This Post Will Get Written Later

I'll stop whining soon, promise!

So I was recently approached by a friend of mine who wanted to enlist my aid for a project that he is planning. I'm not sure how much I should say about it, but I will tell you that my job will involve photography. Etarran suggested that I should probably get some practice in with my digital camera (which I use rather sporadically at best, even though I enjoy doing so). I was at a loss for things in my house that I could take cool pictures of, so I figured I'd go out walking this week or next and find something inspiring. Then, I woke up this morning, and:

That shot is maybe a little blurry, but to get this exposure I had to hold the camera steady with my hands (no tripod) and use the *Bulb* setting (keeps the shutter open as long as you hold the button down). This was about a 1 second exposure, if memory serves, so I'm pretty happy that I could hold a camera even that steady.

This one I like also.

So this is a good start, only the project is going to require night photography. Low lighting conditions are my bane, having only the little integrated flash that comes with my camera, and no fancy lighting equipment, etc. Still, I'm pretty excited for this, and I will definitely provide linkage when it gets underway.

On another note, I start school monday. This year it's College (more on this in a second), which now makes a pattern of spending a year in one institution and then disappearing without a trace. I could be happier about it, considering that it's more or less the only choice I have - unless I like the idea of subsisting on minimum wage for the rest of my natural existence. In a year's time Dalhousie will be willing to let me resume my studies, but given that I'll be committed to an 85-week continuous program with only a token break over the winter holidays, It will likely be more along the lines of two years before I'll consider going back. Even then, I'm beginning to wonder if I will. I've always liked to believe that I'm the kind of person who values education for education's sake. A smart person, and smart people go to university and do well (that's what we are told). For a time, I even imagined that I might pursue a PhD. And it came to me when I was examining my motivations that what I wanted was letters attached to my name, a milestone, something I could point to and be proud of. I don't think I really considered the investment of time and effort that it would require, only the prestige it would bring thereafter. I suppose I can live without prestige (seems to be the way things are panning out so far), but what I'm doing right now is gearing up to learn how to be a sysadmin, more or less. I love computers, I should love that sort of job. That's the goal, to do what you love. All things considered it's not a job that's unintellectual; it's mostly problem-solving, after all. I think I could be good at it. But then, I could be good at anything, if I wanted to be. And the thing is, I think I'd like to make more of a difference in people's lives than I could possibly do being the guy who makes everything better again when the computer demons come calling. I think I'd also like certification that qualifies me for more than just one kind of job, something that tells people that I'm capable, adaptable, intelligent. Sure I can project these qualities in person, but I may only get to be seen in person if I have the right letters attached to my name. And so the necessary conclusion is that I should go back to university and tack myself some letters onto this here name of mine.

And that's a little depressing, because I'll likely have to start from scratch. It's intriguing because I could have a chance to do a first year properly, meet people and make friends of my own accord. Weird because by the time I stop getting an education I will be most of the way to 30. That's terrifying to a guy who has only just turned 20, because I've already lived the life of a student for 2 years, and I don't know if it's something I want to keep doing for next to a decade. I think I'd like real life to start at some point. And that's option two, isn't it? Get qualifications, whatever they are, then get paid enough money that I can afford to quit working and backpack a continent or two. Meet someone, settle down (or go nomadic together). These things start looking pretty important when you can see 30 looming at you from 10 years down the road!

So that's my state of mind in the here and now, a little bit to be hopeful about and plenty to worry over. I promise at some point soon to return to my more usual punditry, which mostly subsided because I don't have my parents' newspapers and New Scientist to keep me up to date at the breakfast table. This year I think I'll try to find money for some subscriptions...


PS. I'm playing a tonne of Assassin's Creed and listening to the new Imogen Heap album, so maybe there will be some review-like substance available soon.

Possible Anticlimax

A new, and rather overdue link on the sidebar comes with this update.

The very real possibility of being marooned for several days with the ghost of relationships past has a way of dampening one's enthusiasm. The option of taking some alternate transportation out of the city, though? That's something. Turns out that Via rail trains stop in Riviere-du-Loup at sometime around midnight, except on tuesdays. Guess which day of the week it was. The station is open for something like an hour and a half in the middle of the night when the trains do run, and it's housed in a brick building that looks like it's recieved more attention from vandals than passengers. I don't have a picture of it, I don't think. You're not missing much. The bus station is inside a Petro Canada at another edge of town, and the express bus to Halifax leaves at 4AM. Actually rather boring.

 

Some of the walls about town had been enhanced with these murals. Not so boring.

