..whatever.

For those who read this for the house news: there is light. We snooped again yesterday. Sunday seems to be the quasi-ultimate day of rest. Sometimes they work. Sometimes there is peace. Yesterday there was peace, and we arrived at the abandonned worksite, clambered over the thawing muck, avoided little bit of wood, nails, and construction refuse everywhere around the perimeter. We toured our top floor for the first time. We took a small smattering of photos, though not nearly enough to please me. Time lingered and guests frettered.

For those who read this for the house news: there are stacks of shingles on the raw plywood roof, there is a three-step concrete porch, there are windows waiting for installation, there are bathroom bits starting to form where required by interest, there has sprouted a boxy little chimney high atop the interest spaces, there are frames and folds, there are doorways corners and nooks, there is a wooden rectangle to hold medicine cabinets, there are stairs and steps on multiple design. We have the shell of a house. We are excited.

February 28, 2005 after 9AM | house , photography | maybe more»

A blade of grass is just a machine of carbon and amino acids. Nanotechnology of nature: a self-regulating collection of chemicals and fluids, harmonious together in a thread of neatly packed sugars, folded and twisted into a matrix of growing and changing swarms of cellular units, plexing into random chao-biotic shapes and forms.

One wonders what might happen if our invented machines of carbons and plastic were allowed to begin from such a primal state and evolve to form their own twists on ecology. Does anyone know of any twisted science fiction that explores this idea? I want to write some short stories about this.

February 28, 2005 after 9AM | thinking , writing | maybe more»

Events connecting as they do through the ebbs and flows of data exchange, I have pushed forward with expermental evilness. Google has long offered an AdSense program for websites, targetted ads pop up here and there as designed, and [rubs hands together] generates cash for the webmaster. I thought I'd poke in an application and see if I would qualify. Oddly enough, this site fits within the realm of their criteria.

Some of you might complain. Ah well.

Thing is, from an experimental perspective I can examine a number of weak justifications:

1) Look at the ads that appear with the site. Some of them are actually relavant or interesting. I've already clicked on one for mere sake of interest.

2) The cheaper this website is for me to operate, the longer I will.

3) A possible thought experiment (and something to write about) as I see how much "click-revenue" a site like this cheezy little thing can actually generate.

Commence complaining now...

February 25, 2005 after 12PM | business , meta , money | maybe more»

I know. Out of character. No photos.

But we drove by the house last night (I having just picked up Karin from work and having had the day off myself) and there was a roof. Yes. A full roof. Frame and plywood and a light dusting of snow, shapes both geometic and house-like coming down along the gable-esque structures atop the garage and above the front door. It seems the framing is nearly complete, and in the interim, the house-"site" looks more and more akin to a livable-structure than a wild mass of wood and concrete reliant on an abstract imagination to fill in the gaps.

The rest is not related to the house and comes down to a mere mental reprogramming.

I've been meaning to write.
I woke up this morning at 6:25 AM.
I've been reading Cloud Atlas.
I watched nearly zero hours television last night.
I walked twelve kilometers yesterday and have the blisters to prove it.
I took an entire gallery of sepia-toned images.
I won Churchill.
I focussed.
I spawned a new mental concept and formulated an interesting plan of attack.

February 22, 2005 after 9AM | house , photography , play , reading , scatter | maybe more»

Karin and I started our Sunday with a tour of the city, planning to do a whole thwack of chores and errands. We wound up at Brett and Lenore's house (after most of the errands were complete) and while Karin and Lenore debated the intracacies of craft supplies, Brett pulled out a borrowed copy of Katamari Damacy and shoved it into his Playstation. Six hours later we pulled ourselves away from the game to eat a late dinner and watch the Simpsons.

Karin made it a point to insist that buying our own copy of the game would be seriously hazardous to both our time and our sanity.

February 21, 2005 after 7AM | city , friends , play | maybe more»

I was out for a short walk. It was yesterday, around lunchtime. The strangest thing happened: not ten feet directly ahead of me a pigeon fell from the sky without any sort of visible explanation.

Thunk!

Dead.

True story.

February 19, 2005 after 8AM | walks , weird | maybe more»

With very little remorse and plenty of gurgling humour, I crushed a meme within the skull of my six-year-old cousin this past weekend.

