Dave Kellam

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.

I went out and saw Minority Report tonight. I heard a lot of mixed reviews coming out of the theatre, mainly people complaining about the length. Personally, I enjoyed it and thought the movie and a lot of the concepts contained within were well portrayed.

One of things that bothered me initially was subtle product placement that started popping up part way into the movie. And then more and more and more. But you realize that it’s meant to be that way, pervasive and invasive. I came home with the goal of hitting the internet and searching for an interview or press release by Spielberg, explaining what he was doing. I found an article outlining some of his views concerning the future of privacy and George Orwell’s vision of 1984. The movie paints a somewhat bleak view of the future depending what way that you want to look at it. It’s comes down to a paradox between safety and freedom (visible in the tagline Safety IS Freedom) in which everyone wants both but you really have to give up one to have the other. The same way that I’m a somewhat staunch advocate of privacy but keep a public weblog. I don’t mind telling people about myself but don’t want other people using the details of my life as a commodity. What wonderful times we live in.

I digress. The movie is solid, one that I would recommend to other people and will probably have to see again. The cinematography is well done, although iit’s somewhat odd for a dystopian sci-fi movie; muted blues and overexposed whites rather than the typical browns and dark s. Overall, the story/plot wasn’t bad and not rife with problems associated with many films that try to tackle a take on temporal mechanics. It probably ranks up there as the best film I’ve seen in theatres so far this summer. I could probably ramble on about privacy and dystopian sci-fi worlds but I need to get some sleep. There are always more reviews out there; sf gate, ny times, usa today.

It was one of those days when you wake up and the outside world calls your name. Not as muggy as the last couple but enough to make you sweat if you weren’t in the shade. I dropped some laundry off at the laundromat, which is a sort of godsend well worth the extra six dollars. They take the laundry off your hands, supply the soap and dryer sheets, and wash your clothes. You come back later and pick up your neatly folded clothes after enjoying an afternoon downtown kicking around stores and parks. Beyond the bag of folded laundry, the only other tangible thing was a few abulms I picked up on vinyl from the bargin bin: Simon and Garfunkel’s Greatest Hits, Supertramp’s Crime of The Century and The Who’s Tommy.

Canoe reports that VHS is going to be phased out of many major retail stores. With DVD and the advent of ReplayTV, TiVo and the like, people should be able to get by without it. It can all be done with a computer as well; I have a television decoder card that can record to the harddrive and a dvd drive for watching movies. Convergence is one of those buzzwords that gets tossed around a lot, but things are coming together now. At some point in the relatively near future we’re going to be able to function with one box, one remote. It will be wild.

The website ended up getting a review, not all that favourable but on the money. Lack of substance, lack of substantial posts and writing. I think that I need to get things reorganized so it’s easy to get things done and doesn’t feel like something I have to do. I also have to figure out the parts that I enjoy doing. Facilitation, that’s key.

It’s National Bathroom Reading Week, some of the recommended reading material: Spirituality For Dummies: Leave the bathroom feeling enlightened in more ways than one.

I updated the links section and the music sections. I have some more links to put on the page, I just have to find them again. And for some reason I decided on six new songs instead of the usual five.

Earlier today, I was wondering if there was a keystroke to switch between tabs in mozilla. Sure enough there is, use Ctrl and PageUp/PageDown on a Windows machine.