Canon came out with a new DSLR recently. I wouldn't mind one of these: http://www.steves-digicams.com/2005_reviews/rebelxt.html

If only.

March 29, 2005 after 12PM | photography , shopping | maybe more»

As part of an ongoing campaign to culture-ify ourselves, Karin and I bought tickets to the "Club Friday" incarnation of the Citadel Theatre's season ticket offerings. Roughly, this means that every month or so we're forced to dress up and drag ourselves to a play. Friday (oddly enough also Good Friday) was the fifth installment of our six-ticket extravaganza, and we were treated to a rural-Alberta adaptation of Anton Chekhov's Vanya.

Set the mood, the play unfolds: The pre-depression struggles of a twisted family across unfolding, multi-angled relationships, through financial straits, across disparate realities, misunderstandings, and states of existence.

Until now, each play in the Citadel series has been dramatically different: a tragic drama, a one-woman monologue, a musical, and a neo-modern greek-thing performed in a swimming pool stage. But it seems we've come full circle and we were treated to another tragic family drama starring Tom Wood the playwright as lead actor.

It was intense. Perhaps staring directly at the numerous mirrors of glittering metaphor was a little to emotionally intense. Maybe I was just tired. Some of the casting was questionable. Mostly, it fell together, though it took a bit to get over the range of ability on the stage. Wood was charged, as usual, dropping his requisite f-bomb well into the second act. And someone in the audience was wearing the most foul-smelling perfume I've been subject to in a long time. My throat dried up completely and I had to buy an overpriced beverage to soften the intermission.

But we do things like that: we watch plays and disect the characters, turning them from illusions into charactatures illuminating the gaps in our own lives. These people walking around on stage, pretending, bring out the folds of our own existence and shine little spotlights right back towards the audience. "So which character are you?" I ask Karin during the break. We reluctantly fill in the roles. "Yeah."

March 29, 2005 after 11AM | city , life | maybe more»

Juste recently, a shorte while ago, we splurged and put in a quasi-big order to Amazon. It arrived late laste week, juste in time for a four-day weekend and some sporadic Easter reading. My splurge-booke was the latest installment by Brian Greene, The Fabric of the Cosmos, his second attempt to explaine to the simple-folk (like me) the complexities of modern quantum physics and the nature of reality. I read his first book more than a year past, sitting through my lunchbreaks in a park in uptown Vancouver. People were always smoking there. It was harde to concentrate. The resulte is that I know a little bit about string-theory and a little bit about eleven-dimensional universes.

But only a little bit.

So here I am again reading about the subtle fabrics of spacetime and the discoveries at the cusp of moderne physics. Over my head, you say? Sort of, I reply cautiously.

I've ploughed through the firste hundred pages in a little more than five days, stopping in briefe spurts, here and there, to sip some coffee -- or in longer, meandering pauses at natural section-brāks to think about the intrikasies of the ideas I juste consumed.

If you've never picked up a booke on moderne physics, it's worthe a few moments of your time -- if for no othere reason than it makes people thinke your are simultaneously crazy and smarte -- and you can use big words like quantum entanglement and special relativity in generale conversation whilste having some vague idea of what you are talking about. The one drawbacke is the creeping suspicion that such endeavore is so rare, no one else you know is likely to buy AND read suche a booke, and you'll be left talking to yourselfe about the complex physics of the universe. Sad, but true.

I'll let you know howe it turns out.

March 29, 2005 after 9AM | coffee , reading , scientist | maybe more»

Some random house updates for those who are still playing along -- and I know you're out there:

::: The Jayman Survey folks continue to leave messages on our voicemail insisting that we call them back to answer a few customer service questions. I would almost tend to think that good customer service would involve calling our house when two people who might be able to afford building a house (ie two people with full time jobs) might be at home. Ten AM doesn't quite fit that bill.

::: Some folks have already noticed the small collection of photos in the gallery that I uploaded this past weekend: we drove by to find (to our delighted surprise) that the house was half-sided. Very cool. Can anyone say colour?

::: Autumn called last night to schedual our official electrical walkthrough. We're going to have a guided tour next week during banker's hours, wherein we'll tell them that the electrical (the same electrical we've been looking at for a couple weeks now) is just perfectly fine from the perspective of our highly trained eyes. I'm sure I'll have even more photos then.

