Don't Tell Julie

I wonder if the recipe here is the same as the one for Julie's famous chocolate chip squares. If it is, that is just too awesome. I married her to ensure a steady supply of these things :)

I POOPED!

Garrett had a pretty busy and exciting day.

He went for a crazy long hike, got interviewed on the radio, made some arts and crafts and took part in a precision dance performance.

But the big news is that he went upstairs, got on the toilet and pooped all by himself today. Didn't even bother to turn on the light to do it. Real men poop in the dark.

Woo! Maybe this is the breakthrough we've been looking for. Toilet training has been coming along decently but this is probably the first time that I can recall him actually initiating a trip to the washroom and doing it all by himself.

Hooray!

Oh, I'll write some stuff up about the other things he did today, but I'm going to wait until tomorrow after I've had a chance to rest my tender tootsies and get some sleep.

GET OFF OF ME!

AAARG!

I did my physical this morning. Seems like everything is as ship-shape as it can be in this train-wreck of a body of mine.

The only problem is that I have an electrode from the EKG that WON'T COME OFF.

It's not that I'm a wuss. Julie even tried giving it a yank and couldn't get it to come out of the tangle of chest hair that it's stuck in. And she had a kind of malicious smile on her face while trying to yank it off.

If it will withstand Julie's callous disregard for my comfort, I have no idea what will get it off aside from some scissors, industrial solvent or time. I'm going to leave it on for the day and see if it gets a little looser later in the day.

Now I need to go eat something. I'm soooo hungry.

So Famished!

I'm hungry. Normally, I'd snack on a cracker, some raisins, chips... A GLASS OF WATER!

But I can't have a snack tonight. I'm fasting. Stupid fasts. I have to go for my annual physical... for the first time in about 12 years or so.

And part of that involves fasting for the cholesterol test. Sigh. Ah well. It's almost bed time, so I'll just go upstairs and listen to my tummy grumble.

Too Close To Home

Today's Real Life comic is pretty funny... Remind you of anyone?

What Does UMD Stand For, Anyway?

Ok. I've spent a bit of today playing around with the PSP and it's a nice system. Lumines 2 is addictive, as all things Luminesy should be. Daxter is a blast, though I haven't spent a lot of time. It does show off what the system can do though.

The system seller, the killer app... The game that really shows what the PSP can do. Just take a look at these shots!




And the anime cutscenes look gorgeous too.



Now to see go play some Jeanne while Julie watches House.

Deathrace 2000

We took Julie's Kia into the shop today to get things looked at. For the last few weeks, it's done this weird thing where it kind of lurches when you brake. Not a horrible thing, I guess, but I had visions of braking at an intersection and the car stopping, then suddenly zooming off into the middle of traffic.

Soooo... we took it in and drove my car back home.

A few hours later, I get a call from the shop. They figured that there was something wrong with a throttle control sensor or something and were going to fix that... but they also wanted to have a look at the brakes, which were already getting low about, oh, 6 months ago :P

About an hour later I get a call from the guy. This time, instead of the jovial voice that was in play an hour previous, the guy had a tone of voice that conveyed wonder and horror that we were able to actually drive around without killing everyone. It turns out that almost everything that could be wrong with our brakes was wrong with them. Heck, the rear driver's side brake wasn't even working, it had seized up and stopped engaging... Sigh.

We aren't getting the car back until tomorrow. We won't have to sell the house to pay for the repairs, but to put things in perspective, they're going to cost us a lot more than a PS3 would :)

Insanity

You want to know what's nuts?

I traded in 21 games today and you can't even tell that any are missing.

21!

My DVD/Game collection just seals itself like a hull breach on the Enterprise.

On the upside, I now am the proud owner of a PSP Slim. Yes, I've railed against the PSP in the past but that's because there weren't any games worth getting the system for. Sure, there were a few worth playing if you had the system, but nothing I'd consider a system seller.

Now there is Jeanne D'Arc, a turn-based strategy RPG by Level 5, one of my favourite developers of all time... a game my very picky friend is calling his game of the year.