Our first stop was the...I want to say "beach", but the reality is more along the lines of "rock". The coast of the St. Lawrence, at any rate. The road to the coast intersects with the highway(?) to Cacouna, and at that intersection stands a familiar ice cream store. I didn't take a picture of that, either. I intended to, and caption it something like "I'm in ur cottage town, invadin' ur memories", but then:

Mom: "Actually, it sounds like you aren't invading her memories, and that's your problem"

Me (despondently): "Yeah. Guess it is"

And so that notion was abandoned.

See? Rocks. Pretty rocks, though.

A few minutes later, and there was some brief respite from dark thoughts, in the form of a weird playground structure. Check out the whirly pole thing!

 

I'm still not quite sure what you're *actually* supposed to do with it, especially considering that if you monkey bar your way across to the top of the thing to use it like a helical fireman's pole (and I did), it isn't (as far as I can tell) supposed to be accessible that way. Didn't stop me, of course. 

Wheeeee!

The park seemed to end not far past this metal curiousity, and the presence of homes on the waterfront coupled with an ignorance of Quebec property law discouraged us from continuing along the river. We did stop to look at cottages for sale ("Seven hours? too far!"/ "But they *are* halfway between Ottawa and Halifax so we could meet up during the year!"), and also this really nice garden:

And shortly thereafter, was this:

 

 The usual ensuing conversation, only on our side in very rusty French. I was translating in my head at the time, so I don't remember the phrasing perfectly. They asked us our dog's name, and we replied easily enough. What was said back to us didn't quite parse, and after a beat came "parlez vous anglais?", and the conversation changed languages. Their response was that their dog's name was "Ruby" as well, but they were wondering how we spelled it. Theirs turned out to be R-U-B-I-S, incidentally. They asked us where we were from. Turns out they were from Ottawa as well, although they had moved to Aylmer (I think, my recollection is a little spotty) some years ago. I think they may have mentioned living in Orleans, but that could be my memory playing tricks on me after the fact. They were there because the area was special to them, but for what reason I cannot remember. Our car had broken down, and we might not have stopped there at all. She (not pictured), observed that this was indeed quite the coincidence, and that we were none of us yet privy to the meaning behind it. I wished again that there might actually be some. We parted ways, and we walked back to the car. We met up with them again in the parking lot. She said again that this meant something, but we knew not yet what. 

If it did mean anything, I'm still none the wiser. I can tell you, though, that our stop in Riviere-du-Loup did mean something for sure: another waterfall:

That's it for coincidence, but I have *many* more photos, so don't miss Part III

May This Be Love

If there is one aspect of rational scepticism that I can be said to dislike, it is that I can't really believe that coincidences are fate. Certainly, I do find it preferable on the whole to think that my future is unwritten, that I'm not simply going through the motions of a destiny that has been fixed since the very beginnings of time. From time to time, however, events will occur that I imagine would make much more sense if there was such a force as fate at work in the universe. Sometimes small things; running into old friends you hadn't expected to see again, a second-grade test score which doesn't earn you a seventh-grade transfer to a different school which, in turn, leads to you hanging out with people who influence your choice of high school leading to a tenth-grade dream girl. I accept such events as random chance, just the one branch of possibilities I happened to experience instead of all the others. I've just been watching enough Heroes to make me wistful, I suppose. The particular coincidence which provided the creative spark for this post, well, it's part of a bigger story*.

I would love to start at the beginning, but should I try to isolate it I fear I would wind up starting this story with the genetic material which dictated the very chemistry of my brain. But then, ADHD being still poorly understood as I hear it, maybe the genes are just a part of some greater set of causes. At any rate, I would not be starting in a useful place, so let us skip a few chapters to the tenth grade dream girl. The chain of events from this point onward is somewhat more relevant. There's a three-year long relationship which she moves on from and I don't, for whatever reason. There's a friend who believed that my life in Ottawa had thereafter become stagnant, and so invited me to live with him in Halifax. At this point the ADHD – which I have been unsuccessfully attempting to deal with sans medication for several years now – comes right 'round and bites me in the ass. I have, therefore, been - how shall I say this? - “persuaded” to spend this year reflecting on my personal and academic ambitions in lieu of pursuing my previous course of study. It seems, so far, that my ambitions seems to revolve a great deal around the three-tube CRT projector in our living room in Halifax. Not much of a life, but I've seen some good movies. Art criticism, then? I imagine that's a hard market to break into.

But I'm getting ahead of myself.

