Obsidian Tempest

Pet Peeve

Enjoying my new big screen TV last night, a character on a show said something that really bugged me.

"I'm not from this planet. Heck, I'm not even from this galaxy."

Note to all science fiction writers, television show writers, et al: this galaxy is huge, larger than your pathetic combined intelligences. You do not need to leave this galaxy to find a strange world. Hell, it take a beam of light eighty thousand years to cross our galaxy, and it consists of billions of stars. BILLIONS. There is no need to go to another galaxy to find the homeworld for your character/species. Doing so only highlights your lack of understanding of the size of the distance between this galaxy and the next, not to mention the size of our own galaxy.

Morons.

This and That

Quick bites:

- Our new TV arrives today and Kim and I are excited. I'll be leaving work as soon as possible to go home and set it up.

- Hockey starts again soon and I'm half excited / half apathetic. We'll see if my enthusiasim returns to pre-lockout levels.

- All summer my weight stayed about the same at 204 lbs. I think it was a combination of good food at lots of family functions and building muscle mass as I played tennis and volleyball. Now that fall is here my weight has begun dropping again hitting a Monday weigh-in low of 202 and a mid-week low of 201. I am dreading the 200 lb barrier though because once I break 200 I cut my daily WW Points from 26 to 24. Yipe! That's 700 less calories a week.

Big Brother is Watching You....

Via Flash Point Canada, a look into our police state future.

We Hate Ourselves for our Freedoms

In-freaking-sane.

Political Ideology Test

You are a Social Liberal (75% permissive) and an... Economic Liberal (35% permissive) You are best described as a: Democrat Link: The Politics Test on OkCupid Free Online Dating

What Historical General are you?

Hat tip: Andrew

Scipio
You scored 66 Wisdom, 70 Tactics, 36 Guts, and 54 Ruthlessness!

Scipio was the conqueror of Hannibal in the Punic Wars. He was the son of Publius Cornelius Scipio, and from a very early age he considered himself to have divine inspiration. He was with his father at the Ticino (218), and he survived Cannae (216). The young Scipio was elected (c.211) to the proconsulship in Spain. He conquered New Carthage (Cartagena) almost at once (209) and used the city as his own base; within several years he had conquered Spain. As consul in 205, Scipio wanted to invade Africa, but his jealous enemies in the senate granted him permission to go only as far as Sicily and gave him no army. He trained a volunteer army in Sicily. In 204 he received permission to go to Africa, where he joined his allies the Numidians and fought with success against the Carthaginians. In 202, Hannibal crossed to Africa and tried to make peace, but Scipio's demands were so extreme that war resulted; Scipio defeated Hannibal at Zama (202), returned home in triumph, and retired from public life. He was named Africanus after the country he conquered. His pride aggravated the hatred of his enemies, especially Cato the Elder , who accused the Scipio family of receiving bribes in the campaign against Antiochus III in which Scipio had accompanied (190) his brother. It was only through the influence of his son-in-law, Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus, that Scipio was saved from ruin. He retired into the country and ordered that his body might not be buried in his ungrateful city. Later he revealed his great magnanimity by his attempt to prevent the ruin of the exiled Hannibal by Rome.

	You scored higher than 59% on Wisdom
	You scored higher than 64% on Tactics
	You scored higher than 4% on Guts
	You scored higher than 65% on Ruthlessness

Flickr Gets Two Thumbs Up

I've been using Flickr for free image hosting for a few months and I have to say I'm quite impressed, especially since I started using their Flickr Uploader (Beta). It a program that allows me to upload pictures from my computer without having to open a browser and select the files one at a time. Instead I can right click on a bunch of images in Windows Explorer and right-click to "Send to Flickr". A little app comes up and two seconds later the pictures are being uploaded. Very convienent.

I started using Imageshack in the spring but lately they have been including pop-under ads when viewing pics on their site and that's not cool in my books.

Rita gearing up

Hurricane Rita is now a Category 5 and one of the top three ever recorded for the low pressure its generating. It promises to hit the coast of Texas with extreme force. How much more can the Gulf coast take before its a kind of ghost town?

They are saying that New Orleans will be able to support only half of the population it had before Katrina and the flooding. I can't imagine what the other 250000 people are going to do in the meantime.

I'm so fortunate to live up here out of Hurrican Alley. But why do I have a bad feeling about the coming winter? Is Ontario due for another ice storm?