So the new game, coupled with the fact that they did a redesign on the system that speeds up UMD read times, extends the battery life to something actually useful and cuts down on the weight of the beast AND the fact that it comes bundled with Daxter, one of the better games for the system, really got the bug in my brain.

It took some digging through my library and some sacrifices of games that I wouldn't have minded holding onto, but everything I traded in was either beaten or had been gathering dust for far too long to justify keeping if I could snag a decent trade-in on the thing. The upside is that I had enough to get the bundle and Jeanne D'Arc and only paid $20 out of my pocket. Gotta love that.

I haven't had a chance to do much more than do a system update and fiddle with some of the settings on the system, but it looks like a pretty nice unit. Will it supplant the DS as my favourite console EVER? Unlikely, but it will complement it well.

Last One Standing

This short film by the Discovery Channel is just cool.

I guess it's some kind of clip from a show they're doing about future tech and Halo, but it's still pretty spiffy.

Do You Like Me Now?

So, I've unlocked the mysteries of the comments and added a few other tweaks to the site.

What do you fine folk think of the new site? I'm sure it'll drive Julie nuts, what with it being the same colour as Evil Avatar (her most hated site on the internet!)

Great New Look, Same Crappy Content

I updated the site (finally) so it doesn't look like a 5th grader's first webpage circa 1995.

Now it just looks like a 5th grader's webpage circa 1998. Sigh.

I'll be tweaking it over the weekend. Given that half of my links were dead anyway and much in need of a rehash, I figure it's about time I gave the site an overhaul.

Unfortunately, I haven't had a chance to reconfigure Haloscan's comment system yet, so it might be a day or two before I get that working again. No worries.

Ohm..... Ohm...

Wow. Take a look at the video on this site. If you can find the brand of battery that they used, you can save yourself a LOT of money.

Carpe Diem Isn't The Fish Of The Day

I picked up a new shirt yesterday because most of my current wardrobe o' T's are getting a little old and ratty.

Julie says that nobody will get it. I beg to differ.

It says, "Blogito, ergo sum".

Please tell me people get it...

Believe

I'm no Halo junkie. I've tried multiple times to play the first one and so far, I haven't made it very far. I haven't even turned on my copy of the second one. The impending release of the third Halo game isn't even much of a blip on my radar (I've got Eternal Sonata to keep me busy instead).

That said, the Believe commercial and this absolutely amazing diorama is just awesome to behold. I shudder to think about how long it took to make that thing.

What Not To Code

Just a quick question.

Are people having trouble viewing the site lately? I know it's coming up, but is it coming up with a weird blue/black text on a white background OR is it the usual black and red template with white text?

Julie's had some wierdness happen lately, as have I. I haven't changed anything with the style sheets or anything, but I might need to see if something is borked in the code.

My Horrible Local Paper

I've finally got the scanner/printer thingy set up here at Casa Del Wager, so I'm going to try to scan some of the pictures and headlines from our local paper and post them just to illustrate how horrible the layout department is for that rag.

I like the paper, as it is a wealth of local news. That said, having a headline that screams "WOMAN KILLS LOCAL MAN - VICTIM KNOWN TO POLICE" right above a picture of a smiling man in a suit standing with his daughters that happens to have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING TO DO WITH THE STORY IN THE HEADLINE is just bad press. In the latest issue, aside from the not so dead dapper gentleman, there is also a picture that makes it look like a local drunk ran over Terry Fox and that an old granny is a perfect candidate for the HPV vaccine.

Trust me, you'll see what I mean after I scan and post these things...

All Better Now (mostly)

Ah, thank you, makers of Tylenol Cold & Sinus and Neo-Citran.

After much chugging of pharmaceuticals and a LOT of sleep, I am feeling at least 75% better. I woke up this morning with my head not ready to erupt and my eyes feeling like they actually belonged in my head. A nice hot shower quickly washed away what was left of my headache and while my energy levels have been not quite up to snuff, I felt a LOT better than I did yesterday.