Kids have stacks of those weird concepts, anyhow. I suppose, ultimately, it's better that they lose them slowly and from a variety of sources than all at once. It would be akin to telling them that Santa, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy are all figments of their wee little imaginations nutured by a pragmatic society.. and then handing them an ice cream cone and sending them on their way.

Travis and I watched Shark Tale this weekend. And as the credits rolled, captioned images of the characters appeared on the screen the names of their voice-actors appearing boldly below. Travis, who is in first grade and is just learning to read, seemed confused that the phonetics that are still just a liquid slurry of miscomprehension in his little brain didn't seem to jive with the words that were appearing on the screen under the pictures of the characters. Another way to explain: "Oscar" the fishy main character, as he seemed to perceptively understand, is not spelled W-I-L-L-S-M-I-T-H. He confessed, at least so much in that six-year-old-A-D-D kind-of-way, and I innocently explained that Will Smith was the actor who did the voice of Oscar the fish.

"Huh?"

A few minutes later, with the help of Internet Movie Database and Google Image Search, Travis was the proud owner of a new thought process. As an example, some mental constructs (obviously taken for granted by you and I and other balanced individuals) that can literally blow the mind of a six-year-old include:

+ Donkey and Mushu are one and the same.
+ The voice of Gill in Finding Nemo is done by the same actor who plays the Green Goblin.
+ Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius is actually an attractive young woman

To you and I, well, hopefully, these things are of only passing curiosity. To Travis they were worthy of a full half-hour (in six-year-old time, that's like, months) of devoted thought and interest (which, of course included such exaggerated expressions as grabbing his face with both hands and flopping in sheer wondered exasperation against the back of his chair).

Someone later suggested it might have been funny to let him in on another secret at the same time: "Oh, by the way Travis. Remember when Santa showed up on your doorstep? Well, that was... uh... well... me."

February 14, 2005 after 12PM | comics , life , movies , weird | maybe more»

Another house update? Well, at least an external one.

We were in Red Deer this weekend -- yaddayaddayadda -- and swinging by the build site on the way back to the apartment we found the house sealed.

Sealed you ask?

It was bound to happen eventually. With windows installed AND sitting loose in the living room... With doors and floors and walls appearing everywhere... With busy little contruction dudes leaving their tools around and about... it all added up to half of a house with some locked doors, and of course, us in the lurch and peeking into our new windows.

The showhome was closed, but I don't think we would have gotten in regardless.

But that's how it goes: and I managed to snap a whole thwock of pictures before the sun disappeared and we took off to finish our trip back home.

February 13, 2005 after 8PM | house , photography | maybe more»

I spent my lunch pretending I am a lawyer.

Well, sort of.

A bunch of things about websites, blogs, privacy, and all that fun stuff got me thinking: You know? I'm putting myself out there everyday, sticking my neck out just a little further, fishing just a little deeper in those digital waters for an interested audience -- and unfortunately the nature of the internet means it's easier to cast it out than reel it back in. Who knows who could turn up these very words in a few minutes, days, weeks, years, decades -- and, well, sadly enough try to hold them against me for their content or even just their existence.

The internet isn't the wild-west anymore. It used to be something like that: metaphorically. But now? It's a cut-throat virtual land of commerce and trade, with crazy lawyers and other folks with sway patrolling it's streets. A guy needs a little protection.

So here's the thing: I don't know if it's legally binding. I don't care if it's legally binding. But effective immediately, every single byte of original content on this webpage is hereby proclaimed private and confidential. Every single byte of original content on this webpage is mine and I get to decide (a) who reads it, (b) who stores it, and (c) what I want to charge for that use.

But don't worry: for most of you it's still free and always will be. Most of you -- that's like 99.999% of you -- only need to be honest, interesting people, and I'll never charge you a cent. Family? No problem. Friends? Go right on in. Fellow bloggers? Well, watch your step, but we all know you're cool, right? So that's it. Not one penny. Just enjoy.

But here's the catch: if anyone, ever, uses this site or the information on it to hurt me, my family, or my company, or tries to sue me or fire me based on any sort of information or data contained here... bang! That's when the other shoe drops -- there's the line: and it-ain't-free-no-more. In fact, it could get very pricy for you, evil-dude. Why these words alone could cost you upwards of $5000 just to read them -- one time.

Huh?

