the rabbits are coming...

passing thru...

We'll call them T, D, and G...to preserve their online anonymity. Anyway...they were en-route to Calgary and planned to 'stop by' to say hi. Being a designated 'pass thru' town we were determined to snare our visitors for the whole evening. We made elaborate preparations...we stocked up on booze, kept feeding them once they arrived, kept commenting on how bad the weather was, researched and quoted nasty highway statistics, trivialized their destinations, called 'our friend at the pass' to ask for advanced conditions and any intelligence on closures for avalanche control. When the time came, after a little debate, for them to keep going we encouraged them out the door and wished them well. As soon as the front door was closed we were spying through the curtains...waiting for our crafty psychological time bombs to start popping. In the dwindling daylight we could see their movements slow...uneasiness was starting to set in...they looked around a little lost-like. Bingo! "T and G are ours...D is in the car...give her a second.." I reported back from the living room spying position. Sure enough, some 'logical' process descended on D and the 3 of them were welcomed back with open arms and kudos for making such a logical and responsible decision!

We did a little tour of Revey...

And we imbibed...heavy on the local brews...

Note that the blurriest part of that pic is D's hand reaching for her beer. T and G, after many hours, came to a grinding halt but until all the beer was gone D's hand was as quick and accurate as Billy the Kid's. James & Verena & Erin were nice enough to give us some live entertainment...as was Rob with his 'small breast theories'...and D's 'Ralph-bucks, I Love Money' soliloquy...

Samurai math...

Really...it's hard to explain this one. Lets just say that sometimes shit happens.

head in the clouds?

For a number of days Revelstoke residents have been walking around with a dreamy look on their faces. Perhaps it's the lactic acid...or the holiday cheer...or the turkey Tryptophan. Or maybe it's that new hill 10 minutes away with high-tech lifts, long runs, low/no wait times. The idea that we'll have it to ourselves until it catches on makes some giddy. And that we can still have our touring and on powder days take the 'flying couch' to the top...it's like having our cake and eating it too...which would put anybody's head in the clouds.

techies...gotta love them

So one of the servers that I deal with appears pretty slow today...so I send an email:

Hey guys,
Is there something funny going on with the server? Or network?
It just seems really slow today.
Thanks

In reply, I get...

"Here is a cpu chart for the past day. Looks like there was a spike from 7-8 am this morning."



I had to chuckle. It's sort of like asking a climatologist "why is the weather bad" and them sending you a picture of the sky and saying "at 9am this morning the clouds were really dark."

how can you tell a man is home alone?

answer #1:
he manages to burn hard-boiled eggs...

productivity...

first I'd like to apologize to my fans for being neglectful. I've been on the road doing research for my holiday postings.

I recently had a discussion about 'productivity' with my friend Pete. Hi Pete. We were discussing how something could be deemed productive. We sort of came up with a similar strategy that he and the lawyer crowd uses to determine the meaning of a law (or legislation...or some word that I have since forgotten). First you ask if what you are doing is actually accomplishing anything...anything...you can make a sort of 'absolute' argument that the mere physical action of doing something could be productive. Next, you take a local context of this action...say we're in a kitchen and you're cleaning dishes...if I choose to smear feces on the clean dishes then in this context it is not productive...but if I were putting dishes in cupboards it would be 'seen' as productive in the context. Next you take the local actions and apply them to the greater task. Say we work in a kitchen that is on the front lines of the Allied forces in WWI...you could argue that this is also productive so as you go up the food-chain of globalism, each step is reinforcing the "yes it's productive" judgment. But perhaps you were in Hitler's kitchen. Smearing feces on the dishes, even though it is locally unproductive, gets overridden by the fact that you're being productive by slowing down Hitler's forces by giving them ecoli poisoning. Next in the moral hierarchy is the humanity argument. Perhaps if you're putting dishes away in the Allied kitchen you are enabling killing which is wrong...so it's unproductive. Anyway, you get the idea.