When I made it plain that my ambitions did not include spending a year in Ottawa living some two blocks away from the walking emotional torture rack I used to call my girlfriend, the next step was to ensure some sort of income for myself in Halifax. Gotta pay the bills, after all, and as “technically not a student” a number of previous avenues for the acquisition of wealth have become inaccessable. My parents considered putting me on a plane, but eventually decided to drive down in their newly- purchased 1982 Volkswagen Westfalia (camper type). Some of the prettier stops along the way I captured on film. Turns out that means mostly waterfalls. To wit:

 

These falls are just outside Quebec city. There is also a pedestrian bridge over the river, further down:

And the crossing (very wobbly, though you'll not see it in the picture):

 

Next, the view from the bridge looking away from the falls:

 

  

 Continuing on the other side, there are bike trails which enter a forest. Therein can be found the following pond:

And, finally, there was this little man-made rock formation (lower middle, to the right) which was too darling not to photograph:

Part one of my much-vaunted coincidence occurs maybe two hours after these photos were taken. Two hours east of Quebec city in another town along la Fleuve Saint-Laurent, as they call it in those parts. This town:

Of course, we didn't actually arrive in Riviere-du-Loup proper until the next morning. Our van broke down on the highway as I was driving. We were maybe 40km outside of town. I had been driving a little fast that day, so at that time it seemed possible that 7 hours at what might have been 110km/h had simply been too much for the old girl. I say “what might have been” because at some point during its long history, our VW's speedometer had become calibrated to a system that was neither metric nor imperial. My father and I used mileposts and counting to discern our speed, and it turned out that what the VW said was 70mph was actually about 90kph (some 57mph, if you want apples-to-apples). Of course, it took us a while to get the counting right, so for a while we thought 80mph might be 90kph, that sort of thing. I affectionately dubbed the big numbers which had used to denote speed in mph “Intergalactic Units”. At any rate, the engine did not want to start again. One CAA towtruck later, and we were parked beside a 24-hour garage (sort of? Their towtruck service was round-the-clock perhaps, but their mechanics were not), worrying that the van would never start again. We cooked dinner on the propane stove (this is why you buy a Westfalia, people!), and then slept the night, hoping against hope that it might just be that the fuel filter had clogged. The next morning:

DOG! (^_^)

Riviere-du-Loup sits very near the teeny-tiny town of Cacouna. Shouldn't mean much to me. Shouldn't mean anything to me at all, except it does - because it mattered to her. The next day, with there being no sense waiting around in a place where the closest thing to civilization is an Irving Big Stop, we rented a car and headed into town. It was like walking with a ghost. It's one thing to avoid the sort of stimuli that remind you unpleasantly of an old flame, but when it's a place, well, there's really no escaping it. Of all the places we could have broken down, it was there. Times like those, you really wish it all meant something in the grand scheme of things, like you were meant to break down there and confront the demons of a failed relationship. But no such luck.

Stay tuned for Part II!

Pure Aluminum Sex

So there is no new computer as of yet, but when the day comes, I have a luscious new Lian-Li PC-v1000 to house it in. In the meantime, my Athlon 64 3000+ is in residence. For a case with 2 120mm fans preloaded, plus an 80mm power supply fan, this thing is just pleasantly humming along beside me at the moment. Upstairs, a new ASRock motherboard gives life (and crappy integrated graphics) to our old Athlon XP 1700+. The upshot is that said integrated graphics have decent Linux GL drivers, so OpenGL games will run under WINE. Not well, but they will run. Glee!

(For those of you who hate the performance ratings, the 3000+ is 2.0GHz, with 512K L2 cache, and the 1700+ is 1.47GHz with 256K L2 cache.)

I will spare you paragraphs of praise for this wondrous new case of mine, and go straight to pictures. Due to being unable to find the USB cable for the digital camera, I had to improvise and use my TV tuner to capture from the camera's analog video cable. I apologize for the lower quality of the pics, as a result of this.

The Case Itself:

Lookin' sharp with the Very Fine Hat:

A boy and his dog case:

The case alone is quite light

The Lian-Li in it's n47ur4l h4b1747:

Not to forget a bonus pic from a while ago:

That's all for tonight. Political content and some Sci-Fi writing to come later on, time permitting. My dialogue needs major overhauls, but progress is happening.

Rabbits from the Magickal Hat!

Sign of the Apocalypse?

