the pod bay door

.: I have been tagged by Pam (but wasn’t aware of it until I checked her site), nor was I aware that Christina tagged me about the same thing. Blog memes aren’t my thing, but apparently when one is tagged, one must comply. This is Five Little-Known Things About Me, which doesn’t necessarily mean they are interesting or unique.

1. I was a DJ on the University of Manitoba’s closed-circuit radio station in 1974-1975. Once per show I would read a few “True Facts” from issues of National Lampoon while playing the music from Elgar’s Pomp and Circumstance in the background.

2. I have a tiny crease in my skull from slipping and falling against a brick corner on the outside of my junior high school. I slipped on some snow while playing with a friend during lunch hour. I didn’t feel any pain, but a couple seconds later, blood started pouring from my top of my head. In restrospect, this could explain a lot about me.

3. In the mid-1960s I collected comic books. Gabriel, my friend at the time, and I decided to create our own comics, which we wrote, drew and coloured by hand. My super-heroes included Mr IBM and The Prism. I forget the other super-heroes I created, and unfortunately no longer have the comics.

4. I have no affinity for building or repairing things, so any renovations or repairs to my home are always done by friends who are accordingly compensated afterwards. My father, however, can repair and renovate just about anything.

5. The first band I joined was called Ram, when I was in Grade 12, in 1970. Ram was an 11-piece group: two lead singers, two guitars, two trumpets, keyboards, bass, drums, trombone and saxophone. We were together for less than a year. We played cover tunes by Chicago, Led Zeppelin, Iron Butterfly, and others. We once played a outdoor gig on the steps of the Manitoba Legislature Building, but for some reason the horns couldn’t stay in tune. The first song the band learned was Vehicle by the Chicago band, The Ides of March. If you can, find me in the band picture (10 of 11 members were around at that time.)

I’m not sure who to tag next, so I’ll nominate Darcy, Cindi, Tony, Keith, and the newly-married Lauren.

.: About three weeks ago I bought a Maxtor 320GB external drive. Everything was going fine until I linked it to my desktop, a 2002 Dell Dimension 4400. The Dell froze and wouldn’t reboot. A few days later, the Dell was at David’s house (the drummer in HDNB), where its hard drive was made a slave drive, and one of David’s drive temporarily became the computer’s C drive. We copied the contents of my drive to the Maxtor, which took a few days, as the Dell’s USB ports are 1.1. When this task finished, the Dell’s original hard drive was reformatted, and I took the computer home, reloaded XP and Office, and then connected the Maxtor to copy the files back to the C drive. Except that the Dell was telling me that the Maxtor wasn’t formatted. I connected the Maxtor to my laptop with the same results.

So I thought, now what? I surfed the Maxtor site, and learned that there were programs I could use to recover the data on the Maxtor, but of course at a cost. I chose this program, which ran for four days but recovered over 70,000 files from the Maxtor, paid for the licence (which allowed me to copy the files back to the C drive), and finished everything tonight. Lesson learned: back up your important data.

.: Christmas is impending. I’ve been off work since 16 December 2006, and have spent a lot of time resting and laying low. I saw three movies this week: Apocalypto, Casino Royale, and Little Miss Sunshine. I’m behind preparing my Christmas cards, and hope to finish a few more tomorrow. I’ve started the daunting task of cleaning my house, beginning with the basement. I filled six blue and six green bags for garbage pickup this morning, plus two blue bags of shredded paper products. I tossed about fifteen large cardboard boxes into the local recycling bins, and donated five boxes of books to the University of Alberta Libraries this morning (where, coincidentally, I work). I bought two new Uniden cordless phones to replace the aging Uniden phone I’ve had since the mid-90s. In between the foregoing I’ve been finishing last minute Christmas shopping.

.: I was saddened to learn last week that my Little Brother is moving away from Edmonton. I am an In-School Mentor with Big Brothers Big Sisters in Edmonton, and my Little Bro, JG, is leaving town. In-School Mentors visit their Littles once a week at their schools, and spend about 45-60 minutes with them once a week. I’ve worked with J for about 18 months, and recently he was teaching me how to play chess. I’ll miss him, but wish him well; he’s a great kid.

.: It hasn’t taken the corporate world long to take advantage of YouTube. NBC, for example, is uploading videos of its shows (or sections thereof) within minutes of a show’s finish. Last Saturday, NBC uploaded the uncensored version of a video featuring guest host Justin Timberlake and cast member Andy Samberg soon after the show ended. The music video is crude but funny – Timberlake plays the boy band schtick to the nines! When the YT video ended, links to a number of other NBC videos appeared, including this one, which includes one brilliantly hilarious scene (extreme sports), and is about an NBC-sponsored site called It’s Your Show. Create an original video (with original music if need be), use the supplied toolkit if applicable, upload the video into an existing category on the site, or create your own category therein. Sounds like fun, if you have enough free time to work on such things.

