It is really weird how life can kinda converge on you at times. I’ve been working feverishly to get 2 sites polished up for about the last 2 months only to have them both launch within a couple of days of each other. One at work, then one I’ve been working on from home, or as I’ve come to know it, second work. The second project has had me teaming with the people I had worked with previously at my last employer before the turmoil that took place there. We have been creating a brand new site called MySafeWork, which is the new online home for safety advocate Rob Ellis. The aim of the site is to hit home about the importance of safety in the workplace. It’s a site with a great message and I’m happy to be part of its creation, even if it has rendered me without a life for the past month.

I’ve noticed recently that I’ve been getting a large influx of people telling or emailing me to join Facebook. It seems like people are just popping out of the woodwork with invites. It’s really kinda bizarre. The odd thing is that I’ve talked to other people and they’ve remarked the same thing. Where is this groundswell of popularity coming from? Personally I’ve pretty much had it with all these social networking sites. I’ve been through a bunch of them now and am to the point I don’t really care. I started out frequenting a community Tickle back in 2003. Through this website I actually met my future Mrs. When that site died out myself and many of the friends I had from Tickle moved to Hi5. It was very similar to Tickle and I rebuilt my friend list there. Corina actually met a good friend of ours, Kristina through this website. My contact list eventually burned out, so I then moved onto MySpace after hearing all the hype surrounding the site after it was purchased by News Corp. I again rebuilt my friend list and still check it every so often, but in reality I really don’t care about these sites anymore. It just seems that these services are just a perpetual loop. I’ve had it with constantly moving to the latest and greatest in social networking. These sites are great, but I find there are only so many community sites you can be involved with before you have to say enough is enough.

Boy howdy is my car costing me money these days.  There is a bunch of stuff I have been putting off with regards to my car and now it’s all coming to bite me in the ass at the same time.  I just got the right tie rod fixed on the car yesterday, which is something that’s needed to be done for quite awhile.  It was diagnosed back in July, but given I don’t drive my car a tonne, I just pushed it off.  Since I had surgery in the summer I have only driven my car about 6000 kms in 6 months.  My car basically gets me to and from work and does some other local driving.  Since I got the tie rod fixed, I need to get an alignment done, so I might as well get the new tires I need installed at the same time.  I also had planned on getting my brakes done in the spring, but my mechanic deemed I didn’t need one immediately, so I held off.  So odds are I’m going to need one sometime in the near future.  Cars are such a bitch.  I’m definitely leasing the next car I get, just so everything is covered under warranty.

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I have to say I managed to have a weekend that was none too pleasant. I suspect I managed to get a case of food poisoning on Friday night. Friday was a rather low key night, with Corina’s parents coming to visit, then I kept reading A Million Little Pieces until later in the evening. While doing that I felt a might peckish, so I opted to eat a bag of chips that I had received in my Christmas stocking. They were Humpty Dumpty Regular chips and they tasted kinda off, but I was hungry and rarely ate those kind of chips, so I didn’t think anything of it.  I subsequently discovered that the chips best before date ran out at the end of December.  They seem to be the only out of the ordinary thing I ate that night, so they may be the culprit. I woke up early on Saturday finding myself feeling rather ill and proceeded to turn myself inside out a couple of times before going back to bed. So for the rest of the weekend I’ve pretty much felt like crap. I ate my first actual meal in the last 2 days at my parents and my stomach is rumbling a fair bit afterwards. My innard hurt still and it really sucks. My Mom kept trying to convince me that it might be the flu, but I’ve never had anything flu that’s made me feel like this. Wasn’t quite what I had in mind for my weekend, but what could I do?

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Anyone who’s caught some of the news in the last day probably heard the "scandal" that has broken regarding the book "A Million Little Pieces" by James Frey.  It seems to be everywhere.  I just caught the tale end of his interview on Larry King tonight after Lost to see what he had to say.  Well this whole issue is rather irritating to me.  I’m in the middle of reading it and now everyone is calling into question the validity of the book.  I started it last week and am about 1/3 of the way through the book.  Corina suggested the book to me, as it was the book she had read for the book club she and a couple of friends started.  I started reading it without any preconcieved notions about it and was quite enjoying it.  I was aware it was an Oprah’s Book Club selection, mainly because of the sticker on the cover.  I didn’t know it was the top selling book for the last 15 weeks.  I didn’t know I was reading the trendy book du jour.  I just read it for the sake of having something to read on my breaks at work without any expectation, having never heard of it before.  I only read it about half an hour a day, so it makes for slow progress.  Then all this controversy about the facts involved in the book pops up.  Part of the books charm is the fact that there is some genuinely messed up shite going on and you know it actually happened.  Calling into question the validity of some of these experiences really ruins the read.  I hope it doesn’t entirely ruin the rest of the book for me.

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Finally my family is coming around on the whole online Christmas list thing I did. A couple weeks ago I mentioned about how previous attempts to use an online Christmas list with my family to aid their shopping had failed. Well it seems it might not be falling on deaf ears this year. After being somewhat hostile to the idea, Corina has come around and created a list of her own on MyGiftList, as well as my sister. My Mom has suggested that everyone do it to make it easy to know what gifts to get. I’m so pleased. Now my previous 2 Christmas’ fight for technology doesn’t seem in vain. It’s a moral victory for the internet enabled generation.