March 29, 2005 after 9AM | house , photography | maybe more»

For those playing along, there are more photos of the house in the gallery (go to page 12). Karin and I did the drive last night. Can someone say insulation? With the electric out of the way, the framing (and subsequent touch-ups) all approved by the inspectors, and the ducts and plumbing installed it seems that the crews have pushed ahead with the insulation and drywall process. This is the crux. This is the pivot. This is the point when I can stop exaggerating about how exciting the vague wood, concrete, and plastic structures seem to be. Finishing will begin to unfold and the house will take on the shapes, colours, and textures that will ultimately be the shapes, colours, and textures that we live with everyday. Karin is officially on the edge of excitement so that means it's okay to be interested now.

March 24, 2005 after 7AM | house , photography | maybe more»

True story, and it just happened....

I'm listening to my iPod while I work. It's easy to quasi-ignore it whist I burrow through research papers. It's on shuffle, skipping through the odd assortment of music I have stored in it's little snow-polished belly. It's playing randomly. It's made some odd choices this afternoon. Oh, well. But it's been quiet for a long moment, sweeping into the front-end crescendo of something like Also Sprach Zarathustra or U2's Where the Street's Have No Name I think, the two songs twisting, conscious in my mind for a fluttering second. I'm unable to place it, but in that fragile flicker of time it could be either. I tilt the screen towards me. It's Also Sprach Zarathustra. Too mellow, I think. Besides, I would rather have something like Where the Street's Have No Name playing right now, anyhow. Oh, well. I cheat, and click next. Not a word of a lie: Where the Street's Have No Name -- the title appears on the screen and the data wells into that sweeping front-end crescendo.

I'm satisfactorily spooked for the day.

March 23, 2005 after 2PM | iPod , music , weird , work | maybe more»

We sat down for a few hours last night and finished off our tax returns. You'd almost think that we'd get on that sooner. After all, with RRPs, RRSPs, donations, moving expenses, and a change in province of residence we're in line to get a healthy refund. Neither is it really, truly a chore: gone are the days of filling out reams of incoprehensible papers. Not that I ever did it that way anyhow: Now you just get your receipts in neat, little piles, log onto the system, click through the online forms, fill in the blanks, pay the $25 fee for quicktax, upload the tax files, download the backup files, have a nap and wait for the government to send you your money.

Alas. The stress.

The burden comes not in doing the taxes, but rather figuring out how to wisely spend the refund. We as two computer professionals, both who earn our pay-cheques based on our technical ability, who are cooperative in a side business revolving around technology, and who both enjoy computer-related entertainment, own -- believe it or not -- exactly one functioning computer. We tossed the idea around a bit and thought we might pick up a new one with some of our tax refund. We're considering a Mac-Mini. Why? Well, considering that it is funky-cool and unix-based, that I own an iPod, that I don't rely on any software that absolutely requires windoze, and that we're both suckerZ (with a capital Z) for cool technology, it's either a Mac, another Dell, a build-it-yourself but not-nearly-as-cool machine, or I forget and just go buy myself a PSP.

Yeah. I know. I'm a hypocrite for consumerism: but only when there is excess cash to be pumped back into our fragile, little economy.

March 23, 2005 after 8AM | iPod , money , shopping , technology | maybe more»

I subscribed to the pay-version of comics.com a couple of weeks ago. I get all my favorite syndicated comic strips delivered to my gmail-box every day. I'm thoroughly enjoying it. Cheaper than buying a newspaper. Plus I get to weed out all the crap.

This isn't an advertisement. I just thought you'd like to know.

March 23, 2005 after 8AM | comics , play , reading | maybe more

It's been snowing.... just in case you don't live here or can't be bothered to look out your window. Heaps of the white stuff are falling from the sky, filling spaces that just a week ago were drying the last puddles from the remains of deepest winter. It's been snowing for days. And the roads are slick, covered in that unsettled brown oatmeal that gets continually stirred up into a meandering obstacle course to the office. One of my co-workers just called and she's parked on the Whitemud and is going to be a little late. The name of that road is almost too appropriate today: I was considering an addendum of explanation.

On Sunday, it was snowing too. The flakes were not quite as aggresive as they are today, but I huddled in my apartment for most of the day anyhow. I plugged into the iPod and played solitaire whilst listening to the last couple hours of Snow Crash. I suppose you could call it a hacker book, but it's really more of a culture book. If you haven't read this one yet, you really -- truely -- can't call yourself a geek until you do. Good science fiction transcends the aura of technology and just tells a story about humanity that we can look at from a bit of a distance and think about all those tricky questions. This one is diffinitive. It's one of those novels that people write essays about and incorporate into their thesis. No, not because it's cool or trendy to have popular science fiction quoted in your doctoral, philosophy thesis. It gets quoted because it is a meta-book. It is self-descriptive and puts the whole concept of... well... concepts into perspective. It describes viral ideas, memetic thoughts, religion disguised as dogma, spirituality hidden in the folds of historical confusion. It predicted the Internet. It manifests the power of free-thought over state-induced fatalism. It is idealism wrapped into the notion that knowledge is power.

