Friday, March 31, 2006

I hate April Fool's Day

Why? Because all of the techie and game sites think they're funny all of the sudden.

Take ThinkGeek for instance. I saw their weekly e-mail of new products and had a little glance at it. Then I saw this.


I spent a good chunk of the day thinking about how cool it would be just to have a little sewer-pipe pot to grow a mushroom in and also trying to figure out exactly how you'd be able to have a mushroom grow like that.

I obviously didn't get enough sleep last night.

Of course, if I had looked at the main page, I would have seen all sorts of giveaways that it was an April Fool's joke. Wireless extension cords? RFID blocking shirts? Come on...

That 1 Up mushroom sure looks cute though.

Wednesday, March 29, 2006

Mmm... Tron...

Hooray! My copy of Kingdom Hearts 2 arrived today. Actually, the store had them in yesterday but didn't bother to leave a message because my answering machine doesn't kick in until after 5 rings and she only waited until 4...

Which isn't a HUGE problem because I'm patient.

Um... That's about it. I'm pretty stoked about this because it has Tron and Pirates of the Carribean in it (plus the opening movie alone looks awesome). Since I have no Final Fantasy XII until at least September (according to the latest dates on the computer at EB), this will have to be my dose of Final Fantasy until that time comes. Granted, given the amount of time I have for gaming these days (little to none most days), it'll probably take me until September to finish Kingdom Hearts 2...

Tuesday, March 28, 2006

Step back! It's a girl!

 
Here's the newest addition to the Wager clan. Eve!

She is seen here in her natural habitat being looked over by her older brother Mason and her grandmother. Posted by Picasa

Friday, March 24, 2006

Shield Your Eyes!

 
To celebrate the birth of Garrett's cousin, Eve, yesterday, I figured I'd put up this picture of Garrett from when he was only a couple months old.

Hopefully Eve won't look like this when she grows up :) Posted by Picasa

Visions of the Future

 
With Daddy away at work, Garrett takes over the duties of the man of the house. That computer won't play itself! Posted by Picasa
 
After yet another all night gaming session, Garrett stumbles off towards the crib. Posted by Picasa

Crouching Baby, Hidden Noogie

 
Deep in the confines of ShoeTray Pass, Garrett-san spots a wild ConnorCousin and gets ready to pounce. Posted by Picasa
 
"Look Daddy! I caught me a cousin! A-yup!" Posted by Picasa

Wednesday, March 22, 2006

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Too bad I'm not a little girl from Quebec

I was out for a walk at work today and saw a Tim Horton's cup on the side of the road. It didn't look like the rim had been rrrrrrolled up so I tossed aside what little dignity I had and picked it out of the ditch.

Lo and behold, I won a free coffee. WOoohoo!

I've only won a donut so far in this year's contest so winning a coffee, from a ditch-cup no less, was rather nice.

Sadly, this might be the high point of my day :P Garrett's got a fever, I've got an earache and my Tetris never came in. Boo hoo.
---
What I'm Reading: The Walking Dead Vol. 3
What I'm Playing: Shadow Hearts 3, Galactic Civilizations 2
What I'm Watching: 24 and Prison Break

Sunday, March 19, 2006

Go Fly A Kite

When I was talking to Julie yesterday about what I wanted to do on my birthday, she said, "Go fly a kite!"

So I did!

We picked up a kite for Garrett at Canadian Tire yesterday and after our morning errands, Garrett & I headed off to the park for his first attempt at flight.

Er, his first attempt at flying the kite, that is.

It was a great day for kite flying yesterday. The 90 kph winds were blowing in and must have dropped the temperature to -20C. That didn't stop us from flying that kite for a good half hour. Garrett seemed to think it was the coolest thing he'd ever seen, although he didn't really like it when it dive-bombed him a couple of times and just barely missed crashing into him. He also made friends with a couple of Canada Geese at the park.

I hate Canada Geese. Thankfully, these two were more scared of Garrett than he was of them and eventually flew off to the frozen swamp and honked at us for the rest of the time we were there.

We only got the kite caught in a tree once, but we got it down. Hopefully it'll be nice and windy again this week and we'll go over to the baseball diamond in the big park to fly the kite again.

Happy Birthday To Me!

I'm an old man as of today. No longer can I say I'm a 20-something. Nay! I am now forced to become a member of the much maligned and spat upon 30-something crowd.

Ah well.

