It's weird, normally this time of day (and much earlier of course) I'd be playing and drawing with Nefarious, cooking breakfast, all that sort of single-dad stuff… But because she's on vacation, I guess it's back to my old classic, work… So I've thrown a big dose of new content up on ModBlog, and plan on doing plenty more work on other projects as the day progresses.
I'm not really too
“BOOYEAH” about it even though I suppose it's both good and bad… Good because I can use the time to do much needed improvements on the various toys we all enjoy, and bad because of course the situation makes me sad.
Oh, and I don't know if anyone saw the (stub and desperately in need of work) entry on Inuit that I recently updated in the BME Encyclopedia, but the Early Canada Online pages that are used as part of the research are really amazing and worth checking out if you ever want to do research on the body modification and ritual practices of native groups across Canada.
I've just posted a BME update with a bit over a thousand images each in the members areas and the piercing sections (so it's today and yesterday's updates put together). Um, other than that, I got a bit of an upsetting phone call this evening, but there's not much I can do about it right now so I'm going to try not to get stressed over it.
While I'm talking about depressing things, the last time the US dollar was as low as it is now was 1992, after the Reagan and Bush era. Then Bill Clinton was elected, and the US dollar climbed steadily and leveled out strong against both the Canadian dollars and the Euro. Then George Bush got elected and September 11th happened.
After 911, the US dollar stayed strong, until the “Axis of Evil” speech at which point the Euro started to climb over the US, although the Canadian dollar stayed even… but then the US sent troops to Iraq, and the US dollar began to drop against both the Euro and the Canadian. It rebounded temporarily after the “Mission Accomplished” speech, but started to decline steadily as the troops deaths increased. After the Iraqi Assembly got elected, it rebounded temporarily against the Euro, but not against the Canadian dollar.
CLICK TO SEE THE TIMELINE
Hopefully I didn't make any mistakes on that diagram!
One of the things that means is that if you are selling a non-American product in America (for example, if you're a Canadian business that exports), is that the change represents a loss in profit (assuming you don't increase your pricing) of about 33% (at a minimum — it is often much more, depending on the business's internal structure). I don't think I've changed BME's pricing since 1997 or whenever it was first set, but especially with bandwidth getting more expensive (due to the move to Canada after US laws became more conservative and pushed the site into likely illegality), I keep agonizing over whether I should increase it a little to compensate…
But independent of how it affects Canadian businesses, I really hope that Americans take these changes seriously when they next vote… Remember that the US can not produce enough of it's own oil, let alone enough of it's own fresh water and farm produce! I don't even want to think about how bad it could get if this economic collapse continues… fingers crossed that Bush doesn't do too much more damage (let alone invade someone else), until President Gore starts fixing things in 2009.
Hey everyone, sorry I haven't been online much in the last week or even really posted. It's been a hard week emotionally for a lot of reasons, and it's definitely going to be a tough little while I think for me over the next bit, but yesterday was definitely fun. A whole bunch of us (Phil, Marty, CJ, Tom, Saira, and Clive) got together for an interview with the CBC. This photo is actually stolen from CJ who was the only one of us with the sense to take lots of pictures:
That's the host that he's licking and the producer on the other side. I was a little nervous going into it because I'd heard he was on the conservative side, at least when it came to the “doesn't that hurt?” line of thinking, but once I saw that he was totally into genital piercing (on women anyway), I lost that worry pretty quick. The interview was a lot of fun actually… I think over the afternoon and evening we must have gone through a dozen and a half (ie. about twenty) pitchers of beer, it was insane. Gotta love the CBC.
But I think we all stayed on message and explained our motivations clearly, and I think everyone had a good time, so I've got good hopes for the interview… It airs at like 9:30 in the morning a month from now — sometimes I forget what crazy crap you can put on the radio here even during the day (tons of profanity and very sex-centric conversation). I'll post the info on it when I know when it airs.
Anyway, there's big BME update later tonight care of Phil, and I have loads of new content and projects to work on (due to a sad reason for me, but it's good for you)… Nefarious is visiting Rachel for the next month and a half so I guess Jon and I will probably be working like crazy (and him fishing) both to get caught up, develop some new toys, and to keep from getting too down about missing her.
I've managed to get an experience update posted; thank you as always to everyone who helped out. I'm sorry I haven't got other blog updates posted, I've just been so exhausted and generally wiped out and stressed that I haven't been able to find the time, and I don't want to push myself any harder than I already am.
Other than that, here's a few more tourist photos.
Well, I've got to go to bed now I think. I have to do an interview tomorrow with CBC Radio that I've got to be honest I'm not looking forward to at all because I'm just so drained. I know what's bothering me, don't worry, it's just a little rough patch that I need to work through and I'm sure everything will be alright by year's end.
I'm back in town and BME has had a small update as promised. Anyway, experiences tomorrow, then piercing, then members as always! And tomorrow the new IAM box starts getting worked on too.
