I just got back from Belleville picking up CD-Rs and a few groceries. As I was getting on the highway, there was an oldman hitchhiking; I pulled over and asked him where he was headed. “Mrulshwdrf,” he told me, gazing wildly somewhere toward the middle of the car's hood, spit covering the front of his old suit.
Um…?
“Ok, well… I'm going up 37 to Tweed. Is that the way you're going?”
“Surfide,” he told me, then asking, “Tweedroad?”, as he continued to drool on himself. I don't think he was drunk; his eyes were all white, and I assume he was blind and half-mad from years of living in a forest. Eventually he decided that he wasn't headed the same way as me and stumbled off.
About two minutes later I saw other guy, a mid-thirties clean cut hippy wearing a yellow hat holding a sign that said “OTTAWA”. I pulled over and told him I could take him as far as Tweed and he hopped in. He turned out to be a home-care nurse that spent his off weeks hitch-hiking around Canada. The first thing he did was gesture at the clock and ask me, “is that the right time?”
He'd been waiting there for something like two hours, which by my estimate would mean that around five hundred cars, probably 90% of which at least would have had space for him — and this guy exuded “harmless”… I think it's pretty pathetic that people are so unwilling to help others. It's inexcusable that he had to wait for that long.
Anyway, the reason I was picking up CD-Rs is that I'm making a pile of copies of all my images, source code, and so on to send to various people for permanent archival (in case “something bad” happens to me I guess) — I have between two and five million images in my archive (and that's just from the past few years, not from day one), so as you can imagine I'm going through a couple spindles!
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