I found something that is both popular, and entertaining...what the hell? I mean, these things happen (Star Wars; The Killers; to a lesser extent, the new Battlestar Galactica...), but it is usually a freak of good marketing acumen, and source material that is widely appreciable, yet possessed of great artistic integrity. I suppose Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a prime example. If anyone says 'Friends', I will beat them down. Other than these diamond-rare exceptions, most quality hides in cult classics, such as Firefly, and Farscape - two of the best shows on TV. More successful shows like Stargate SG1 will never quite reach the same level...which is the usual trade -off. Plot arcs discourage casual viewership. Try tackling Charlie Jade without a sense of episode order (as I have done...why haven't I googled an episode guide? huh. oops), and you will see what I mean. I find it amusing that SG1 has nabbed actors from both Farscape and Firefly...Hint: it still won't make you as good as either!

Oh, right....on to what I found. Again, I owe S.M.O. for this one. I have talked to her a lot lately, as she is one of those people I can and will talk to for hours, especially if there is work I am trying to avoid. I think everyone needs such people...people to drink coffee with, share dreams with, people who won't laugh at you for what you think, only make you think harder. I love you people. I hope I appreciate you guys enough that you know who you are.

What's that I hear? "Get on with it"? Ah, yes:

Here is what I found

I may have had just a smidgen too much sugar today, you know...

oh, and read the stuff marked as either "classic" or "controversial" in the sidebars, as the day-to-day stuff is not half as good.

Moving along...

Pokémon Snap...well, not really.

In light of Priestshinegami linking to me with the words "the hat, THE HAT", I feel inclined to share pictures of me and my Very Fine Hat (VFH), for those not fortunate enough to know me personally (ego much? :P). Well, I got my hands on our sweet digital SLR camera, and proceeded to take a great many pictures. Off the bat, I will tell you that these photos occasionally lie...I have not shown the messes that surround some of the stuff. They're not as bad as the one in my room, but they are there, nonetheless. My quasi photo safari:

Can I get a "HELLZ YEAH!!!!"...?

'Nuff said. The Kibosh has been positively slammed on Harper, and especially those who voted Conservative to appease their hateful homophobic senses. I am practically jubilant now, because had things gone the other way, no Canadian could claim that this is the best place in the world to live. Not a one of us. It has been so many years since we tried to leave the racism and discrimination that marred much of our history...to think that we almost went back upon our progress is a troubling thought. I have made my views on same-sex couples' rights quite clear in the past, so I don't think I need to say more. Well, except:

In your faces, Stephen Harper, Pope Benedict, and David Warren! Now crawl back into the spawning pits of hate from whence you came!

Finale

I needed a nice blanket title for my end-of-post thoughts...the blog is not going to be over anytime soon, fear not.

The Daydream Believer is now angry at Gold for certain comments made by the latter. Her posts (DB) are intentionally cryptic in nature, so I apologize if anyone finds only confusion in attempting to understand the nature of this altercation. I'd rather not put this bad blood through the centrifuge, as it were...but I will make my mind plain before you, as I have some observations:

I know both Gold, and DB to be kind and honest people, prince(sse)s among men/women, no hyperbole. They can both be...distanced, and at the same time be very warm people, paradoxically. Gold...I think he sought out others that understood, people who would accept the distance. I'm not sure about DB, but I know that Gold is wrong to say she does not answer as much as she asks. I have talked with her at length on occasion...she does not lack stories to tell, that is for certain. To his credit, Gold did post on his blog that he allowed himself to read another person, and that it had brought him trouble in the past. The question posed by my mind was "Is it better to speak your mind, and give someone an answer they will not like, or to hold your tongue?" After some consideration, I think it was kinder of Gold to tell DB what he believed she would not want to hear....but needed to. On the other hand, being the age we are, we may ask the sort of questions DB asked, because we need reassurance that we will not reach our darker potential. Being told that one hasn't changed in 4 years is hardly a confidence builder when one wishes to forge a new identity, a separate identity from times past.

DB, you are perhaps a little distant, but that needn't be so, not if you do not wish it to be. Trust and closeness are not easy things to form at the best of times, of course...I trust a number of people, but then I have known most of those people for many years now (ie. since third grade). For what it's worth, I trust you.

Gold, I think you should not let people's reactions stop you from speaking your mind. So long as they know that you mean to help them confront that which they are afraid to admit to themselves.

Coming Next Week:

Why the French colloquialism for "Orgasm" is, in fact, the basis for an excellent theory on the meaning of life. No, I am not on drugs. Yes, I am as scared as you are.

(23:27:22) [name] said: (Loud) everything just went horribly horribly wrong

a real IM. It seems there is a drama-storm headed this way. Take cover, people.