.: I was born on June 28, 1953, at 0105 hrs, in Winnipeg. Today I turned 53, in the year my age matches my year of birth. It’s a scorching, sunny day in Edmonton, and I am glad to be alive, surrounded by good and caring friends, family, and colleagues. I am fortunate and grateful for many things in life, and today is a good day to reflect on all of them, and give thanks. To everyone who has been or is a part of my life, thank you. – Randy

.: In a previous post, I raved about the brilliant ABC show, Sons & Daughters, easily the funniest network sitcom I’d seen since Seinfeld, and partially improvised to boot. ABC, in classic fashion, showed great faith in the show by cancelling it after 10 episodes, proving yet again, that network television executives cannot recognize talent and creativity when it is staring them right in their collective faces. Scheduling the show opposite American Idyll didn’t help the cause either. I haven’t felt this passionate about a television show being yanked before its time since ABC tanked the equally brilliant My So-Called Life.

A petition to bring the show back to ABC is online and I’d encourage you to sign it.

Fred Goss, the co-creator, Executive Producer, Writer & Director of the show, is on MySpace and YouTube, and posted two short videos that are worth watching. Fred writes, “This is the presentation I used to sell a pilot to NBC last year. It also led to the sale of Sons & Daughters at ABC. I shot this for under 5000.00 dollars and obviously it was worth every penny.” If you haven’t seen Sons & Daughters, the video has very much the same feel as the show, improvisation, actors playing off one another.

Of the following video, Fred writes, “These are a compilation of additional scenes to the weekends presentation. If you haven’t already watched weekends, I recommend that you watch that before watching this.”

As for Sons & Daughters, read this post, a great summary of why the show is so good. Missed the show? Check the links at the bottom of the aforementioned post, which will take to you videos of all the shows, available on YouTube until ABC yanks them. Brilliant stuff, funny, edgy, and worth the time to watch.

.: The band I am in, Hardy Drew and the Nancy Boys, played its first gig last night with its current lineup, with me on guitar. We played 14 songs, including 12 originals by David Leigh, the drummer and lead singer. Overall, it went well. Pictures will be posted soon. Many friends and colleagues were in attendance, and my thanks to each of them for taking the time to support my musical escapades.

.: From the 2006 Canada Census:

8. The Statistics Act guarantees the confidentiality of your census information. Only if you mark “YES” to this question will your personal information be made public, 92 years after the 2006 Census. If you mark “NO” or leave the answer blank, your personal information will never be made publicly available. If you are answering on behalf of other people, please consult each person.

Does this person agree to make his/her 2006 Census information available for public release in 2098 (92 years after the census)?

.: This list is from the BBC Magazine, and was posted at the end of 2005, so it’s a bit outdated, but still fascinating. 100 things we didn’t know this time last year is based on the Magazine’s weekly feature, 10 Things We Didn’t Know This Time Last Week. A number of “things” are endemic to the UK, but there are a few gems, such as:

• 3. While it’s an offence to drop litter on the pavement, it’s not an offence to throw it over someone’s garden wall.
• 6. WD-40 dissolves cocaine – it has been used by a pub landlord to prevent drug-taking in his pub’s toilets.
• 11. One in 10 Europeans is allegedly conceived in an Ikea bed.
• 12. Until the 1940s rhubarb was considered a vegetable. It became a fruit when US customs officials, baffled by the foreign food, decided it should be classified according to the way it was eaten.
• 19. The = sign was invented by 16th Century Welsh mathematician Robert Recorde, who was fed up with writing “is equal to” in his equations. He chose the two lines because “noe 2 thynges can be moare equalle”.
• 29. When faced with danger, the octopus can wrap six of its legs around its head to disguise itself as a fallen coconut shell and escape by walking backwards on the other two legs, scientists discovered.
• 32. “Restaurant” is the most mis-spelled word in search engines.
• 45. C3PO and R2D2 do not speak to each other off-camera because the actors don’t get on.
• 59. Oliver Twist is very popular in China, where its title is translated as Foggy City Orphan.
• 65. Actor James Doohan, who played Scotty, had a hand in creating the Klingon language that was used in the movies, and which Shakespeare plays were subsequently translated into
• 73. One in six children think that broccoli is a baby tree.
• 99. The Japanese word “chokuegambo” describes the wish that there were more designer-brand shops on a given street.

.: If you watch LOST and haven’t seen tonight’s episode, stop reading, this is a spoiler. I was quite surprised and disappointed at the final scene, in which Michael, rescued from the jungle by Jack and Kate, shoots and kills Ana Lucia and Libby in the hatch. Or are they dead? I have to hand it to the creators of this series, they really, really know how to get a rise out of the audience.