Julie's giving me a great present today: the house to myself. She's taking Garrett out for a playdate in the afternoon which means I can play some WoW or an RPG and not be interrupted :) Julie must really know me well to know that the best present she and Garrett can give me is some time to myself to play videogames. I also got the newest Harry Potter DVD and Garrett got me a Playstation magazine which had a demo for Okami, which I also liked immensely.

I gave myself a present. One free use of a colon in my post (see above).

Tomorrow (or Tuesday) my other present to myself should be arriving at EB. Tetris DS. Nothing like Tetris on two screens with the ability to play online. Woo!

Yeah, I'm a sad, nerdy guy.

Now to go and stop wasting time typing and get to enjoying my big day!

---
What I'm Reading: The Walking Dead, The Monstrous Regiment
What I'm Playing: 24: The Game, Grandia 3
What I'm Watching: Doom: The (really bad) Movie

Have you ever seen an ape dressed like an ape?

Thursday, March 16, 2006

WOAH!!!! YEAH!!!

AAAH!

I've had "Kick Start My Heart" by Van Halen (or is it Def Leppard?) stuck in my head for about two hours now.

AAAH!

I don't even know why. I haven't heard the song in years. But there it is... Woah yeahing away in my brain as I type this.

I should go sing it out loud so that it'll get out of my brain, but Julie & Garrett might not appreciate it.

Wednesday, March 15, 2006

Civic vs. Train

You may have seen this on the local news, but here's the skinny.

"An investigation is underway after a deadly collision between a car and a passenger train near Guelph.

Police say the car was struck by a Via Rail passenger train at a level crossing just west of Acton today.

The vehicle was pushed about a kilometre down the track.

No one on the train was hurt, but one unidentified woman in the car was killed.
"

I didn't see the actual accident happen, but I drove past the scene of the accident shortly after it happened. There were a lot of fire trucks, cruisers and ambulances on scene and officials were wandering up and down the tracks for a good hour or so after the accident. It was just outside of Acton (the Dublin Line crossing) which has no barriers but does have flashing lights and bells.

I was really surprised when I did see the train/car mess though. The train had pushed the car a good kilometer down the track. It took me a minute or two to realize that, no, someone didn't drive off the road and get hit there, they'd been dragged that far by the sheer momentum of the train as it came to a stop.

I think it may have been the first car/train collision scene that I have actually seen firsthand. It sucks that someone got killed, but I have to say that it also looked interesting, from a dispassionate "Ooo, a train crash" viewpoint.

I'm curious as to who the person who got hit was. The news said it was a 27-year old Acton woman. I wonder if I may have known her from around town, whomever she was.

---
What I'm Reading: Wanted, The Monstrous Regiment
What I'm Playing: WoW, Grandia 3
What I'm Watching: Nothing tonight (hello reruns)

Monday, March 13, 2006

Rrroll Up The Rim To Sue!

I'm sure everyone has heard this little story by now, but can you believe the stuff going on in Quebec over that winning cup?

I think that the family of the 12 year old girl who helped roll up the rim should have been thankful they were going to get any money from the parents of the girl who found the cup. By being greedy buggers, they lose any sympathy I might be inclined to give them (which isn't much).

THIS guy, though, takes the cake. He should have to pay me for making the vein throb in my forehead for being angry at idiots like him.

It's not like the cups don't have a GIGANTIC YELLOW ARROW pointing at the spot that you're supposed to roll up. If you tossed out a winning cup, tough luck, sweetheart. Would this guy have demanded a DNA test if it had been a cup that won a donut or coffee? Yeesh. By his logic, I should have to return all the stuff I have scavenged during bulk junk day because it's technically (in his mind) the property of the person who threw it out.

In case you couldn't tell, I don't have much sympathy for him. I did like the response from the government body that oversees the contest.

"What's next, a claim by the person who printed the cup? Or delivered it?"

So, give the 10 year old's family the RAV 4. If they feel so inclined, give $100 to the family of the 12 year old so that they can go buy a bunch of coffee maybe win something. As for Greedy McTossypants, he deserves a BOOT TO THE HEAD!

Comics + Religion = Comaligion

This is a pretty spiffy site. It details all of the various major superheroes and plots out their religious tendencies. I never knew that Batman was a lapsed Catholic/Episcopalian or that Wolverine practiced Buddhism.

Neat...

Garrett + Car News = Everyone Falling Asleep

Speaking of crazy stuff, I'm going out tomorrow to get about 12 boxes of comics that this guy is giving away for free. I have NO idea what they are, but at the very least it'll give Garrett some reading material until he's 9.

