adult, but not much else in your world is going to. The conflict, I expect, results in greatly diminishing the significance of the ritual.

So have we completely lost that transition? To my mind I can’t think of any moment in my life when I felt that I was suddenly an Adult. Graduating from college didn’t do it, nor did moving out on my own. Getting married didn’t do it, nor did buying our own house. Not even the death of my mother brought the weight of Adulthood down on my shoulders. Why? Or, more accurately, Why Not?

The ritual of marriage, which Ronya and I once held as being an outdated and restrictive institution, did in fact solidify our relationship in our minds. The day after we’d complete the ceremony our thought processes made a kind of mental gear shift, like switching from second to third. Suddenly we were making plans in terms of decades to a lifetime instead of months to years. The simple ritual, as individual and warped as we made it to fit our philosophy at the time, still held enough significance that we could actually *feel* the mental shift. I’d almost swear the change was chemical.

But it still didn’t make me feel like an Adult, and a large part of me wishes for that chemical change in my brain that would convince me it was Time, something as significant as the sudden growth of body hair and dramatic change of voice that puberty brought. Something I could point at and say “there, that’s what tells me I’m an Adult now.”

Even to this day I still feel like a child, or a youth, merely playing out the part of being an Adult. I feel like I’m faking it, pretending and doing the best that I can, still waiting for someone to call me on it. And just about any time I get into a passionate argument with someone I care about, a significant part of me feels that I *am* being called on it, that it’s being pointed out to me that they can now tell that I’ve never really grown up and have simply been faking it all this time.

So who out there actually feels like an Adult? If none of my friends do, does that mean nobody does, or does it simply mean I tend to hang out with people who are similarly affected? If you *do* feel like an Adult, was there a specific time and place, a specific event or ritual, that defined the moment for you? Or did you just wake up one day and realize “Oh shit, I’m an adult”? (and I’m sure I’ve used my punctuation incorrectly on that last line but can’t for the life of me figure out which would work better)

philophical, discussion, Adult

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March 20th, 2009 | Category: Commentary, Personal, Philosophical | Leave a comment

Children’s books burn, courtesy of the federal government.

It’s hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute.

And suddenly I’m even happier to be living in Canada, where our kids grow strong with the lead in their books. I wonder how diligent they’ll be in enforcing this law?

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March 15th, 2009 | Tags: ban, books, burning, government, lead | Category: Commentary, External Links, News | Leave a comment