I finished Cloud Atlas on Sunday, too. (The weekend of book-ends?) The last page struck me with the chord of dramatic irony that is my life and ideas: talk about fatalism. Inject wandering soul here: idealism? Let me tell you about idealism and the so-called easy way of dealing with those tough questions. David Mitchell or even Douglas Coupland may have had a lot to teach on wandering souls, but Douglas Adams summed it up nicely too, just like so: ...because most of the things which stir the universe up in anyway are cause by dispossessed people. There are two ways of accounting for this. One is to say that if everyone just sat around at home nothing would ever happen - this is very simple - the other is to say, as Oolon Colluphid has at great length in his book ’Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Guilt, But Were Too Ashamed to Ask’, that every being in the universe is tied to his birthplace by tiny invisible force tendrils composed of little quantum packets of guilt. If you travel far from your birthplace, these tendrils get stretched and distorted. This compares with an ancient Arcturan Proverb “How ever fast the body travels, the soul travels at the speed of an Arcturan Mega-Camel.” This would mean, in these days of hyperspace and Improbability Drive, that most people’s souls are wandering unprotected in deep space in a state of some confusion; and this would account for a lot of things.

Just like when it snowing: it's easier to hide in your house listening to audiobooks. But eventually you gotta get out there and live your life. You know: plough through the drifts that want to hold you back and push your car into fish-tails and spin-outs.

March 22, 2005 after 9AM | iPod , reading , thinking , weather | maybe more

St. Patrick's day is a suck of an anniversary for us. In 2003 we came home from work, had a light dinner, and tried to figure out where I'd left my digital camera. Two hours later we were relaying a list of stolen items to a friendly police officer, and pondering yet another cog in the orchestration of our flight back East-ward. Two years later we ignore the fact, I pocket my digicam -- somedays almost wishing it would disappear so I could have an excuse to get a new one -- and fly south-ward.

Steve is tending a quiet showhome and he's even more talkative than normal. We end up discussing the nuances of contractual labour and the advantages of the housing market in Alberta over British Columbia. And he hands us the first key to our house.

It's little square-ish, gold-coloured strip of metal: typical, with the regular jagged edges. I've gotten used to the microchipped car keys, smart cards, or three-dimensional, security hyper-keys. This is just a plain, brass key.

A loaner. But our house, it seems, is now locked.

We take pictures, of course, sneaking around in that space between daylight and darkness when it seems darkest of all because your eyes haven't adjusted to the light and you're tucked into newly sealed spaces that are meant to have electricity and light fixtures for these circumstances.

The ducts are installed. I take some photos. Electrical cables are strung throughout the house. I take more photos. Cable TV and telephone lines are snaking between floors. The camera flashes again. Vacu-flows are roughed in. Snap, flash, process.

Karin is cold. I lock the door. We go for pizza. The apartment is secure when we get home.

March 18, 2005 after 8AM | house , photography , stress | maybe more

We control information in a variety of ways. Blogs are the medium of a generation of disillusioned corprocrats. Thoughts are encapsulated in modular nodes that cohese to form a wandering opinion in the guise of a personal narrative. Understanding the medium is as important as understanding the message. (1) Journals escape the exaggerated thoughts of the writer to later readers. (2) Music encapsulates contagion, verse, and harmony in memetic flow. (3) Books formalize logical stories into patterns of narrative. (4) Film transcribes the formal and exclusive data of words, language, and ideas into visual and highly transmutable concepts. (5) Advertising distils concept and desire into viral thought. (6) Legend and myth propel and amplify tested concepts and story into the far future. Failing to understand purpose implies misunderstanding of disinformation.

statistics

blog entries: 126
percent of blog entires (meta): 20%
percent of blog entries (focused): 15%
percent of blog entries (abstractions): 8%
percent of blog entries (memetic): 17%
percent of blog entries (pure narrative): 40%
themes: 30
cohesion to thematics: 67%
narratives: 3
cohesion to narratives: 85%
links: 718
advertisements: 723
percent of advertisements (revenue): 69%
percent of advertisements (viral): 21%
percent of advertisements (narrative): 10%
comments: 851 (depreciated)
percent of comments (spam): 79%
percent of comments (misconception): 8%
percent of comments (offtopic): 11%
percent of comments (defendable): 2%
readers: undefined

Disinformation is key.

