Monthly Archives: April 2001

Damn 56K

Monday, April 23, 2001

One of the crappy things about living in the downtown core of a city is that you have the oldest cable lines known to man. My cable modem has been offline 90% for the past six hours now. I'm connecting through a 56k link on my Mac… The only machine in the house with a modem. It's driving me bonkers. I'm a bandwidth addict for chrissake. I need it. I neeeeed it.

I called them and their diagnostics agreed that my line had an unusually high amount of interferance… They're sending someone here on Wednesday to do some sort of noise and hum tests. Not that it'll do any good. What can they say? “Oh, yeah, you're fucked. Move to the suburbs.”

Nice week to quit drinking!

Well, I'm logging off now, I don't think I can handle this speed… Anyone who really needs to contact me can just call I suppose.

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"Fullest day ever"

Monday, April 23, 2001

I love this t-shirt.
“Best shirt ever”

When I sleep, my CD player scrolls through a bit over 500 CDs. My day started as always with waking up to something abrasive and incondusive (I hope that's a word) to rest — this morning it was Jad Fair. I got up, and dealt with some of the essential emails. As I'd suspected, since I'd spent the entire weekend creating source materials, there wasn't much for me to do today since the other half of the development team are now very busy. I suspect it'll be that way for the next few days as the software is implemented and the final business and banking things are dealt with. Our fraud screener wanted a huge monthly minimum fee so we've had to go with an alternate solution there, and there's still a little more to deal with on the merch stuff… but as far as I can tell it's all good.

Anyway, the plan for today had been to grab MiL0 from Phil and Carrie and some other little fellow's1 house, go out for breakfast and zip her up to the airport. Now, I'm not particularly known for anything other than erratic impulsive behavior (and I suspect that she may have a penchant for it also)… So breakfast turned out to be in Niagara Falls instead (I'll post some pictures of that later). Hey, it's not that far away and if we timed it just right she'd still make her flight.

After all, you can't really come to this part of Canada without going to the Falls. We checked out the tunnels under the Falls, something I hadn't done since I was a child. But time passes quickly, and we knew that if we left right now we'd get her to the plane on time.

Well… Almost…

We got her to the airport minutes after her gate closed. If it wasn't for the crowded parking lot, it would have been timed perfectly. No big deal though, there was another flight a few hours later. It was a bit nervewracking, but I hope she enjoyed coming along on the other errand I needed to run today:

I dropped off my TT at Howard's place and we hopped into my beast… Seriously, there's not much scarier for me than driving a truck like that at about 110 (kph!) on a highway. It really isn't made for that kind of speed. And, to top it all off, I've somehow lost the car's registration paperwork, insurance paperwork, AND license sticker, which would have made for a huge headache if we'd been pulled over. Anyway, even though that drive put my stress level through the roof we got her to the airport and I hope a good time was had by all.

Above: The new bikini top I just got for my big baby.
1 little fellow – I have been asked to remind you that when I use fellow, I use it genderlessly. If I am to speak with any degree of decency, I believe that I should have said little filet or whatever the the female version of fellow is…?
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Ego stroking

Sunday, April 22, 2001

One of the wonderful things about having been active online for a long time is that if you type your name to a search engine, you come up with all sorts of stuff… I was “spying” (that's what it felt like) on other people earlier, and eventually typed in my own name. I found lots of BME stuff, a zillion little interviews and some long ones, name dropping all over, stuff on exotic cars, Deloreans, monster trucks, kit cars, and even old video games I wrote when I was a kid. But I found a really nice article I'd never seen before. I met with this writer a few months after I moved back to Toronto from Philadelphia. Anyway, if you could care less, click here.

Liz Langley was very nice — one of the things we talked about was tongue piercing. This was a time when I'd recently gotten some bad chips in my teeth and I was very anti-tongue piercing. I love this quote from her article:


"[Shannon's] advice... if you want to restyle your tongue, get it split instead of pierced. After awhile that metal clacking against your tooth will break it, leaving you looking like a hillbilly, which for some is worse than looking like a lizard."

It's true… I haven't really seen many people actively seeking a hillbilly transformation! Anyway, I just sent her a thank you note… It seriously is one of the nicest things anyone has ever published about me.

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Is this for real?

Sunday, April 22, 2001

Pasta often has goofy names. All the classics like rigotoni and lasagna and spagetti and linguini sound really funny… But this one takes the cake:

Scoobi-Do? That can't be real? Either way, I'm eating it tonight. It's squiggly.

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For all the rama-dama-ding-dongs

Sunday, April 22, 2001

Ok, I've just uploaded I think around four hundred new images to BME, so check it out! Also, it's not uploaded yet, but Shawn showed me a sneak preview of some of the things in his new update and there will be some damn cool stuff — including ear rim beading! Anyway, I'll let you know here as well when he updates.

Even though I've been running and building online communities for about 15 years now (starting with a one line BBS system), I've always been more into the building aspect than the interacting aspect. IAM is really changing that. It's true that I met a lot of interesting people on BME in the past, but on IAM I've met an incredible number of amazing people. I love that whenever I post something, no matter how obscure, someone will message me about it with something interesting to say.

Even though I've met Rookie IRL, I didn't know that he was born in the British Virgin Islands — When I mentioned that I was considering taking a break down there (also known as running away), he IM'd me to check out Anegada… Oh my god… It was a passing idea when I wrote it, but now I'm getting obsessed. If you try and reach me some weekend and I don't answer my phone, I may well be down there.

“For those who want to get close to the elemental aspects of life, Anegada, the sunken island, has been described as a most enchanting place with miles and miles of sandy beaches and total immersion into primeval seclusion.”

I read that high-speed two-way satellite links have dropped down to about $60 a month. What am I doing here? Although I do have a few friends who live in the Caribbean, and most of them have not been huge fans of it…

Anyway, to those of you that I've talked to about silk screening, U2 and SR-71 spy planes, server load balancing, trikes, Claude Shannon, and all sorts of other stuff — THANK YOU! I've never been this happy in an online community, and I hope to see lots of you in person on the July 1st BBQ.

Now back to work!

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