Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

…was definitely much more fun to go to than the ROM was… The ROM is kind of stuffy in comparison I think, even though a lot of the stuff at the Science Centre is just as dated these days in terms of not having been updated since I was a kid! To say nothing of the fact that the hyper-ugly “crystal” addition to the ROM has meant that half the exhibits have been closed for the past year…

But anyway, the OSS was fun:

They did have a display up though that I think sends out a bit of a mixed message… Now, I know what they were trying to say, but to me this says, “hey kids, if you want to be like a grown up, try smoking and wearing less clothes!”

I take transit everywhere these days. It's cheaper and often faster than driving, and less hassle… Plus you get to occasionally see goofy things like this monster truck that was driving around to promote Popeye's Chicken or something like that.

Other than that, the quality of children's “educational” books sure does suck (note: I didn't buy this one). Not only are they dumbed down like crazy — so much so that I think kids may get stupider reading them — but they don't even make any sense. Could you do the puzzle below?

The correct answer for every one is purple by the way (and you're not allowed to circle more than one, and all of your answers have to be the same on every page). Real great idea, hiring a color blind designer to do a book on colors for kids…

I made a shrimp bahmi goreng last night (I grew up eating nasi goreng; this is sort of the same thing but noodles). I wasn't sure if it was going to turn out well or not when I was making it but the result was excellent and I'll cook it again for sure!

Jon and Nefarious went fishing this morning — it was good timing because I discovered this morning that due to some sort of a crash, the update from August 28th was only partially updated. Basically the images got uploaded to the server, but weren't properly inserted into the databases, so they didn't appear in the galleries (or at least didn't appear permanently — they may have for about 12 hours). Anyway, I wrote a pile of diagnostic software to deal with corrupted databases on BME, as well as some backup software that's much more efficient than what was currently in place for my local machines.

The images from the 28th will be in tonight's update, and should appear between the updates from the 31st and the 30th so they won't be missed, even though it makes the sort order a little wonky visually.

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A while back I got a drinking straw construction kit for Nefarious from ThinkGeek that lets you build custom straws — here's a four-cup experiment she built:

Other than that, I've been fantasizing about moving to Cape Breton Island, up in the Highlands — probably a more reasonable fantasy than the Magdalen Islands (and my French really isn't good enough for that anyway). Perhaps I will spend my remaining days learning to playing a fiddle! There are better pictures if you look around but it's a really beautiful place — I think GQ magazine called it the #2 island to visit on vacation in North America (#1 was some place in Mexico).

A guy can dream!

For now I am stuck in a (relatively nice) house in Toronto, although the service station down the road — I think they're to blame — has had some sort of contamination problem lately and the whole neighborhood has smelled of gasoline, giving me a headache, for the past week.

Anyway… I've got to get a bunch of images together for the folks from Bizarre. They're doing a big feature on BME in one of the next issues. I'm told it's quite lengthy so I'm looking forward to that — hopefully I'm quoted accurately and didn't say anything too bad, ahaha! I can't remember what I said that could possibly have even filled as much text as I'm told there is. We did the interview either right before or right after my surgery so I was in a ton of pain and in a weird headspace, so fingers-crossed it wasn't embarrassing!