Patience

I live in a house where there are some, well, deficiencies in keeping the cold out, and a solution that we have devised is to simply put up a blanket in the front room. The new method, it has been determined, is to put in an actual curtain.

Well, at first we had gotten a rod that was too large to fit into the holder (it held a 1-3/8 inch piece, while the rod was 1-5/8 inch in diameter); so that had to go back to one home improvement store. We then went to the other store (the one that we go to more often) where we found a slightly-smaller-than the 1-3/8 inch diameter piece for 25¢ less per linear foot than the comprable piece at the first place.

So, anyway, using the measure-twice logic, we got a piece that was slightly longer than the actual length we needed, so it needs to be cut down. Enter me, the same person who is willing to let his computer sit for hours on end converting video from one format to another (i.e. raw TV recording to more compatible formats then to DVD format). I will say now that I am not afraid of saws, but since it's somewhat difficult to get a precise measurement of the length that is needed, I didn't want to lop too much off.

Well, knowing that, how do you go about getting a piece of wood shortened by about an inch or so? Take some 100 or 150-grit sandpaper and use that to basically whittle the wood down in millimeter incriments, checking about every half hour to see how the piece fits. After about 5 hours or so, I finally got the wood to the line that I had originally marked out as my goal, a distance of about 2 cm or just under an inch; and I still have a slight way to go before I can finally go about installing the piece into the wall (which in itself will be another exercise in patience as I actually want this to be done right and in level; though the fact that the ceiling is only going to be an inch or two above the pole should make it a skosh easier.

I think this might just in the end, be a sign. A sign that I might have too much time on my hands (though, I will grant that this was something productive, and a workout for my right arm). :)

Where the bloody hell are you?

If you're somewhat aware of the ads, you'll know that this is really a rhetorical question, as the intent is to get you to get your arse in gear and get down to the land of the Big Thing, Australia. The only reason I mention it tonight is that there was just a show on the Discovery Channel about the "Great Australian Outback Cattle Drive", which is acutally a recreation of an outback tradition intended for tourists who are willing to make the trip out to the area of the Oodnadatta Track in Outback SA, some 800kms from Adelaide.

Naturally, the main sponsor of the show were Tourism Australia who made a splash earlier this year with the introduction of "Where the bloody hell are you?" as the new catchphrase for their tourism spots. This is one of the longer editions of the adverts; the version shown here is a 30-second version, and is shown in fullscreen.

Now, the good folks at The Chaser decided to see if they could come up with some better slogans to sell the country to foreigners. I think some of them might fly, but of course there are some government-types who might not think the same...judge for yourself ;)

Saturday Randomness

I've been kinda lost as to what to post about the last couple of days, so here's another list of random things ;)

• A message to Schapelle Corby: most people don't care if you don't have a shag until you're 47 (or ever again really). Thanks for telling us anyways. (Oddly enough, this story is the top story on the SMH site as of 4PM EDT Sunday...)
• As I had discussed on Thursday, the sales slips for the Thankgiving sales have been out for a couple of days, and because of that, I have scoured them to make sure that we find the best bargains in the stores. Now, the plan is to go to the store that I think will have the lowest prices and compare to the prices that I can get with the sales combined with coupons {i.e. getting canned vegetables for 23¢ at one store, while another has them on offer at 25¢ per can}
• I've had a really good week this week; it's really good when you can get enough sleep.
• There was just a commercial for South Africa Airways on TV, featuring the flags of the countries that they serve; it's good to see more of the foreign airlines advertising here (usually the only ones you'd ever see are British Airways and Qantas; I'd never even heard of Cathay Pacific or many of the flag carriers of Asia until about a year ago)
• MSN Messenger is a bad piece of software as it forces you to use Internet Explorer; I am trying to get my mother to switch away from IE to Firefox, and I figured that if I just changed the default browser, that would work; but it would seem that they've made it just near impossible to not use IE (there's software, but that totally broke the linking mechanism such that you can't open any links in any browser).
  
• If you haven't heard, Spongebob is still the "in" thing for marketing. Witness this scene below, where you can see both The Game of Life and Monopoly with special versions centred on the show (the Monopoly cover has the eyes as a hologram, that's why it looks kinda strange). And no, I did not purchase them; just took the photo ;)

There's something about Japan...