We did a bunch of walking this morning too, which helped me feel both better and a lot more worn out than I was just hanging around the house. We checked on Julie's fair entries and she won a first place, a couple seconds and a couple thirds. I think it tallies up to about $19 in winnings, which isn't bad. Garrett's entries didn't win any prizes but he did get some fancy participation ribbons. I think he should have won something for his 'What Looks Good On A Bagel' entry though. Both the first and second place prizes were just peanut butter and banana slices. The third place winner was two halves of a bagel with cream cheese and a raisin happy face on each one.

Garrett's masterpiece, on the other hand, was a veritable cacophony of flavour. He had a cream cheese base, gummi bears, chocolate chips, raisins and probably some of his snot as he had a bit of a runny nose that day.

The contest was, "What LOOKS Good On A Bagel", not "What TASTES Good On A Bagel". If I'd known he could have just slapped some peanut butter and a banana on the bagel, we'd have won the show. Ah well.

I was a lot grumpier the last two days than usual though. I hate it when I'm sick, especially when I can't sleep and my head is sore. I think Julie was glad I went to work today so I wasn't snarky all night like I was last night.

Typhoid Brocky

Well, stay away from our house until at least tomorrow. Garrett (aka the walking petri dish) started having the sniffles a few days ago and now both Julie & I have it. I've been chugging Advil Sinus and Neocitran all day... and my headache is worse than ever.

Julie seems to be a little more over it than I am, but it's still incredibly crappy when we both come down with a nasty bug the same day.

I'm going to bed...

I AM IRON MAN!

Woohoo! The Iron Man trailer is now live. They showed this during ComiCon, but it was kind of hard to see. That said, it also looked 8 kinds of awesome, so it's nice to be able to actually see the Mark 1 suit and Robert Downey Jr. chewing the scenery. I really hope this movie lives up to the trailer!

Still No Rush To Get A PSTriple

Wow. If you have a PS3 and were looking for a shiny new game to play on it, avoid Lair at all costs.

"Whatever you want from this game, it will proudly and haughtily give you the opposite. It's almost as if the game has some kind of deep-seated hatred for gamers and its opportunity to wreak unholy vengeance on all of us has finally arrived...The vendetta against gamers is also carried out in Lair's tragic design which seems as though it was crafted in crazy land." - Gamespy

"If flying in to invisible walls over and over again is your idea of fun, then Lair may be your game of the year...You're stuck doing trial-and-error flybys that will inevitably find you concocting new curse words because you're burnt out on the F-word." - Game Almighty

Internet People

I know this has probably been going around the net for the last couple of days, but here it is for the last few of you who haven't seen it.

Internet People!

I think your level of nerdiness/lack of social life is directly proportional to how many of those people in the video you actually know of without having to look them up.

Sigh...

I Thought I Was A Movie Geek

61%The Movie Quiz

FilmCritic.com - Movie Reviews

It's Worth The Drive To Red Lodge.

I survived yet another trip to Manitoulin with work. Woo!

It was pretty rainy this year. It did clear up yesterday and today, so the week ended on a high note but it was pretty miserable the rest of the week. That said, we still had a great week.

I even ate a salad, but that was because the alternative was Cream Of Broccoli soup and there was no way I was eating that slop. Thankfully the rest of food was amazing as usual... I tried to get the recipe for the homemade potato soup but they wouldn't give it to me. Sigh.

Anyway, I'm pooped. I wonder where Julie & the kids are. Somewhere between Acton and Kitchener, I guess.

I got Garrett a little hide and birch bark drum. I wonder how long that will last...

Going Au Naturel

I hate my lawn. Every year we go get more seed and fertilizer, work it all in and water it until the drought hits and every year the lawn looks more and more dead. I went out today to cut it and it just made me sad.

For next year, we're either going to have to till the entire lawn under and reseed it that way or just toss a bunch of clover seed and flowers on it. The most infuriating thing is that I have grass growing in my flower gardens, on my backyard path and everywhere else EXCEPT on the lawn. Sigh.

Oops!

Happy belated birthday, Dave! I barely remembered it was September 1 yesterday as it was and the one time I remembered that I needed to call my brother to wish him a happy birthday, I wasn't home to get his number.

Sigh.

The scary thing is that my little brother is now almost 30... Eek!