Halloween

Happy Halloween. Celebrate on this, the most sacred of all pegan holidays.

As for me, I have a driving lesson tonight. This is my last driving lesson. In one week they will mail me the certificate that will get me 10% off insurance. I hope not to plow over any unsuspecting kids as they go about their looting.

I'm also very proud of my pumpkin this year. Click the title of this post to see a digital picture.

Thank God For Daylight Savings

I'm still very tired from my LAN Party escapades, and am extremely thankful for the extra hour of sleep the daylight savings time switch affords me. Yesterday night I slept for 14 hours to make up for not sleeping Friday night. It's also a good thing there is no morning swim practice tomorrow.

I'm still really tired.

LAN Party

Last night after swim practice I went over to Andrew's house where him, Brett, Daniel, Tanner, John, and Maikel were having a LAN party of epic proportions.

For those of you unfamiliar with the term "LAN Party" it means that a bunch of nerds and/or losers with nothing to do on a friday/saturday get together, wire up a crude network, play multiplayer games, swap files, stay up all night, and ingest large quantities of caffine laced liquid. LAN stands for Land or Local Area Network and just describes the fact that you are all in one room for a period of 20 hours playing computer games.

The hit of the party was a game called Flatout. This is a racing game in which you get Nitrous Oxide for making the physics engine work (hitting things). There were some pretty spectacular crashes.

F.E.A.R. (a fps or first person shooter) took up Brett and Daniel's time for a bit. Also a big battle was waged in Age of Empires III (rts or real time strategy).

There were also a few movies watched from my ginormous stash of pirated material. At one point my network utilization was at 100% as my computer frantically tried to keep up with the damand for my movies.

Twain Reader (Podcast)

This podcast is like a weekly audio book. The guy reads a chapter of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer once a week and puts it on his website. The great thing about this podcast is that I don't actually have to do any reading.

So basicly I'm reading The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain with no effort or work. It's also much more convenient than a book in that I usually have my iPod with me anyway. I could be on the bus listening to the latest chapter, putting in absolutely no effort, and without the obvious hassles of a big obtrusive book getting in everyone's way.

I was being a bit sarcastic there, but seriously, it's a good podcast. It has earned the Derek Seal of Approval (for those of you who don't know me or how eccentric I can be, this is an actual animal Seal which sits there and flops it's tail occasionally, a high honor indeed).

Second Last Driving Lesson

My Mom found out that adding me to the insurance for her car costs like $800. Isn't that crazy?? And then it costs more for me to have my own vechile (somewhere in the range of $2000).

Once my AMA Driver Training is done, I get a 10% discount though, so that is my goal now.

All those prices are anual by the way.

The Battle with iTunes

It's been 24 hours and I'm still trying to get my iPod loaded with music. It turns out that iTunes was designed neither for nor by humans. Steve Jobs is the Bill Gates of the Apple world.

iTunes has been importing 2 copies of songs into the music library. Also it takes forever to do anything. Then it frequently unsubscribes from podcasts. In fact it's whole handling of podcasts in haphazard.

Update: I FINALLY got everything back on my iPod although now the ID3 tags that iTunes uses to identify songs are all wrong. It will take considerable time for me to fix everything, but at least I have music again.

iPod Resurected

Although it came in the mail yesterday and my mom just hid it until today, it is still exciting to get my iPod back from Apple. The good part about this is that it works now.

Now I have to wrestle with iTunes (crappiest program ever) to get some music on it.

Sick Today

I woke up feeling awful today. If you remember, my social teacher has a test for today which I missed.

It looks like the "extreme sexual exhaustion" excuse may make it's debut.

If you don't know what the deuce I'm talking about, read last friday's post.

Windows XP Reinstallation

So I've finally got my hard drives sorted out and I will be reinstalling windows today. This may take all day factoring in the installation of all the software I want to reinstall.

This weekend is crappy at best.

Club Champs

Today I woke up at the crack of dawn to go swim in a dorky little swim meet my club has every year. I have trouble waking up early to swim a 2.5k warmup and then two 50m races. So in an attempt to make my early morning more justified, I'm going to glamorize both races.

50 meter back - I was racing some fast guys includeing Richard Elkington (my main competition in backstroke). We both had a good race, but I beat him. I'm practically an olympic gold medalist.

50 meter free - I had an excellent dive at the beginning. In fact, this was probably the most powerful and technical dive I have ever done. After that the race was fine. I beat everyone except this kid on the outside who out touched me (in layman's terms that means we were side by side and he had a better finish than me).

Back to bed for me...