During the discussion I remembered that I had once written in my journal something about productivity. This is what I'll share and do my best to describe what hell I was thinking.

page 1. guilt.

have you ever had one of those massive sleep-in days and felt guilty for it? Well on January 28, 2006 exactly that happened. I got to thinking that I seemed to think more than I did and wondered if that was a weakness of character. I always admire those people who seem to have an engine that's stuck with the accelerator on the floor...mine seems to be generally on idle with brief spurts of acceleration now and then. I guess what I was trying do answer was 'can I be a productive person if I naturally tend to think more than I act?'...

page 2. graphs.

when trying to understand stuff, I tend to put stuff in a visual medium...with axes and curves and stuff. for the task at hand, action and thought are my axes and the idea is to analyze what it means when the location on the graph changes.

see enlargement of top of page 2. negative thought is undefined but negative action is deemed to be parasitic. Since I wasn't feeling like a parasite, I confined the analysis to the standard upper-right quadrant of positive thought and positive action. (positive meaning amount...I'm not referring to any morality here). also outlined on this page are the questions. The plot outlines some minimums for survival and shows a couple of examples...'the deadbeat' and 'lazy intellectual'. Also outlines the idea that each person has theoretical maximums for thought and action.

page 3. math

the introduction of the terms: 'Minimum Action Line' and 'Minimum Thought Line'. These differ from the minimum survival thresholds because of a resourcing dilemma...if you spend a lot of time thinking then you will have less time to act and vice versa...each person has their own characteristic MAL and MTL curves which bound them to an area on the thought-action plane. I made a note that this is vaguely reminiscent of a Minkowski plot in the field of Special Relativity Physics. See here for more. A key concept outlined here is moving from one point to another...which to do so requires effort which seems to be a linear combination of the change in T and the change in A. Effort can be relative or absolute, that's an important point too (the reason being left as an exercise for the reader).

page 4. profiles

a cursory discussion on the differing shapes culminating in a formula for absolute productivity. whether the calculation is absolute or relative and whether or not alpha and beta are parametric don't really matter at this point.

page 5. motivation and perseverance

if effort is essentially the cost of moving one's own point on their A/T plane, bound by their own natural limitations, then the willingness to do that or to come up with that effort can be called motivation. motivation can have many forms...energetic perseverance or stubborn bullheadedness, etc. This is also a trait that we are naturally endowed with...to a greater or lesser extent. Your natural bounds may fluctuate based on attitude, etc. but motivation doesn't cost anything...anyone can generate it...change your attitude and you can generate motivation which, in turn, will allow you to move yourself into a more productive position no matter your bounds.

page 6. conclusion.
ok, I guess it was ok for me to sleep in. I can still be a good person.

...hmmmm...I don't know what was in my eggs that morning but it must have been good!

no news is good news...

'nuff said.

guns guns guns...

After 34 years of being fascinated with firearms I finally took the test that will allow me the pleasure. I can't remember the last time I took a test. The whole process was quite exciting indeed!

The studying...

The sweating...

The thrill of the hunt...

The practical...(pump, hinge, bolt)

The result!

I may have done well on the test but the guy doing the testing, Matt, broke out with an occasional smirk. Most likely thinking something like "this guy studied hard but I bet he can't shoot worth shit...". He's probably right...I'm all book knowledge, no street smarts. But at least I've done my heritage proud...and I can finally put my grubby paws on my great grand-dad's gun! (note that it's a larger calibre than Ryan's which is only fair as he only got 98%).

eject before disconnecting

I recently read an article about the relative cost of the new ipod nano [ok...just a non sequitur...it seems that some omniscient, inescapable spell checker subtly underlines all words you type with a light, dashed red line. Included in the universe of badly spelled words is the word 'ipod'...it leads me to wonder if this 'feature' on a Mac will underline 'ipod' and if it's just passive aggressive vengeance on the part of Microsoft XP...anyway] in different countries. A variation on PPP...or purchasing power parity. Known as the 'ipod index'...read about it here...I'm too lazy to paraphrase. Other methods are talked about here. Anyhow...what I deem to be the triple point of economic feasibility + technological expectation + 'ipod index' has happened for me and thus I have bought an ipod. As magical as that perfect spot where an element is both a liquid, solid, and a gas at the same time, or some may say 'the perfect storm', I found my self in the store, with the money, with the will to buy...I should really call it the quadruple point because the ensuing endorphins are pretty special too. As is my mommy-bear instinct to protect my new little gadget. I could go on, like any Apple product owner, about how cute it is, how it's so well proportioned and is so easy to use, and how even the packaging is round and pleasant to rub all over your body. But I won't. I'll eject now, and disconnect.