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So everything is getting sorted out for the party this weekend. I’m a little worried about the amount of people that are going to be in the apartment, but oh well. I figure the cops are going to come for sure given the high likelyhood my neighbours will phone in a noise complaint. As I always used to say, it’s not a party in Paris until the police show up.

Back when I used to have and go to parties frequently my friend Les once had this totally brutal party. My group of friends used to have a great rep for having kick ass parties, so every one was very well attended. Except this one. Les decided he would try and throw a party the day of, so he told a bunch of people at school and hoped everyone would show. Well that wasn’t quite the case. Hardly anyone showed up and the party was just plain terrible, so Chance and I decided to spice things up. I phoned in a noise complaint on the very lame party we were attending. Then we told everyone at the party(aside from Les) and made a point of making as much noise as possible outside his house, just to make sure the cops would come. We were screaming and yelling and Chance managed to get the keys to the riding lawnmower and was doing doughnuts on the lawn at 1am. The police eventually showed up to this terrible party and talked to Les(who was used to talking to the cops during parties given how many parties he used to have) and they just said keep it down and went on their way. Les comes back into the house and proceeds to gloat to everyone about how it wasn’t that bad of a party if the police showed up. Everyone had a good laugh at that.

My costume is almost complete. I ordered an accessory from eBay and am waiting for that one to come in. They assured Halloween delivery, so it should be here given it’s being shipped from Montreal. I can’t wait to try the whole get-up on. I’ll be sure to post pictures afterwards to see the awesomeness.

Does anyone remember the old show "Téléfrançais" they used to show in elementary school? That show was the cats pyjamas! I had to have watched that series numerous times while going through school. I went to frech immersion school from kindergarten to grade 3, so I watched it then. Then from grades 4-6 I went to an English school, and of course given they would obviously be behind in the level of French they taught, I watched it again, so the show was pretty ingrained in me. I want to find a song from that show that was performed by "Les Squelettes" called "C’est L’Halloween". I can find the theme song to the show, but not that song. Corina and I were singing it in the car last week, but i can’t seem to find a copy of it online.

Updated 10/22/07 A reader posted a link in my comments to a YouTube version of C’est L’Halloween by Matt Maxwell, so here it is

After much harassing lately, I am in the midst of assembling a Christmas list. I have been off work today sick, so I figured this would give me something to do. This issue has been a bone of contention in my family in the last couple of years. The last 2 years I have prepared online Amazon Christmas lists of items I wanted, only to have them pretty much ignored. Me being a forward thinking chap like I am, I wanted to make things as easy as possible for my family, as I am a very hard person to buy for. I’m very particular about things at times. The biggest beef my family had with my lists is that they had no way of knowing if anyone else had bought a certain item off of my list, or if they bought off the list, I would know because it would then be checked off. I’m hoping to remedy that this year by using a service called MyGiftLIst. It enables me to make a list and send it to friends and family. They can then buy the items wherever they choose, then check it off the list so others won’t buy the same item. It should be pretty fool-proof Hopefully this year people will actually heed my list.

This weekend I managed to cram pretty much everything into 1 day. On Saturday Corina and I got up early and I made badass breakfast. Then it was off to Simcoe. You recall awhile ago I mentioned about my firewire drive? Well I managed to goof up buying the drive off of eBay and got the wrong type of drive. So on one of the forums I frequent I worked out a trade to get the drive I needed with a guy from Simcoe, hence the trip. It involved some shady dealings in a Tim Horton’s parking lot. The guy showed up late, but eventually I got the drive I needed.

So with that sorted Corina and I made it a day in Simcoe. We did some shopping downtown, picking up a few necessities, like Tang and cookies. In our travels we found this awesome little market that had a bit of everything. Given we were in Simcoe on a nice, sunny day, I thought we should feed the ducks. Simcoe has a really cool pond in the centre of town that has tonnes of canadian geese and ducks, so it’s quite amusing way to kill some time. We picked up a loaf of bread and some bevvies and went to the park. I got a bunch of pictures of ducks(I’ll post some when I get home) and some videos of a goose turf war, it was quite fun. When we finished up there we went back downtown to a place I had spied earlier for lunch called Carey’s. It was a nice little pub/bar with an open air front. Given we’re probably going to be running short on sunny weather soon, it was great to enjoy eating outside for one of the last times this year.

Saturday evening we had plans to go bowling for Dan’s birthday, so we headed over to his place beforehand for drinks and video games. Dan beat me at NHL 2K6, which I got last week. To show how much distain I have for the Toronto Maple Leafs, I bought the US version of the game with Marty Turco of the Dallas Stars on the cover instead of Leaf captain Mats Sundin. We then played a 4 player round of Tiger Woods, which Dan also won, oddly. Dan is always good for having weird and wonderful beers on hand, and yesterday was no exception. I had one from Austria, then another from South Africa, both of which were quite good. We then made our way to the bowling alley. I was a bit worried about my knee and had that confirmed the first ball I threw. I couldn’t do my regular throw, so for the evening I pretty much just walked up to the line and hucked the thing from my hip. Luckily we were playing 5 pin, so it wasn’t that big of a deal. I think everyone had a good time, especially during the third game when we just messed around, doing granny, backwards granny, eyes closed and windmill shots each round.

All in all it was a crazy busy day, but I got alot done. I even managed to run cable to the bedroom finally, so now we have 2 tvs hooked up with cable in the apartment, much to the joy of Corina.

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I was just informed that the comments weren’t working on my blog. I’ve rectified the situation, so comment away. I had wondered why I hadn’t received any comments in the last week.