The help authoring program I’m using has destroyed many hours’ worth of work and I have to board a plane in five hours. I’m ready to hurl my computer against the wall, but I think I’ll just go to bed instead.
Category: It Happened to Me
A frustrating fortnight has thankfully drawn to a close.
We share a very high speed business DSL connection with our neighbour. To make a long story short and keep the finger-pointing to a minimum, I’ll just simply say that the party responsible for paying the Internet bill forgot to do so, and as a result, we got cut off. I paid the balance with my credit card, but the order to cut off service had already gone through. The hosting service reinstated our account quickly, but Bell Nexxia — the people who handle the “last mile” service between the hosting company and our phone jacks — took their own sweet time hooking us back up.
Odd that they’re so quick to cut off service and so slow to reinstate it. Jerks.
Thus began a two-week period of no Internet service at home. To many people, this is a minor incovenience. To the members of this household, it’s almost deadly. Paul’s working on funding proposals for his anti-censorship software for the Web, Peekabooty, and I’m trying to finish of leftover freelance contact work. In my case, an Internet outage is reputation-and-paycheque-killing-deadly.
I ended up doing spending my evenings at Webst@tion, an Internet cafe on Queen Street West, a mere two blocks from my house. A nice older Korean couple runs the place, which houses about 30 or so machines running Windows 98SE. I did whatever work I could on my own machines, and then carted it to Webst@tion whenever I needed to get online. In the beginning, I was burning CDs to move stuff over there, but as the days passed, I figured it would be easier and considerably more useful to buy a 256 MB USB drive, especially since they’re so cheap these days.
One particular project I’m finishing off was rather depedent on a large remote SQL Server database, which necessitated that I do the work on a machine connected to the ‘Net. I ended spending a lot of time at Webst@tion. Under most circumstances, I’d really mind — using an Internet cafe when you’ve got a perfectly nice and comfy setup at home is like passing up your own bathroom for the one at the nearby gas station, and forking over money for the privilege.
On one particularly long night, when I wished I was sitting in my nice office chair instead of a basement with a bunch of kids playing networked Counterstrike, the owner walked up to my station.
“You like kimchi noodle?” he asked.
He had two bowls of instant kimchi noodles topped with some green onion that he’d added.
“You look tired,” he said, “Kimchi noodle wake you up. It free. You good customer.”
“Wow. Thank you. Kam sa ham ni da.”
“You speak Korean!”
“Not very much. My brother-in-law, Yang Il [I used Richard’s Korean name], is Korean.”
“Ah,” he said with a nod. “You don’t play games here, and you not just doing email. You are a professor?”
He pointed to my tie. Yes, I’m still on my “wear a dress shirt and tie or vest” kick.
“Oh, no. I just like to dress up. I’m a computer programmer. The DSL at my house is down, and I need to finish some freelance work.”
“Well, you dress nice. You look like a professor.”
(I know a couple of engineering profs at Crazy Go Nuts University who would laugh at that idea.)
So began the freebies. Pot noodles here, a free Diet Coke there. I felt like a “regular”.
Now that the Internet is finally back on at my place, my time at Webst@tion is done. So long, and thanks for all the bandwidth and noodles!
Categories
Unreal estate
A little more on the ongoing saga of the sale of the lovely house that I rent.
I have only a layperson’s knowledge of the general principles behind real estate, but I do know the Rule of Proximity: the value of the properties beside yours affect the value of your property. In the case of Big Trouble in Little China (better known as my house), our immediate neighbours have decent houses, but as you progress east or west on my street, the houses become more and more dilapidated, going downhill from “student ghetto house” to “crazy old lady with all the cats”-type shacks with garbage in the front yard.
When the real estate agent called me yesterday to let me know about yet another showing, she told me that there would be a large open house tomorrow with a phalanx of agents. She said this was because they’d adjusted the price.
I assumed that they’d adjusted the price downwards, as the general consensus among all the recent home-buyers I’d met was that the current asking price for Big Trouble in Little China — CDN$679,000 (for my non-Canadian friends, that’s US$504,552 or 431,801 Euros) was mildly insane, given the current market, which has been described as “soft”.
However, when I met up with Deenster and Lisa last night, Lisa told me she had inside dirt on my house. Deenster and Lisa’s mom is a real estate agent, and apparently, there’s some kind of buzz going about my house. The price has been adjusted upwards to CDN$750,000 (USD$557,766 or 477,046 Euros).
Clearly the real estate industry has found some kind of drug that makes homebuyers tractable. My guess is that it is absorbed through the skin and that it is administered by putting a light coat of it onto house brochures.
When this Internet-and-computers fad blows over, I may have to see how I look in one of those Century 21 blazers.
Categories
Virtual Bubble Wrap [Updated]
[Update January 28, 2005]: Welcome, BoingBoing
readers! I’d love to show you Virtual Bubble Wrap online, but I’ve since taken
the page on which it lived down and put it somewhere yet. It will have
a home soon, promise!
Windows users can download a standalone version from this entry.
Once a year, just to keep this lovely piece of absolutely useless
software alive in the collective mind of the ‘Net, I point everyone to Virtual Bubble Wrap.
Yes, there are many other versions of Virtual Bubble Wrap, but the version created by Mackerel Interactive Multimedia
way back in 1993 is still the best (the original version was part of a
floppy disk-based presentation). I like to think that my Shockwave
adaptation, coded up during a severe hangover the day after my birthday
party in 1995, is a close second.
One reason I was inspired to post this particular entry is that Brendyn Alexander’s trying his hand as developing multimedia apps in Director. Good on ya, Brendyn, and welcome to the club!
Recommended Reading
Burying the Fish. A Cory Doctorow piece about Mackerel that was commisioned for but never made it into WIred. I think it’s the very first time he’d acted as my unofficial press agent — here’s the relevant snippet:
The
next-generation Mackerelites are a mixed bag. There isn’t a one of them
that isn’t hip and downtown as all get-out — walking into the old
Mackerel office was like stepping into some weird Hollywood vision of
sexy young geeks in great clothes, firing Nerf darts at each other and
disappearing into the overflowing kitchen for company-sponsored Shiatsu
massage from a geek therapist who logged in regularily to the company
BBS.
They came from all walks of life. Joey DeVilla, the only production
grunt with a background in computer science, was seven years into a
four-year CS degree at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, was
DJing one night at a campus bar, and running a hunk of video wallpaper
that included screen captures from the Mackerel Stack, recently
downloaded from a BBS. One of the dancers caught him in the DJ booth
and mentioned that he knew the guys in Toronto who built the thing. The
next morning, Joey packed his things and hopped a train to Toronto, and
demanded that Ollie hire him.
Last night, while taking some cough medicine, I thought: “Hmmm. Not bad. Tastes just like Jagermeister.”
Categories
One last entry for the day
A little exchange at the health food store that had my friend Char laughing uncontrollably:
Kriss: I think I’m wearing my thong underwear backwards.
Me: Why? Does it feel like you’ve “got company over”?
Spike TV, if you ever need a guy to write one-liners for you sitcoms, I’m your man…
The club called Shmooze (is the misspelling intentional?) that I mentioned in this entry really did sell booze at cost last night. Between the hours of 5 and 11 p.m., cocktails were priced at CDN$1.25. For my friends who live outside Canada, that’s just over 92 cents U.S., .80 Euros or just over .55 British Pounds.
The night got even cheaper as it wore on, because the accordion is a device capable of turning music into free alcohol. More on this, and The Great White Collar Socialization Experiment later.