those crazy Finns

My Finnish friend Henkka kindly gave me a picture of his family beer storage. And apparently they don't need to actually refrigerate it because they buy it cold and they'll finish it off before it cools.

curses....curses....

OK. Every time I need to adjust the temperature in a refrigerator I see a dial like this one. I don't understand it. What does it mean? My fridge was bordering on freezing and I don't want my beer to crystalize so I don't want it to get any colder. Do I:

• a)rotate the dial in the direction of the arrow...making the dial go from '3' to '2' in hopes that it gets a little warmer.


• b)move the dial so the number on the left (presumably 4) comes into view because that's where the arrow points.

I guess intuitively a higher number means warmer from our experience with thermometers but the dial sort of indicates to move it left whereby decreasing the numerical value. I don't want to ruin my beer...what should I do?



my version...if I made a fridge, would be a little different...

going crazy

...or should i say nuts.

for those of you who haven't done the walnut thing...you have no idea what work is. It's like a cross between tree planting and doing laundry by hand. it sucks.

But the rewards are great. I'm thinking of cheap ways to automate the process...ideas include a power-washer, concrete mixer, and cheap imported labour.

nature n@rd

k, I can't use 'nerd'...it's taken. But Nature Nerd has inspired me to take more nature pics...

telus...reloaded

oh boy. so about an hour and a half on the phone....finally the connection is working. remarkably simple really. somehow this fellow Ray in the Philippines was able to make my modem work in about 10 seconds (after being on hold for a loooong time)...then Melvin in Montreal was able to get me to connect to it wirelessly...it being 'pornden'...Erin's new wireless network. Ray and Melvin, I love you. Telus, you suck.

telus

here's a little diddy that attempts to illustrate my recent experience with a new internet connection. I thought I knew something about computers and stuff...I guess not. At one point I remember whipping out my knife and stabbing the boxes that the modem came in while on the floor cursing. Erin looked over from behind the counter and calmly asked if what I was experiencing was hormonal and if I needed anything from her that would make me feel better.

breakfast of champions

yummy. fast. easy.

the big shitty

So I'm in Vancouver ...fighting traffic and doing shoulder checks like a ninja all the way to the office. The area where I work isn't the most up-scale but does not in any way rival the reputation of 'East Van'. Seeing this little medical instrument on the ground next to my parking spot sure brings home the reality of drug use. My first instinct was to pick it up, fill it with water, and run into the office squirting my employees with it. But, alas, I didn't. I'm glad to know...or at least I think I'm glad to know that I'm still immature at heart.
Thanks for stopping by. Stay classy.

negotiations...

every second day.

sigh!

I'm using all my mental power to curve the line towards the x-axis.....

dinner time

Yup. Only the finest for this guy.

oh boy

...so I had a hot phone/email date today.

It started by Erin emailing me...


To which I responded teasingly with...

Hot or not?

Oh, and here's an image I made...I hope it doesn't get me in trouble...eeeks!

what the hell

I feel like I've just lost my diginity....posting for the very first time.

Welcome to my one-way broadcast. I say what I want. And you read it if you want to.


Tonight I filed my gst/hst return 4 months late. I also cut up an expired credit card and threw the big piece in the garbage. The small piece, which contains half of my name and several digits, will sit on my desk until the next time I empty my office garbage pail. I also re-read a 2004 magazine issue of 'fine homebuilding' entitled 'Tool Review'. I am male, hear me make lots of annoying buzzing and sawing noises.