Yeah, That'll Work

Greg Weston reports for Sun Media that:

Today's tour of the federal funny farm takes us to National Defence headquarters, where the generals have concocted a truly novel battle plan to end political meddling in the bidding for huge military contracts.

Get rid of the bidding.

Sources tell us the defence department has drafted a detailed plan to buy up to $10 billion of new aircraft over the coming decade, an expenditure just slightly less than this year's entire military budget.

If all goes to plan, the biggest procurement program in Canadian history would include not a single competitive bid. Instead, the generals would simply pick the planes they fancy, the government would hand out the contracts, and taxpayers would be stuck with the tab.

No muss. No fuss. No bids to rig.

Offered without comment because the pure poison I would spew towards the ruling party would cause an environmental disaster.

Roofing is Hard Work

Spent all day yesterday in warm weather roofing a part of my parent's house. How professional roofers manage to do it all the time I don't know, I was exhausted by the end of the day. Fingers got cut, muscles got worked, neck got a little burnt; that's some rough stuff I tell ya!

Next weekend is a relaxing birthday party for my Cousin Taylor. We'll be taking the kids with us, they love to go to the farm in Greenbush.

Mini-Camera Pics

What's Your Esitmated Life Span?

"Your calculated health span is 89.1 years"

Take the quiz here: http://www.agingresearch.org/calculator/quiz.cfm

Telemarketers Must Die!

We don't pick up the phone for numbers we don't recognize. Sorry, if its important you'll mail me a letter or leave a message.

We had a voicemail a couple weeks ago. "Hello, this is Joanne with HSBC Financial, could William please give me a call at 1-866-555-5555? Thank you."  I had had similar call the month before but that was because a payment on a credit card was a day late. I had paid off the card in the meantime so I ignored it.

A couple weeks later, the same message occured. I ignored again. Then, this week I get the message for a third time. In frustration, I copy down the phone number and call her up.

"Hello, Joanne speaking."

"Hi, this is William Dullemond. You've been calling me and leaving messages?"

"Oh yes. Did you receive a letter from us a while ago explaining how we offer lines of credit?"

"Ummm, I don't need one thanks."

"Are you sure? We have good rates and ..."

"No thank you, we're fine. Goodbye."

If anyone from HSBC Financial reads this, know that your company is officially on my Shit List. I despise telemarketing.

Do you Believe In UFOs?

Interesting article on Canoe: Lights In the Sky

I'm on the fence about the whole thing. Part of me likes to believe we are being visited by beings from another world and that we will someday make official contact, but the skeptic in me acknowledges the nearly impossible physical limitations in travelling from nearby stars, the low probability of a nearby alien civilization existing during the period of our civilization, and the high probability that all UFO reports could be explained logically if given enough time to investigate thoroughly.

Still, I would give up almost anything to have a genuine unexplainable UFO experience myself. Preferably one I survive of course. Something to really make my heart beat faster and my skin crawl.

Digital Camera Update

No pics yet, expect some tonight though. I had to wrestle with figuring out how to download the pics off the camera without deleting them in the process. To make everything more interesting, the small manual with the camera was obviously translated from a Chinese dialect to English by someone with English as a second or third language. For example:

"For best operation, ensure lots of rays."

I assume they are trying to say make sure there is plenty of light. Its quite amusing to read actually.

My Political Profile

Via Voice in the Wilderness:

Digital Camera Arrived

My $8 digital camera arrived in the mail last night. Its very small, and can take about 20 pictures of 328x240 pixels. I need to buy a AAA battery for it before I try it out. Expect examples later today.

Updated Template

I've managed to update my template including links to Can Conv and Never Forget in the side bar, as well as the "View Related Items" link below each post title that links back into Can Conv and shows posts from other Canadian bloggers about the same topic.

Good work to Andrew for setting these valuable resources up.

Ghastly

We can expect to hear many horror stories coming out of New Orleans in the coming weeks and months, but this one certainly has to be among the worst we'll encounter:

Doctors working in hurricane-ravaged New Orleans killed critically ill patients rather than leaving them to die in agony as they evacuated hospitals, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

With gangs of rapists and looters rampaging through wards in the flooded city, senior doctors took the harrowing decision to give massive overdoses of morphine to those they believed could not make it out alive.

Credit Given Where Credit Is Due

No Sharia Law In Ontario

Good on Dalton McGuinty for shutting down the effort to dilute the power of civil law in Ontario with religious law. It could have only ended badly any other way.