March 16, 2005 after 8AM | abstract , meta | maybe more

I blinked and there was two inches of snow. Ideal timing? The property managers for our apartment chose today to do a thorough clean of the underground parkade. Not only does everyone need to park outside in the snow for the day, but at four o'clock we're all going to pour back inside and melt gravel drenched snow onto the nice clean concrete.

Smart.

March 16, 2005 after 8AM | weather | maybe more

Though hesitantly, I think I may have (very recently) signed up for more than one set of physical activites for the upcoming summer. Of course that's counting neither the numerous hikes and outdoor adventures that Karin has already planned nor the exercise in packing, moving, unpacking, and the yardwork associated with a brand new house. This is external to all that. Man, am I going to be in good shape come beach-season!

First, I think I'm running one of those overnight relays. You know, the kind where you get on this team who runs a 12-hour race from 7PM to 7AM. Still working out the details on that one, but sounds both promising and painful all at once. I might be hitting some folks up for pledges on that one. It's the whole cancer-fundraiser, good-cause, you-know-the-drill thing. It's also the I'd-better-get-training-more thing.

Second, Gene and Lily are trying to set up a team for a Rec Soccer League in the city. I told Lily I was game, so we'll see if I make the cut. Hmm.... team sports. How out of character for me.

I suppose this means my little lunch-time jogs on the ClubFit treadmill may need to, in the unrelated words of Emeril, kick it up a notch. Sure, thirty minutes of sweating with the iPod is better than nothing, but it still barely compensates for the twelve hours of daily computer use. Sigh.

March 15, 2005 after 12PM | fitness , iPod , life , play | maybe more

Things.I.see.Word.List : because I'm still dazed from the lights of the oncoming traffic, and I'm feeling wordy...

wine and cheese reception
Dawkins The Selfish Gene
Plan du site
Eco Medical
RRROLL UP THE RIM TO WIN
Whistling Kettle
4" Tropicals
Major Accent
starbucks
DEDICATION
Everything to Everyone
meridian
It's Your Turn
Applications with PHP and MySQL

March 15, 2005 after 8AM | abstract | maybe more

Karin left me alone in Chapters in West Edmonton Mall for an hour and a half this past Saturday afternoon. It was a mob scene. She shopped. I bought a starbuck, listened to my iPod, and browsed through the stacks, safely away from the bulk of the crowds.

Two books caught my focus:

Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe, a pop-sci physics book on the potential unification of quantum mechanics and general relativity through string theory -- I read it last year -- has a new book out called The Fabric of the Cosmos: Space, Time, and the Texture of Reality. I read the first chapter in the bookstore, but figure with the latest promotion (and raise) I can afford to get back on my book-of-the-month program. I think I'll put this one on the list for the near future. Light summer reading, maybe. The pages that I read hinted at a philosophical twist, some Baudrillard style musings on string theory and modern physics. I'm a closet geek on that kind of stuff.

Alton Brown, the only real reason to watch Iron Chef America, has a new book out. It's called I'm Just Here for More Food, or something -- a follow-up to a similarly titled tome from a couple years back. Admittedly, it's the style of cooking book I'm recently tranced by: nerd-cooking, wherein it's more about the chemical ambiance of the dish, the hows, whys, and wherefores of the ingredients mixing, heating, blending and ultimately producing stable (and edible) compounds, than the style of the food or anything else so trite. On this line, I was thinking of a little web-side-project -- when I have time -- involving a little mini food-o-pedia or recipiki (tho the domain-name is already taken for that, drat!) to catalog whatever research I could dig up on the food science front.

March 14, 2005 after 12PM | coffee , food , iPod , reading | maybe more

I've been reading this book called Cloud Atlas, dragging the consumption into a long, deliberate process because, well, after paying twenty-five dollars for the book I'm going to enjoy every word. Occasionally, I stumble across these odd-sort of stories. This one came courtesy of the CBC and a truck-ride home from the house site: a referral by a local bookshoppe owner slash regular reviewer. It intrigued me, the enticing oddness of the whole concept, as she explained it guardedly, as though she couldn't quite put her finger on the reasons why she was recommending it. But yet she was.

