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Attention Ontario residents

Today’s the day of the provincial elections. Vote early, vote often.

Even my housemate Paul, who is American and got a work visa earlier this year, is eligible to vote. He did the responsible thing last night, asking the table at Squirly’s bar: “So, who should I vote for?”

Deenster replied by telling him he should vote NDP (New Democratic Party, the mainstream left-wing party).

Warning: Prejudices of a hard-working first-generation Asian immigrant raised by two doctors follow. If you majored in English, Political Science or Philosophy or and are on anti-mood-swing drugs, take them now.

I like to joke that NDP voters tend to be the sort of people who have great disdain for working professionals like myself, as they are often neither working nor professionals. Nobody held a gun to your head and forced you to major in underwater basket-weaving, kids.

End of career/class snobbery/a little kidding around. We now resume normal blogging.

I voted Liberal, if you really must know.

My prediction for the outcome, which is generally what everyone else is predicting: Dalton McGuinty and the Liberal Party will win. Right-wing voters will bemoan the slide of the province to the left, left-wing voters will carp about the ownership of politics by the right. The sun will still rise tomorrow morning, and the accordion will remain the world’s most sexy-yet-underappreciated instrument.

Categories
It Happened to Me

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
It Happened to Me

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.

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Amazing "P2P" cover for the current "New Yorker"

I think this cover for the September 29, 2003 issue of The New Yorker captures the RIAA’s tactics perfectly:

Photo: Cover of the September 29, 2003 issue of 'The New Yorker'.

(A tip of the hat to Joseph Lorenzo Hallhe blogged this first.)

Categories
Geek

Accordion City is SCO’s first stop on their tour

Ryan Skadberg just pointed me to the page for SCO’s “City to City” tour, and the first stop is Accordion City. Surely we can get some kind of prank organized.

If someone can get me a penguin suit and is willing to cover any possible legal fees, I will don the suit, sneak into the conference and “sport hump” (a great tradition from Crazy Go Nuts University) SCO’s CEO and Chief Asshole Darl McBride. Really.

Photo: SCO CEO and Chief Asshole Darl McBride.

Look at that face. You know you want to see me in a penguin suit sport humping this man. Help me to help you.

Recommended Reading

In case you don’t know wat this whole hate-on for SCO is, some articles:

Categories
It Happened to Me

Proof that my priorities are a little screwed up

Last night, while taking some cough medicine, I thought: “Hmmm. Not bad. Tastes just like Jagermeister.”

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Here kitty, kitty, kitty, kitty…*WHAM*

“Dogs have masters,” my ex-girlfriend Erica, a cat owner, used to say. “Cats have staff.”

If dogs could write poetry, they’d write stuff like this:

You’re my best friend

You’re my best friend

You’re my best friend

Is it dinner yet?

Or this gem:

Are you gonna eat that?

Are you gonna eat that?

Are you gonna eat that?

I think I’ll eat that.

Cats, on the other hand, would this poesy of this variety:

I hate you.

Now feed me.

To many people, and in this case when I say “people”, I mean “lonely, bitter shut-ins”, cats are ideal, independent low-maintenance companions. To me, cats are The Other White Meat.

In spite of this, Boss Ross and I have declared — for no other reason than for the hell of it, we swear — that Friday is the First Annual Post a Picture of a Cat to Your Blog day.

Personally, I think that pictures of cats should be perceived as damage by the Internet and should be routed around. However, the vast majority of Internet people seem to like cats, especially those who write weblogs. Weblogging is so associated with cat pictures that O’Reilly and Associates, publishers of computer books with woodcuttings of animals on the covers, saw fit to put a picture of cats on their book on blogging:

Photo: Cover of O'Reilly's 'Essential Blogging'.

So don’t forget, folks: post a picture of a cat to your blog this Friday!

(You don’t have post a cutesy one either. Feel free to go all Lee Harvey Oswald if you like.)

Recommended Reading

My unexpectedly pleasant conversation with John C. Dvorak. Dvorak’s response to my saying that the choice of cat for cover animal on O’Reilly’s book was all his fault. (Okay, it’s really in response to me calling him PC Magazine’s “Resident Asshole”.)