I don't know what it is, but I was flipping through channels and stopped on the Golf channel tonight to discover that they were showing a direct rebroadcast of the "Dunlop Phoenix" Tournament from Phoenix Country Club in Japan. Pictured below is Shingo Katayama, or "Cowboy Shingo". The reason should be fairly obvious. The other reason for this particular screenshot is the scoring graphics that the broadcaster (I'm not sure who exactly this is from) employs - a circle means a birdie, dashes mean par, and the triangle designates a bogey.


Now, most of the time that a network will pick up a foreign based broadcast, they'll usually borrow some of the graphics (for example, I've seen standard Sky Sports graphics before, also graphics from the old Fox Footy Channel, Networks Nine and Ten when the AFL was showing, plus Sky Sport NZ from the rugby), but they usually don't pick up the full graphics. This time, we have the Golf channel managing to pick up the broadcast schedule for the remaining rounds (the commentator even mentioned that if you could read that you can ignore it as that is the schedule for Japanese viewers).


Something that I've read Peter in Japan discuss is his affinity for the "Navi" system - otherwise known as the Navigation system. This continues into the TV world, as we have the NEC Shot Navi plotting a straight line between Tiger's current lie and the hole, along with the fact that he is approximately 234 yards away from said hole.


Of course, the main reason that this has made it to our screens is the fact that Tiger is competing in it (the Australian Open is nowhere to be seen on US screens incidentally). The rebroadcast here ends in the same way as it did in Japan however, a picture of Tiger ready to take a shot, and the graphic declaring the End of the Second Round.

According to the schedule above, the 3rd round should be airing right now in Japan, but we won't see it until sometime tomorrow; the live event that is being covered is the UBS Open in Hong Kong, and that doesn't start until the top of the hour...

Grocery Shopping

We are somewhat lucky that we have at least five separate major grocery retailers in my general area. Three of them are based in my state, one is based in California, and the other is Wal-Mart. Most of these stores all have similar sales, but the prices can be different (or in some cases, the product)

So, as somewhat of a public service, I provide some sample prices for products on sale between today and Saturday (note that this is the only period where all five stores have these prices on offer concurrently)

For example, Stove-Top Stuffing. Three of the stores have it priced at 98¢, 99¢, and $1.00 respectively. The fourth store has it at $1.25 (advertised as 4/$5) and Wal-Mart has it priced at 88¢. Two stores have Clementines available - one at $4.98 and the other at $5.48. Something common in most stuffings made at this time of the year is Sage & Onion crutons produced by the Brownberry Baking company. One store (the same one with the $1.25 Stovetop) has it at $1.50. Another has had it at $2.00 for a while now, but they've put it on sale at $1.66 (or 3/$4.98). Yet another has it at $1.99 (or 2/$3.98). The other two don't have it listed, so one can assume that their regular prices of $2.25 and $2.00 are maintained.

So, what's the lesson here? I think it's that just because you think that your neighbourhood store has the lowest price *you've* seen, doesn't mean that it is the lowest price - a last example - most stores are having Dean's dips at something like $1.50 per package; but there's another store that has the same size on sale for 98¢.

Living by the Rails

Waiting at the post, originally uploaded by sephiroth.blog.

This is something that I don't mention often, but I live about 50 feet from a major railroad, where trains can go by at speeds upto 60 miles per hour (approximately 97 km/h). Ironically, it was the rails that led me into two things - digital photography (the vast majority of my photos are of trains) and scanning.

Some of my photos are, admittedly, not the greatest in the world, but others, like this one, are pretty cool. I had taken a photo of this signal standard back in January with about the same lighting conditions, and I had been looking through my photos recently and found that picture. So, on Sunday (when I was Out and About) the train happened to be doing some work with switching its loads between side tracks and the such. I actually waited for a while (because I had my handheld scanner with me, I had some clue as to what they were doing) until they got the front end of the engine right where I wanted it.

The best part is that they stopped right where you see the engine - in the perfect spot for me :)

I'll be digging through my train photos to find some of the best (and even some of the not-so-good ones) ones to post here :)

Commenting on blogs

As many of you might know, I am (along with Snoskred), trying to comment on as many of the NaBloPoMo blogs as I can.

Today, I finished the 92 blogs in the letter B; of those, I didn't comment on only 15 of them - 14 because unregistered users can't comment, comments are turned off or the blog just couldn't be found, and one because I chose not to. For me, I had a hard time commenting on blogs in the past, a point of contention when I had let it get to me that people weren't magically appearing at my blog.