I picked up a copy a few weeks ago while out wandering on a day off.

I carried it into the Edmonton City Centre mall, and sat in one of those big leather chairs in the middle of the lunch rush, people in suits and business attire dashing to and fro while I sat there in my jeans and tee, diving into this escape of a novel from a genre I usually breeze by.

The story is simple. Sort of. It is six intertwined narratives of vastly different styles starting in or about the seventeenth century and ending somewhere in the far-but-not-too-far futures. Six storytellers. Six circumstances. Six wild and engrossing mini-adventures through the local culture. And somehow they are all linked. But, and this is where it gets a little more complex, the stories are halved. One reads the first half of the first story, and is plunged in the second story. The explanation for the cut-off is explained a little ways into the second story, but shortly thereafter one dives into the third story, and so on, all the way to the last story. The last story is read from start to finish, then the reader is dropped back into the fifth story where it was left off. Again, one retreats from the far-future narrative, back through time, and little bits of the puzzle the was built up on the accent is revealed on the decent.

Odd, but the construction of the book is as intriguing and (possibly) as vital to the plot as the narratives themselves. I've long begun my decent, but I think I might have to run to satisfy that curiosity.

March 14, 2005 after 9AM | reading | maybe more

I don't know if this is true or not, but it made me feel a wee, little, tiny, marginal-bit better about sitting in there this morning, drinking from my logo-mug, and reading strange and unusual books:

"Starbucks Fair Trade coffee is a blend of wash-processed Arabica coffees. The blend is subject to flavor variations due to availability of high quality Fair Trade coffees. Fair Trade certification increases farmers' incomes through forming cooperatives and linking them directly to coffee importers – coffees are guaranteed a minimum price, allowing farmers a more sustainable way of life."

I write "strange and unusual" because (with my busy life) I've finally reached the middle of the book and there was a climax. What kind of book has a climax right in the middle. I mean, it sort of makes sense in the context of the story, but still... I ask you.

March 11, 2005 after 1PM | coffee , reading | maybe more

I dropped Karin at the train station so she could go to her volunteering at the Briar, and I drove down to the house. For the first time in weeks, probably because it was nearly seven o'clock in the evening, there were no workers. To boot, the door was wide open. The changes since Sunday were insignificant: window trimmings, decorative posts, more plumbing including the facets on the outside of the house, and plenty of cleaning. I muddied the floors a little, what with the melt and clay surrounding whole site, and snapped about seventy photos, mostly boring pictures of the plumbing and important framing areas, for my own future reference. There may be a couple of interest that I'll post later, but for now I've had too much lcd glow from redesigning this site yet again.

March 10, 2005 after 9PM | house , photography , volunteer | maybe more

it's not that i want to be completely abstract, but sometimes the pressures of these complex realities can't be explained except in metaphor. explain that in a metaphor, huh?

March 9, 2005 after 10AM | abstract | maybe more»

Is it truely bad form to herald the collapse of modern society? It's not like I'm going to go purchase a sandwich board, write doom-sayer phrases in bold letters, and parade myself up and down Jasper Avenue. At least, not quite yet. But, more often it seems, there is an apparent antagonism towards the warnings of our imminent changes.

According to sources, the American debt is a little less than eight trillion dollars. Perspective? That works out to about twenty-six thousand dollars per person in the US. That's a lot of money. Work that out across time, and that big ol'debt number is generously increasing by roughly, say, the equivalent of my mortgage -- every two seconds. Sure, the Canadian economy is trudging along fine right now. But that's like saying this: you're out for a Sunday bike ride and feeling just fine -- until the elephant to which you're inexplicably chained lurches, sways, has a heart attack and tumbles over a steep cliff on the edge of the road.

Yoink!

But then it's bad form to mention the elephant, isn't it? Shhh! Everything is going along fine. [Evil eye! Evil eye!] My endurance is holding up very well, thank you. I just had an energy bar, checked my pulse, and swallowed a splash of fresh, clean Canadian spring-water. My legs aren't even tired. [Pedal. Pedal.] What do you mean I'm actually in serious danger. Nod and smile.

The average person has so much credit card debt that if the economy lurched too far to either side, let's say tomorrow, they would go flailing off into the vacant spaces of eternal banruptcy, their wallets collapsing from the vacuum of poverty. Poor people. I don't have that kind of debt, but so what. Should I think that this makes me safe?