Hat Tip: Tilting at Windmills

Annoucing Never Forget

Andrew from over at Boung By Gravity has gathered a handful of us interested bloggers and started a group blog called Never Forget. This blog is for us to post about Canada's military history and show our resepect and support for our fighting lads and lasses.

Cheers to them for the job that they do. They make us proud.

I'll be updating my template this week to include links to Never Forget and Can Cov.

Comment Spam = Grrrrrrrr

Sorry for the Light Posting

Work has been busy and I haven't had the time I normally do at lunch to put something together. My lunches have been taken up with chess against other co-workers and I've been loving it. I've been improving too. When I started last month I made about 2-3 blunders per game but now I'm averaging just one per game. Plus I've been working on my opening strategies for white and black. Both have helped.

Looking to play chess? Head on over to www.Gameknot.com where you can play games over weeks at a time or in 20 minutes.

How I Survived My Brush with the Wilderness

Or Labour Day Camping v2.0

If you remember, this summer Kim and I went camping at Bon Echo and had a perfect time. No bugs, lots of good weather, and just all round fun. So it was with a light heart we left on our Labour Day camping trip to Charleston Lake with Kim's parents and sister. We did the trip last year and had a good time, surely we can expect the same this year.

We arrived Saturday afternoon and began setting up. Just as we were getting the tarps up light rain began to fall. Ok, no biggie. Clouds aren't too dark. Hey, what's that rumbling noise?

Downpour. About 10 minutes of heavy rain which quickly formed little rivers running down the hill through our campsite. Thank goodness we had the main tarp up or we would have been soaked. The rain stopped and we finished putting up the small tarps and settled in for the evening.

Now, my father in law gets up early every day. That man just cannot sleep in and usually its not a big issue. But Sunday morning he needed his coffee and he didn't think of using the camp stove to cook it. Instead, he needed to start a fire. To start the fire, he needed to split some wood. So at 6:30 am he started swinging the axe. The rest of us were not appreciative of his actions.

So we get up grumbling and start to get ready for the day when we notice that the rear passenger tire of my car is flat. *expletive deleted* So I begin working on taking the tire off and putting the spare on so we can take the tire in to a garage somewhere to be repaired. After much grunting I was able to get the lugnuts off but the tire would not budge. Would not, could not move. It was like it was welded to the axle. So, I tried to call CAA but the cell phones did not have a good enough signal. We hoped in my father-in-law's car and drive out to a pay phone, call CAA, and then proceed to wait for an hour at the gatehouse for the tow truck to arrive. He looks at the tire and says "no problem!" with heart warming confidence.

Thirty minutes later, the flat is still on the axle, the CAA guy is leaving and is shocked that he could not get it off, and I'm running out of patience with the world. Desperate, we inflate the tire as best we can with emergency puncture seal can (which backflowed on my hand and required nail polish remover two days later to try and get off successfully) and drive into town. The Canadian Tire in Gananoque is open and they are able to quickly find the small nail and repair the tire. Heck, they even managed to get the tire off the axle!

We make our way back to camp and can finally relax. It was late afternoon by that time and my mood was quite grim so I took a nice relaxing walk by myself and let nature relax me.

Monday morning we got to sleep in til after 8:30 (we made sure the old man had chopped wood the night before so his morning fire would not wake us) and began packing the stuff to go back into the car.The weather was once again beautiful and we quickly broke camp. After checking out we parked and did a hike up to the lookout, and then said our goodbyes before hitting the road, stopping only at Dairy Queen in Smiths Falls for some much needed ice cream.

Chaos

While the devastation in New Orleans has been staggering, I'm at a complete loss for how quickly the city degenerated into a lawless zone or anarchy. Looting is running rampant, snipers shooting at buses, teens with guns reportedly raping girls, etc. It sounds like the scenes from an end of the world movie. And most disturbing of all is that US government officials seem to be at a complete loss as to what to do next. How can this be?

To anyone with even a cursory knowledge of New Orleans you have to know that its below sea level and protected from flooding by some levees. For years scientists have shown that a hurricane hit could threaten the city with flooding. How could there not be a plan to move the military in and evacuate the city should the worst case scenario occur? What's plan B? Was there even a thought of making plan B? What about plan A?

There's something rotten in the state of Louisianna.

Katrina: How to help

I'm not up to date on all the ways to help out, so I thought I would just point to Andrew's post.

Help if you can.

I am the Chosen One

Hat Tip to Voice in the Wilderness

how jedi are you? :: by lawrie malen