The wild-west is being bound and gagged: Certain folks have been getting fired because their bosses have read their blogs. Other folks have been getting sued for comments that visitor.people have written on their sites. Malicious others have hunted down personal information and background data on bloggers to use it against them. So here's the deal. New policy: No such thing as free anymore, at least if you have evil thoughts or otherwise wouldn't have my permission to use this stuff.

Stated. Fact. Expect an invoice if you don't make the cool-list. By the time you get it we'll probably be in court for some other reason, anyhow. Maybe a settlement is in order? Just make sure to read the EULA I wrote over lunch. I hate those things, but the world (wide web) is a scary place these days.

February 11, 2005 after 3PM | business , meta , opinions , politics | maybe more»

I would like to the pull the erronious nuances of my interaction with the city into a tight bundle and toss them from a tall bridge. There is that lurking feeling, something is again hiding from a travelling circus of reality, like a core buried beneath the teaming surface, locked without light or air, but stemming a flow of information that it controls and with which it controls.

I pull back for a moment and contemplate my options: engagement or plurality.

Plurality seems like the choice of more interest, a nagging follow-through, swinging fully outwards into the quantum foam and examining the whipped lemon-merangue of the universe, trapped in metaphorical descriptors that would otherwise be fragile and pointless, but now offer the only taste of indescribability.

I would like to the pull the erronious nuances of my interaction with the city forward, lock them into some cohesively nervous twitch that could be visualized and augmented with a digital becon, quantitative and pure, abstraction locked in the function and not the purpose.

It might not happen, so I pull those notions together, weave their varying strings of confusion into a fabric that I can pull over my eyes like a blindfold: the depth of perception fades to a blur when the truth is held to close. The pattern is lost. The chaos is shrunk to a single point of colour. The idea is not perceptible.

Explain and justify.

February 10, 2005 after 11AM | abstract , city , writing | maybe more»

You'll need to pardon my excitement. Karin and I stopped by the build site last night on our drive back from Calgary: we took the shortcut in, turning down Elerslie Road and piking up Terwilligar. From that angular sort-of vantage we could see something that hadn't been there before, even as late as Friday night. It was an odd sort of chill to drive down the the street that will soon be included in our address and to round the corner by the park (that will soon be "our park") look across the snow and see a little wooden structure blossoming from the landscape where every time before all there had been was space and mounds of frozen clay.

I had anticipated the construct, but seeing it there on the landscape was something else entirely. It was Sunday, late-afternoon, but still light enough to take decent photos. I had hoped to sneak onto the site, climb up onto our new floor and look at the wood shapes close-up. But there were five people working on it. Five. So we parked and walked by, inconspicuously snapping pics of the changes from across the roadway, then snuck round back to the end of the half-finished road to the west of us, and stole some pictures from a rear angle.

Progress. Ahh...

The plan, or so we were told, is to have the framers out by the end of the week. In essence, that means two floors, interior walls, and a roof. Something tells me that I'm going to be doing a lot of driving this week.

February 7, 2005 after 9AM | house , photography , travel | maybe more»

So, betwixt the furstrations of having a ill-tempered website, a mess of chaos at the office, and innumerable little terrors mixing through the folds of my everyday existence, there has been the house. It seems that the bitterly cold weather of weeks past caught us up, and we spent a number of frustrating post-work and weekend trips to the site to look at a slowly progressing concrete hole.

When it rains, it pours: when it shines, the sky opens and heavenly light streams through the atmosphere. Work stabilized for a bit, the web-stuff is sorting out, and when Karin and I visited the house-site on Wednesday evening there were the makings of a floor. The framing has begun; And I imagine by the time we spin around this evening there may even be something resembling walls and stairs and other house-like structures built of the wooden bits now scattered around my future front yard.

Photos? Well, it was dark and we were being sneaky. The showhome was "barely open" so we went by without saying much. And far be it from me to terrorize my neighbors with bright flashing lights from my camera late into the evening. I'll save that for when I live there and have a house to duck into for protection.

February 4, 2005 after 9AM | house , meta , photography , weather | maybe more»

Don't you hate it when your website falls into utter and total chaos? Okay, so it's not completely relatable angst, but two weeks of it is very much a pain in the ass.

Things are coming together. If you've managed to read this, drop me a note and let me know that you care! Ha!

February 3, 2005 after 3PM | meta , stress | maybe more»