I haven't posted as much as I've wanted to lately. I worked evenings last week which, coupled with Garrett's insistance to be awake at ungodly hours of the morning and my having to chase him around until he went to the babysitter in the afternoon, left me falling asleep at the keyboard most nights after work last week. I'm a little more with it tonight (the coffee I drank at 8:30pm on the way home from teaching a course probably won't help me sleep...) so here we go, just in case it's another 4 days between posts.

Garrett has been VERY chatty lately. He is either singing his brains out all day or mimicing everybody around him. He's getting quite the vocabulary, although he keeps calling ears eyes. Wierd.

I had to take my car in to get the gear shifter solonoid replaced today. I don't know if I've mentioned it but my car wouldn't shift out of Park into Drive (or Reverse) for the last few weeks. Well, it would eventually shift into gear, but I had a couple times where I had to sit there fighting with the shifter for upwards of 20 minutes. This meant that I was loathe to drive anywhere besides work unless I had to, just in case that was the time when it would stop shifting into gear at all.

I finally got the part replaced today and is it ever smooooth. I can really tell the difference between the old shifter and the new one. The old one really had a lot of grinding that it had to do to get in gear. This one doesn't. (Hooray for eloquence!) The upside of the whole thing is that the repairs came in over $200 less than I expected them to be, which was nice. Hopefully this was the last thing that I'll need to get fixed on my car for a while.

I went for a good 5 years with basic maintenance and a bit of brake work. Since Christmas, I've spent far too much time getting things looked at, although the big repair (leaky head and air gaskets) were covered by warranty and this gear shifter thing was just wierd. I still love my little plastic car, although I do need some new tires... Sigh.

Now that we're on this topic of car repairs and such, my wiper blades essentially crumbled off my car last week as well. So I went out and picked up a couple of those funky Reflex blades from Canadian Tire and they are great. Thankfully I had a huge wad of Canadian Tire money that my dad had given me a couple years ago (Thanks Dad!) so I only really had to pay for one blade. It's so nice to be able to wipe my windows and not have streaks.

I think that's about it for now. I'm going to go find something to read or play or watch as I'm still rather jazzed on coffee. I'm going over to a friend's friend's place tomorrow with Garrett to play my first game of D&D in many a long year. Garrett is going to come along and learn how to make a saving throw against vegetables. Or play with the little boy who lives down the lane. One of the two.

At least one of my days off will be fun. Today's day off was a combination of teaching my driver improvement course and waiting for car repairs to be finished. I did hit the comic shop though, which netted me a few titles I'd been looking for and a bevy of graphic novels to read. A bevy, I tell you!

I need a very big lava lamp...

At least, I'll need one to go with this super huge lightning ball.


"The plasma reached a temperature in excess of two billion Kelvin, making it arguably the hottest human made thing ever in the history of the Earth and, for a brief time, hotter than the interiors of stars...During the unexpected powerful contained explosion, the Z machine released about 80 times the world's entire electrical power usage for a brief fraction of a second."

Crazy stuff, but very pretty.

---
What I'm Reading: Wanted, some other graphic novels and comics
What I'm Playing: Grandia 3, Galactic Civilizations 2, Scratches
What I'm Watching: 24, Corner Gas

Thursday, March 09, 2006

Beds beds beds

We are currently in the market for a bed for Garrett. I keep waking up next to him and I KNOW for a fact that he wasn't in bed with us when I went to sleep.

I was hoping to find a Spiderman toddler bed at Wal-Mart, but they only had Winnie The Pooh, Barbie and Dora there.

A bed like this:

might work, but it's also VERY expensive.

Sigh. I just know that we need to find something soon because he was getting his knee over the top of the crib the other day in an effort to get out. Barbed wire might raise some eyebrows, my force-field generator is on the fritz and Julie didn't think that my plans for a moat would pass the building code.

Ah well.

Best Graph Ever

Global warming isn't our fault. I blame the British and their pirate killing ways.

Just check out this graph.



---
What I'm Reading: Everything Bad Is Good For You
What I'm Playing: Grandia 3
What I'm Watching: Not too much

Believe it or not, I'm walking on air...

Saturday, March 04, 2006

Fluffy Saturday

Since I'm only putting up fluff today, check out THIS video.

It's The Simpson's intro but done in real life. Very cool.

Oh, and here's a cool video for a Sony TV that had lots of bouncy balls. Garrett really liked it.

That's The Sound Of My Jaw Hitting The Floor

Just go check out this video for Spore and tell me it's not going to be the last videogame I'll ever need to buy.

After I upgrade my PC, of course.

Thursday, March 02, 2006