Remarks Made to a Social Teacher

I was in social today and my teacher said near the end of class that there will be a test on monday. She stressed that if you miss the test, you have to have a parent phone in an excuse for you so she knows you didn't just skip the class. Then you have to write the test the next day.

The excuse part caught me and I started thinking about what would constitute a valid excuse. So just before the bell rang I asked her "what about extreme sexual exhaustion?" as casualy as I could. Her response was to just stare at me with her mouth open, shocked that I had asked that.

It gets better. On the way out of class I said "I guess I can write with my other hand..." still on the same subject. Her facial expression was priceless.

This Week In Tech (TWIT)

Some time back I said I would be doing a few posts on some of the podcasts I listen to. Nothing important happened today, so here's Derek's podcast review: edition 2.

TWIT is a podcast that I have listened to for some time now. It is a round-table discussion about tech news hosted by Leo Laporte. Every week they talk about the latest product, company or any tech news they hear about. A few recurring topics have come up including spam (John C Dvorak get's no spam!) and the methods of hosting the show (via Skype until it was determined it would be easier and better quality to do a live show).

This show appeals to my most geeky side, and I find it very interesting. I also get the humor in the show, most of which are in-jokes from previous episodes.

There is an audio and a video version available, and so you could watch the show on a new video iPod.

Doom Review

This movie gets no thumbs up. It was complete crap. For less money than a ticket I could just download a copy of Doom 3 and play that.

The movie had no plot. They tried to infuse it with a Resident Evil type plot but it didn't take. The last 20 minutes of the movie when it switches to first person were absolutely pointless. The last few scenes were alright, but only for their action.

Since I won the tickets I don't feel too bad (although those were two perfectly good hours I will never get back). If I had actually paid money to see it, I would feel super gyped.

Doom (Continued)

I went to pick up the tickets today. I though things were going well. Turns out they weren't.

My mom now says that I can't use her car. After making one of her "deals" with me in which I do something so she'll let me use her car, she flatly informs me that I can't use it. This totally destroys my plans.

Also Kassia says she has to work. So now I'm out of a ride and a person to go with. It will be a miracle if I go at all.

Doom

Today I got an email from Dose informing me that I have won two tickets to an advance screening of Doom this wednesday. This is the first thing I have won in a LONG time.

For those who aren't Canadian or just don't live in the few select cities, Dose is a free daily newspaper targeted to youth or those who thing they are still hip (although they're 40). This includes my mom for some reason.

I'm using one ticket, but the other is up for grabs. Anyone I know who wants to come is welcome, but you may have to battle to the death for the seat.

As of now, the people who have expressed some interest in going are Erin and Kassia. Although Erin just asked "Is it scary?" and left it at that. Eden says it's a stupid movie. Miriam doesn't want to go as she is too busy cutting her wrists. Kathleen is MIA.

The only person who actually wants to go is Kassia. On the other hand she was all like: "YESS I'D LOVE TO GO!!!! ...what's doom?" so this might be taken into account.

Car Update

My Dad is getting me a vechile, but has been stalling. I phoned him tonight and we decided that I might be buying my Grandpa's Grand Caravan.

We're aiming for the end of the month.

Happy Birthday

Paolo... SURPRISE!!

I'm sorry I missed your party man. These Cr4Zy planners kept switching it on me. I lay the blame squarely on them.

Anyway enjoy this year. It should be very memorable.

Also, I hope you achieve your grade 12 goal. For that matter, I hope I achieve your grade 12 goal.

Here's to us.

The Longest Day

This morning I woke up at 0430 and drove to swim practice. After two hours of that, I drove to school.

Somewhere through first period, all the C.A.L.M. students were called down for a field trip that consisted of walking through NAIT and the U of A. A whole day of walking.

To add insult to injury, NAIT didn't provide the lunch they had in past years, and my teacher got me all excited for. It was going to be the highlight of my day.

When I got back to school I had to wait until 1600 for the busses to take the school swim team to a competition. The meet was organized poorly with people taking times manually. Also the races were done in rapid sucession, leaving me very tired.

After I got home (bus back to school, car home) I phoned people to finalize plans that were in the works. We drove around trying to find a movie I'm not sure exists at this point. We even tried to buy it, but it was rediculously expensive. After all this, we just settled for Bourne Identity. Then we talked about the most idiotic things (I must assume they were equally tired). I drove two people home and plan to be in bed by 2400.

Looking at my computer's system clock, I see I have already overshot that by 8 minutes.

iPod Video

I want to be clear. I like Apple products when they work. I got into a crazy rant last Tuesday because I was fed up with the utter lack of customer service when my iPod became depressed.

