July 2007

Well I’m providing a link to the new Kanye West video for his new single “Can’t Tell Me Nothing”. I found the link in various places this morning but most recently through BoingBoing. This video features comedian Zach Galifianakis lip-syncing to the words and as the BoingBoing post puts it

brought director Michael Blieden down to his farm in the Carolinas and basically shot a Hype Williams video amongst the cornstalks, starring Galifianakis as Kanye. Complete with sunset-and-tractor and clogging-in-slomo shots.

It’s so good! I’m going to go watch it again.

I agree with the sentiment in this post. I doubt that it’s the same context but I have had experiences in the past where people assumed that my silence is equal to tacit agreement or approval. It’s not.

I’ve had my Blackberry for almost 6 months now and only today did I discover (by accident I might add) how to lock the device with the keyboard alone.

It’s perhaps more sad that I feel this is post-worthy.

For some reason the cost of gas dropped about 5 cents overnight. It’s at 97 cents around here and everyone seems to be acting like it’s a special sale so each gas station that I passed on the way to work this morning was packed with cars. This is the first time gas has gone down significantly in price in at least 3 months. It’s been hovering around 1.05/Litre so this downward trend is good for the pocketbook though not necessarily good for the environment.

Update: this warranted a story on CBC this afternoon.

Via Darren I watched this video called “Did You Know”. You can find it embedded below or go here to watch it.



It consolidates a lot of the ideas I have floating around in my head, especially after reading The World Is Flat. I think everyday about what kind of world Jack will grow up in and how we need to work hard to prepare him to handle problems and scenarios that we don’t even know are problems yet. This will likely be something that I struggle with the rest of my life.

Do yourself a favour though and spend 8 minutes to watch this video. You can go to the group’s site as well for more information.

Ever miss watching that memorable video Fish Heads? Well you can watch it on YouTube!



Barnes and Barnes have an interesting history.

It seems that some people who live near where I work have decided to start practicing Tai Chi. When I drove in yesterday morning there were a group of people on the sidewalk doing what looked to me like Tai Chi (I could be wrong though). I’m not sure why they don’t use the park right across the street unless it’s because of the offering of shade by the building (it’s been hot here recently). I’ve kind of wanted to try Tai Chi before. Perhaps if they continue I might give it a whirl.

I hate it when I wear a short-sleeve shirt and the sleeves of my undershirt poke out underneath. I’m not sure why this happens but it does.

It’s not a good sign of communication when you send an email with the subject line “Alive?” because you haven’t heard from someone in a while. It’s also not a good sign you haven’t received a response yet from such an obvious trolling email.

The Simpsons movie site allows you to create your own avatar in the Simpsons style. Here’s mine:

Does it look anything like me?

I’ve been using Google Docs to create these blog posts for the past couple of days. The interface is nice and a copy of the content is stored elsewhere than on the blog. It’s very easy to publish a document to your blog. You go to the publish tab and once you’ve set up the XML endpoint you just hit “Post to blog” and then it appears. I can embed HTML in the posts (see previous posts with YouTube videos) and I have fine-grained control over the presentation. I wouldn’t have thought a few years ago that an online word processor would function but this one is definitely stable, at least from my usage.

My life is definitely pretty tightly integrated with Google. From Gmail to Calendar to Reader to Analytics to Docs to (now) Feedburner and YouTube a lot of my day is spent using Google services. So far I have no problems with this as I’m very comfortable using these services. I think this will be an evolving question to answer for a lot of people over the next few years as Google’s dominance of the Internet continues.

Update: I completely forgot about the other services I use: News, Finance, Maps, Talk. Man am I ever a Google junkie.

In order to reduce the amount of surplus entertainment material that I own I’ve decided to start listing things for sale on Amazon.ca. It looks like even though I’m listed through the Canadian site it seems that my listings appear in a global fashion depending on whether I agree to ship to Canada, the US or internationally. This is good but it seems that the competition for books and music is pretty steep. It might be difficult for me to sell some of the books but it’s not really costing me anything to list and I really have to cut down on my collection. I have all of the music archived (or soon will) and most of my books are just taking up shelf space. The ones that I really want to keep I’ll keep but I think probably about 90% of the books I own I could sell. It could potentially be some extra income as well as increase the amount of storage space we have around the house. And if they don’t sell in 60 days (the listing period) then I can either relist at a different price or figure out another way of dispersing them (craigslist for example). Long live The Long Tail!

This is a neat music video from Kanye West:



It features a sample from Daft Punk’s song Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger (again on its own Wikipedia page). The really neat thing about this video though is the fact that Kanye is re-enacting scenes from the movie Akira. I find that to be a fantastically cool idea. It does make me miss my brother quite a bit though. Akira was his thing and I bought him the manga books for his birthday.

For the last several weeks I’ve been obsessed with maple cookies for lunch. This is a relatively new development for me. I mean I always enjoyed these types of cookies and I sure do love maple syrup but wanting to have maple cookies every day? Definitely new. It’s the highlight of my mid-afternoon.

I have the theme song from Weeds in my head. We’ve been watching Season 2 this week and each episode has a different rendition of the song. In Season 1 it was the same version for all 10 episodes but it seems that for Season 2 they tried to tie the style of the theme song with the content of that episode.

Wikipedia continues to amaze me. There’s a whole page on the theme song, Little Boxes. You have to love the community knowledge experiment that is Wikipedia.

My umbrella broke a few months ago and with Marcy on maternity leave I’ve had access to the car more often than not so I haven’t bothered to replace it.  That might come out as a bad decision tonight as I’m taking the bus home and it’s scheduled to rain this evening.  I’m just hoping that the (crossing fingers) few minutes I’ll need to be outside on the way home will have clear skies and not the torrential downpour that Murphy has in store.

Yeah it’s from 2003 but in light of today’s crushing defeat of Tsunami Kobayashi a coworker found this video of Kobayashi’s eating competition against a bear.  Yes, a bear.  Stephen Colbert would have even more reason to put bears on his number 1 threat in the Threat-Down after seeing this.  It’s proof that they’re “godless killing machines”.  Enjoy.

I’m feeling a little enthused about this blog of late.  For the last few months it’s been mainly a collection of links but maybe it might return to being more than that.

I have no particular reason to feel so enthused though life is pretty great right now overall.  I love being a father; it brings me so much joy to go home and see Jack smile and coo and in general be a very happy baby.  We’ve been so fortunate so far that things have gone well with him.  Naturally Marcy is amazing and I’m so blessed to be living with my life with her.  Work is going ok: could be better, could be worse.

I’ve been playing around with Twitter a little bit.  You can see me here or you can follow me through the badge to the right.   I haven’t been into it as keenly as the rest of the Internet (seemingly) so we’ll see if the updates continue at their frenetic pace.  Frenetic for those of you counting is 2 updates so far today.  5 updates since I signed up in April.  Wow!  I’d better slow down.

I also have a bunch of photos on backlog to upload to my Flickr page.  These are mostly of Jack (naturally) but it’ll let people see just how much he’s grown in < 3 months.  When they’re this small even the tiniest change can be seen.  I picked up one of his hats yesterday and couldn’t believe that his head once fit in there.  Now it’s more appropriate for his fist than his head.