Dave Kellam

An older article outlining the similarities and differences between hardcore GBV fans and Trekkies. Good for a laugh if you’re a fan of one or the other.

It was nice to have a day off yesterday, I actually set about accomplishing tasks rather than vegitating. I have a bunch more photos up, although I did manage to forget the month of March. I’ll change the sidebar link to the photo section when I get a few minutes, I moved it onto a subdomain and started using a different system.

I went out and saw Signs. Shyamalan is becoming a modern day Hitchcock; a master of suspense. It’s one of those movies that will have you on the edge of your seat, you keep expecting things to happen. He’ll build up the tension, let it fall away and then scare the shit of you. I really enjoyed it and would recommend watching it a nice dark theatre instead of watching a pirated copy on your computer.

The remainder of the evening saw me take in The Reverend Horton Heat at a pub downtown. Honestly, I had never really listened to any of his music before but I’m tempted to get some now. It’s sort of an odd show to witness, and old guy with a guitar backed by a big mouth bass and a drum kit. They proceed to belt out rockabilly songs with a punk feeling to them. The show was high energy and high intensity but I felt pretty lethargic and had trouble getting into it.

The plan was to get my computer and return the website to past glory. Not to be outdone by the box, my work schedule turned into nine straight days. Now those are done and I have a day off tomorrow. That means I’ll get some time to sort through photographs, play around with photoshop on a mac and so on and so forth. Maybe I’ll get around to updating Moveable Type and moving it over to MySQL. We’ll see what time permits. All of that may be a tad ambitious for one day.

Here’s an article from abcnews outlining reasons for legalizing the use of drugs in the US. Their main points revolve around the costs of maintaining a drug war and all the dirty money that drugs bring in. i.e. legalization means cheaper prices, less crime, less corruption; drug users are generally harmless. Take someone who just smoked a bowl and someone who’s completely trashed, hand them a baseball bat and tell them to have fun. The drunk person is likely to start smashing things, while the high one will probably just look at the bat and start laughing.

Drugs and prostitution, you could make much the same arguments for the legalization of both. My views are that both should be legal and talked about. People should be informed about the consequences of their actions and have the right to make their own decisions (after reaching adulthood of course). People will always be able to find drugs or prostitues (the world’s oldest profession), so we may as well take the money away from the criminals and put it back into society (via the government).

It was a scheduled day off today, it wasn’t really all that eventful; relaxing though. I decided to start watching Sneakers around three in the morning yesterday. I thought it was pretty well done, it still holds up as a ‘hacker’ movie years later. I think in part due to the all-star cast: Redford, Poiter, Kingsley et al. It’s worth checking out.

This evening involved watching The Seventh Seal. It’s rated up there as one of the greatest films of all time; many people being aware of the chess match with death. I liked it and will probably have to watch it again to offer more opinion. There’s some dark comedy elements to it, a form of humour that I always tend to enjoy. There are many philosophic underpinnings, mainly relating to the nature of God/Satan, death and so forth. It’s pretty wild. I watched the criterion disk and have to say that they did an amazing job restoring the film.

Almost forgot, I also flipped between and The World According to Garp on television this aft. Kind of watching which ever one interested me at the time and doing some dishes. I’ll say my preference leaned in the direction of Garp, but I kept flipping back for the action sequences in Robin Hood.

My new computer finally arrived a day or two ago. I decided to go with a Powermac G4 933 instead of a pc. Reasoning based on my growing hatred for the piss-poor design of windows and observing most of my computer science professors walking around with ibooks and powerbooks. I figure they probably have a pretty good idea what’s going on. I’ve spent the last day or two getting comfortable with the system. I can say that it’s pretty intuitive and that anyone who says, “There’s no software available for macs” is a bloody liar. There’s lots of well designed software out there (due to the fewer number of users, it’s not as easy to come by pirated software), for windows there are reams and reams of shitty programs that you can download. Yea!

Life without a computer on the desk? That’s reading books and watching movies, going out and doing things. Last weekend I went to Toronto to catch Guided By Voices in concert. They played on friday and saturday night, I went to both shows. Both shows were amazing, that’s about the only way I can put it. The intenisty of the band and the crowd was unbelievable, even more so the second night (it was impressive that they could top the first show). It rocked hard and I think I’m going to have to start looking for bootlegs of the show that someone hopefully recorded.

So, it’s the return and thus the reader can probably expect a semi-regular updates once again. The design will probably be left alone for awhile, at least until I get copies of photoshop and dreamweaver. Peace, that’s all there is for the moment.

I’ve been surviving without the computer for awhile now. I’ve been working a lot, so it hasn’t been too bad. The one drawback has been my lack of knowledge concerning current events; i realize that when i want to know something, i always turn to the internet. Who directed that movie? IMDb. I need info on blah. Google. And so on.

Labatt’s is offering free long distance in hopes that you’ll use the money on beer instead. I might do just that, I’ll have to check it out.

Time for some forced hiatus from computers and the internet. My computer has done a real number on itself, some sort of bizarre cry for attention. It probably thought that I had been neglecting it. At least of one of my harddrives is completely screwed, the other one most likely so, some of the other components may be in rough shape. I’m not entirely sure what the cause was, perhaps me forgetting to clock things back down a bit for the hot summer months. Oh well, it just means that I had to step up my plans to get a mac. It’s been on the burner for awhile, and has now become reality.

So my posts might become more erratic and less frequent than they already are. I’ll be checking in on the internet every once in awhile for the next week or so while I wait for the new computer to arrive. Peace.

Scott points towards Ultimate Soccer, a game I spent all together too much time playing. When I finally beat it, mozilla crashed. Damn. Still fun though.

Working seems to suck the internet life out of me, although it’s totally unrelated. I get home and avoid the box. But it’s time for a holiday weekend in Canada and I happen to have Sunday and Monday off. And the weather forecast is calling for five days of sunshine, yeah yeah! That was two sentences in a row that began with conjunctions.

Eilis was in town for a couple days at the beginning of the week, it was nice to see her again. She’s headed off to McGill for the next year, so I probably won’t see all that much of her. I know a bunch of other people headed off on exchanges and transfers, it’s going to kind of weird not having them around. I’d consider doing one myself but never got off my lazy ass. The long weekend also has the potential to bring other people I haven’t seen in awhile into town.

I’ve been doing a bit of work on a new photo section (here), trying to make it easier for myself to update and easier for people to look at. I decided to go with MiG, it can generate its own thumbnails and whatnot. The only drawback is the use of really long links but I think I can probably figure out how to mask them if they’re bothering me that much. Now I just have to plow through the last couple months worth of photos and get some new content up.