Of course, the reason that this wasn't happening is that they didn't know that I'm out here, and by leaving comments in other blogs, that is a way of getting myself out there and letting people know that I do exist. :)

The thing is, though, that when I started this, I had a hard time coming up with comments on a single blog, but as I've been going through and commenting on various things - be it nice photo here or a great recipe there; it's become a heck of a lot easier for me to say something. When I started this, I struggled with ten which took me the better part of an evening to finish. Now, in the four hours or so that I've been doing this today, I've commented on something like 30 blogs and after I have my lunch, I plan on doing some more (along with getting some doing some more posting over at the Scambaiting blog and checking in with my 419mail blogs.

So, if you are a little bit shy about saying something, just go ahead and say it. There's nobody stopping you ;)

Piracy, 1990 style

No, I'm not talking about Napster or Morpheus or Kazaa. I'm talking about pirated radio, like Radio Caroline. Pirate radio takes center stage in the Christian Slater movie Pump Up The Volume, where the storyline is based around the son of a school administrator who has just moved to Paradise City, AZ from New York who transformed his shortwave transceiver into an FM transmitter.

Using a voice-changing machine, he broadcasts at 10 pm to the students of Hubert H Humphrey High School as Happy Harry Hardon, who encourages listeners to send in their advice. During one of the first broadcasts, we see someone type into a computer "Do you think that I should kill (myself?)", which is printed out and sent to Harry (it's classified on IMDB as a continuity error, but if you think it over, it makes sense). Unfortunately, the sender of that letter wound up taking his life, and Harry wound up taking the flack for it. He was going to discontinue broadcasts after this, but he was inspired by Nora, the only person to figure out that it was him based on the revelation of how he spent his lunch hour. This led to a massive uproar in the school's faculty, and the students were also taking his advice to be themselves by setting a lot of graffiti on the walls and ceilings of the school. In the end, Happy Harry got put off the air, but his message was out there - and a lot of other teens started their own pirate radio stations.

One of the major themes of the movie is to not be who someone wants you to be - be who you want to be. The most obvious example is Harry (whose real name in the movie was Mark) - when he was on the radio he was very open and willing to talk, but whenever he was seen in scenes around the school, he would always have his head down and not want to interact with anybody. His parents expected him to be like he was when he was Back East, but he never fit into the school, at least as himself. When he put the Harry face on, he became who he wanted to be - open and willing to tell people what he thought of things. The pivotal moment for this is right after the suicide, when he encourages his listeners to actually be themselves.

An interesting note, on the technical side - on the last night of his broadcast when the FCC had started to look for him (and where the Commissioner said that it was people like Harry that were the problem with free speech), and he had made the decision to go mobile, technically the receivers in the school carpark should have been experiencing some mobile fade - it's a common occurence when the source of a broadcast is moving. But it is a movie so it doesn't have to be fully accurate to be good. ;)

Overall? It's a good movie with a great message - be yourself. It's seen in everything from the students to the school itself, where the principal is suspended for expelling "bad" students just so that she can tout the school's record as having the highest SAT scores in the state. However, she lied about expelling them and retained the public money from their existence in the school's population.

Some loose ends -

What crimes did Mark end up being charged with? They had discussed pornography and solicitation, and charging him with being involved in the suicide.
How did his parents react to actually finding out that it was him? He had narrowly escaped (with the assistance of Nora) their wrath after the mass meeting and in the last scene, his father was more concerned with the shady dealings of the principal it would seem.

Out and About

horse1
Originally uploaded by sephiroth.blog.

I actually feel like I've gotten stuff done today - visiting some more NaBloPoMo blogs and commenting on them, posting queued mails to the various 419 mail blogs, checking in on my scambaits, and going out and taking a walk.

Just up the road from where I live are a family who own a few horses; most of the time they are in their stables, but while I was out walking, they were let out to run around in their field. I (as I usually do) had my camera with me and I, of course, took some photos.

There are a couple more photos from my walk today that I'll be sharing over the next day or so. Oh, and I am now set up with flickr, which is easier to do than I had thought. :)

Tonight on TV...

At 8:30PM central on Telemundo: Walking Tall starring 'The Rock' (dubbed into Spanish)
At 8:30PM central on TNT: Walking Tall starring 'The Rock'

It would go good trying to watch both, at least until one of them has a commercial interruption ;)