There was a thread on Fark this morning. Dismal. Sad. Disappointing, just how thoroughly the discussion deteriorated into an abject denial and utterly baseless defence of the strength of the American economy. For all our short tempers, many of the canucks on the site were simply trying to play the resolute and sober friend: "I really don't think you should be driving, George. You're gonna crash that thing and hurt somebody."

A gurgle of international curses is quickly followed by a "don't tell us what to do." Nod and smile.

This discussion quickly falls into an us-versus-them arguement: we're apparently simple folk, living up north in the ice and cold, unable to think for ourselves because apparently the strength of our reasoning capability is directly proportional to the size of our hive-like mentality. We're small, and stupid, they claim. Nod and smile. What do we know about big things like economies and social security, debt, and wars on terror? Step aside, the grown-ups are talking now. I could refute this, but step back leaving the fodder-droppers to their own.

It's like a religion. "We're right because we say we're right, and denying our inherent rightness is exactly more proof that we're just as right as we thought. Right? Why am I asking, I know I'm right!"

Shrug. Yoink! I shouldn't care, but I don't want to go tumbling off a cliff chained to a lumbaring elephant just yet.

We, it seems, are in denial. Our corpocracy dictates the need for us to spend our money. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. All that stuff he's telling you about saving those pennies: it's wrong. It's blasphemy. Fiscally responsible individuals, why, they're just supporting terrorism. They want to destroy us all: hoarding and saving. Money is a fuel, after all, and fuel only works when we throw it into the fire. Nod and smile.

We are slaves to the drug: affluenza, is the modern epidemic. Avian flu, AIDS, Anthrax, Ebola? Bah! These are ruses. They are red herrings meant to throw you from the real killer: big gas guzzling cars, fatty hamburgers, immaculate homes large enough to house an entire enclave of family members, unwatchably huge collections of DVDs. You know: stuff.

Ah, but I'm just another crank, right? I'm just here spouting off my mouth about the fall of society: extreme scenarios never really happen, after all.

Everything will work out in the end. Nod and smile. Nod and smile. Unless... well...

March 4, 2005 after 3PM | money , opinions , stress | maybe more»

I've been waking up earlier everyday. Call it a mental reprogramming. Rather than sleeping in until half past seven, hopping out of bed, rushing to shower and get myself out the door for work with hectic haste, I have mellowed the process. I set my alarm to shortly after six, turned it to a loud country music station (so that it quickly annoys me and compels me from my slumber) and am ready for work by shortly after seven.

The result is nearly an hour of caz-time.

I get to sit around, go grab a coffee at Starbucks, read a chapter of the current luggable-novel I'm devouring, or better yet, sit and write.

This new process has been musing for about two weeks now, and the thrill is settling into a steady, productive roar. I've been trapping some seriously cool ideas on paper, neatly scribbled into a coiled notebook that I force myself to carry around for just such emergencies. The second, followthru result is simply that I've compounded a new literary ecology for my morning mind to work through, and it's yielding some vague progress.

I'm stirred.

A few dozen pages of scribbles, quirks, ideas, invented conversations, and descriptors can managebly make the leap into a short story of some sort, potentially in the near future. That would be cool.

And then the city stirs.

March 2, 2005 after 8AM | coffee , writing | maybe more»

...volunteer? Go to www.2005worldmasters.com and sign-up.

I'm helping out with these games this summer (well, up to and including this summer). I'm sitting on the Volunteer Logisitcs committee with a bunch of interesting people who have adopted me as their resident techno-geek. We sort through lists of names and committees and ultimately we're going to try and figure out how to fit a round peg into a square hole: or perhaps just how to organize, train, accredit, uniform, feed, and generally manage a few thouand volunteers across the big ol'city of Edmonton for ten days.

It can be daunting.

And seeing the internal workings of something both [a wee bit] bigger than a track meet and [a wee bit] smaller than the Olympics is often mentally boggling. (You know, I might start making my experience all-around with the whole games a general sort of topic here. It's sure to occupy more and more of my time as it nears and progresses. ) And alongside the boggling-bit of mental exercise we, the daunted, feel the co-worry of it all: we don't have nearly enough volunteers yet.

So, PLUGPLUG, go sign up. I'm high on the program of folks doing a lot of the sorting about who-gets-what-job, and though I can't offer any preferential treatment, now's the time to get in there and get a good position: lots of cool things left available. I might even be able to offer you a place to sleep (new house, woohoo!) if you're from out of town and want to drop by for a week or so to help out.

Oh! And you get some free stuff. PLUGPLUG

March 1, 2005 after 3PM | volunteer | maybe more»