On the other hand, Apple has always made a good product (excluding my iPod which is very prone to failure). Their computer hardware is alright, and their software is quite good.

Steve Jobs (CEO) has recently announced the video iPod as well as the new G5. Both look exceptionally good. I'm not sure why he didn't wait for iPod Nanao's sales to plateau before the release, but he's the CEO and I'm not.

Also I should note while I'm on my Apple rant that in about a year there will be a Mac with an Intel chip as opposed to the PowerPC bastard child formerly running all the Macs. This is especially interesting as it means there has to be an x86 (Intel) version of OS X. Soon you will be able to buy all the great PC parts with their interchangability and replacability and choose to boot into either Windows (probably Vista, formerly Longhorn) or OS X.

Both definitely have their advantages and drawbacks. These are exciting times. I definitely don't envy Bill Gates (a.k.a. Satan) when Apple finally releases a version of OS X for PC...

Konfabulator

I recently discovered a very useful app for PC and Mac. It allows your computer to run "Widgets" on your desktop to do a variety of useful things.

I have one to remote control iTunes without bringing it up, another with the current weather, and one to apply a tint to my monitor at night to reduce the contrast slightly.

There are many more functions and I'm sure I've only grazed the survace, but I suggest you explore and play around with this. The website has a huge gallery of widgets of which I've only had the chance to look through briefly.

If you find a particularly useful widget, leave me a comment.

The Asshats at Apple

My first iPod was broken before I got it all the way out of the box. So I had it replaced. The problem was, they didn't transfer over my warrenty to the new serial number.

When it broke again, they told me I had to send them money to ship it back for servicing. It was within 6 months of the original warrenty, but they would hear nothing of it. They gave me the slip saying I needed to PROVE when it was purchased.

I got the credit card statement, but that wasn't enough. So I got compusmart to fax me the invoice. By this time it was more than 6 months from the original date of purchase, so I had to pay anyway.

Due to this kind of horrible service, I will never buy an apple product again. I hope you do the same.

Gobble

Happy turkeyday everyone.

And now Derek's Eating Advice:
1) To maximize the amount you can eat, I suggest you pace yourself. If your stomach gets full, there's still plenty of room in the large intestine. Pacing yourself solves this.

2) No matter how full you get, there is always room for pie. Always. Don't take no for an answer. Your body will thank you later.

Don't drink and drive. The damage to your vehicle is hard to explain.

License to Kill

The new license has come in handy already. After I got some joyriding out of my system, I was able to pick people up and drop them off so we could watch a movie.

Driving beats biking in responsibility and convenience, but biking has some manliness and exercise that I miss. To compensate for the manliness loss, I have been driving with the sun in my eyes and squinting instead of wearing sunglasses or something.

Also, as they were all pleased to observe, I had four girls in my car. I highly recommend this to anyone as it looks cool.

Driving Test

I took my road test today and am now the proud owner of a class 5 (GDL) licence. This beats my aunt who failed twice before she got her license. Now my friends need to get off their lazy asses and drive. No more excuses.

Drinks all around. But none for me. I'm driving.

Hard drives of DOOM!

My hard drive was sick and now windows doesn't recognize it. Normally under these circumstances I'd format it, but I want to do some data recovery if I can.

The programs I've found are VirtualLab 5 and Stellar Phoenix NTFS. Both are basically trial versions and only allow you to see all the wonderful data they could recover for you. They taunt you with your own drive.

I'm thinking there has to be at least one free data recovery app out there, with the internet being quite big and all. So far no luck though.

If you know of some free software or something that could be pirated, send me an email.

Soccergirl Inc.

Recently I've been getting into the podcasts. There are a couple noteworthy ones that I'm going to post about over the next few days (or weeks).

So I'm on iTunes's music store browsing podcasts and come across "Soccergirl Incorporated". I was curious and decided to give it a listen. Soccergirl's podcasts consist of her podcasting from her bathtub (so I'm told) and saying things like "Wine and dine me first... Then we can have butt sex".

Speaking as a male, this was pretty hot. Her voice sounds hot too. Obviously more research was required. So I got to looking for pictures of her (she said she had topless ones). I'm sad to say that I've found them.

Soccergirl was much hotter before I saw her pics. Just to show you what I mean, I'll link this. It doesn't have profuse titage, but if that's your thing, check out her blog (link in title). Also, she has a video of herself blowing a microscope.

It's great that she's comfortable enough with herself to post pics on the net, but it ruined my experience. On the other hand, I do agree with her on this; "poor people don't have photoshop."