Friday

Ok, so my G5 finally shipped yesterday after order it on July 22nd. So, I get the FedEX INTL Economy tracking information to check when it will be here. Great… I notice at 9 am. this morning, that the box is already in Calgary. Sweet… or so I thought. I thought, ok, this package has already been paid for in terms of GST and PST, so, it should be on its way here later today. I check at 9pm to see if that was the case… NOPE!!! Customs (those bastards) are holding it up. WHY?!?!? I WANT TO KNOW WHY!!! The package was ordered from Apple Canada (not apple US), and has already been paid for in terms of GST and PST. So why would there be any reason for customs to stop it???? Not to mention that I’m sure customs will take their sweet time in contacting me about it if they do at all. It seems I will never get this G5…

09-27-2004 (Monday) -> Continuation

Alright, so customs has it… fine. I call to find out why. I contact FedEX becaust that seems like the logical thing to do as it was shipped via them. FedEX has no clue as to why… in fact, they have no clue as to anything regarding the package in Canada. Why??? Because for some unknown reason, Apple decided at some point in time that FedEX (while using them to ship) should let another company handle customs. Which company you might ask?… Nippon Express. A JAPAN BASED COMPANY !!!!! Why in hell would a company choose a foreign based company to handle customs?!?!?! It makes no sense. Anyway, I call Nippon Express… they have no clue. They check their computers for the info and show that they have it and tell me that yes, it should be cleared and given back to FedEX already, but, in the words of the rep I was speaking to “oh my, why hasn’t this cleared yet, we had since Thursday?” MY THOUGHTS EXACTLY!!!! WHY??? ARGH am I getting irritated. So, customs sorted it out and the package is returned to fedEX. Later on I call FedEX to find out when the package will arrive. They have no record of recieving it after Nippon Express sent it back to them…. I’m now awaiting a call back from the Calgary FedEX office. It must not have been intended for me to have G5 i thinks.

Tuesday - 3:30 pm

for the record…. it’s here now (minus my NVidia card)

smart Cars are now officially for sale in Saskatchewan. And tomorrow you can test drive ‘em.

The smart is an interesting vehicle. It is small; has a length of only 2.5 metres which less than the width of a hummer (for comparison purposes). It has a manual transmission, but no clutch. It is a diesel, but it will start in Winter (3 second start time after sitting in -40 for three days in Norway) without trouble (electronic ignitor heats fuel). On the environmental side it produces like 90g of pollution / km; gets like 4.7l/100km in city and 3.6l/100km on highway. The vehicle is no speed demon though, with a top speed of 135km/h (electronically limited mind) and a 0-100kmph acceleration of 17s (for comparison my intrigue is 8.2s IIRC). It’s advantages though are size, fuel, and maneouverability. The pilot launch my mercedes has been a resounding success with over 1000 pre-orders already placed. They pre-orders are expected to arrive before December, and all orders from now on are expected to arrive at the earliest in January. So are you going to get smart?

I noticed today that one of the spam messages that slipped passed my filter had a cute little line at the bottom which went as such: “The glass city had several fine streets, for a good many people lived there; but when the procession had passed through these it came upon a broad plain covered with gardens and watered by many pretty brooks that flowed through it …”

Now that rang some bells in my brain and I dumped that into google. It’s from the “Dorothy and the Wizard in Oz” by Frank Baum.

The glass city had several fine streets, for a good many people lived there; but when the procession had passed through these it came upon a broad plain covered with gardens and watered by many pretty brooks that flowed through it. There were paths through these gardens, and over some of the brooks were ornamental glass bridges.

Dorothy and Zeb now got out of the buggy and walked beside the Prince, so that they might see and examine the flowers and plants better.

“Who built these lovely bridges?” asked the little girl.

“No one built them,” answered the man with the star. “They grow.”

“That’s queer,” said she. “Did the glass houses in your city grow, too?”

“Of course,” he replied. “But it took a good many years for them to grow as large and fine as they are now. That is why we are so angry when a Rain of Stones comes to break our towers and crack our roofs.”

“Can’t you mend them?” she enquired.

“No; but they will grow together again, in time, and we must wait until they do.”

They first passed through many beautiful gardens of flowers, which grew nearest the city; but Dorothy could hardly tell what kind of flowers they were, because the colors were constantly changing under the shifting lights of the six suns. A flower would be pink one second, white the next, then blue or yellow; and it was the same way when they came to the plants, which had broad leaves and grew close to the ground.

It is one of the many sequels to the Wizard of Oz and was written in 1908. I found it vastly amusing that it was quoted in the spam message …

Photography by Brent Braaten, The Canadian Press

RCMP in Prince George, B.C., are hot on the trail of a trickster [who] was responsible for superimposing the Tim Hortons brand on the flag of the Mountie logo on an RCMP [vehicle]. Police didn’t even notice the change until they saw the photograph in the a newspaper yesterday. So far, no one has stepped forward to claim responsibility, but RCMP spokesman Const. Gary Godwin isn’t ruling out an inside job. ‘There are some light-hearted members on the force,’ he said.

??? A Newspaper Cliping ???

Holy shit

“The fags is gettin married, get the rope, and cut holes in the bed sheets…. no the white ones, not the rainbows. Alright you cousins stop fuckin’ and gather round. we got to stop this. them fags and dykes up in canada is getin’ hitched, and that can’t happen. if me and my sister can’t get married, they can’t neither. ” Quote attributed to George W. Bush on hearing that another province of canada had decieded to let homosexuals marry

I beknownst to me, last Thursday was a major day. Thursday was the day my total usage on my cablemodem account hit 1 Ti Byte (July 1st, 2002 through September 9th, 2004).

Having liberated my usage data from Access Communications (thanks Tocsic), I found many interesting things. For example, this is a comparison is my usage in August (w/o Delg) and my usage in September (w/ Delg).

Ok, this was just too good to not let everyone know about this. Anyone who has ever dealt with Japanese English (Japlish as I call it) will automatically know what I am talking about. It’s just funny… those who don’t know what Japlish (Engrish) is, then go here to find out.

皆さんこんにちは。　このムービーは日本であります。　へんだよ！　でも見たい　　面白い思っている

Devilman
UNBELIEVABLE! In the art of “Casshern,” they have taken an old anime and converted it into a real person/CGI film. Could there be a drawback? YES, there can be… take a former K1 fighter/NFL Football player (Bob Sapp) with no acting skills what-so-ever. Thank god he seems to have a very minor part.

Hero
Typical bad high-school that is need of good teacher/coach… good teacher/coach comes… he’s the Hero… yey… can everyone say boring and overdone or do I need to bring in a Hero to teach you all?…

花咲ける騎士道
Sorry… I don’t know the title for this one. All I know is that it is French in origin…

Appleseed
The guy who did Ghost in the Shell decided to redo Appleseed… I’m sure you all know of Appleseed, so I won’t say more… except at the end of the preview, I think she says the equivalent of “Who’s your mama?!”, but I could be very wrong.

海猿
Japanese Navy Seals????

解夏
Um…. I really don’t know… looks like a TV drama that made it to big screen

スウィングガールズ (Swing Girls)Now before you start thinking prOn, this is 100% not…. what can I say about this?… hmm… .OMFG… just watch and you’ll see what I mean.

SteamboyAn anime with a more traditional look to it than recent ones…. any good?… actually, yeah, looks interesting

LoversAn HK production. Very typical Kung-Fu movie, but worth a peak just as Hero was.

Fyn, Delg … remember when we discovered that the closest white castle was in Minnesota … I found it … via satellite! White Castle #1 in Minnesota is at 608 Central Ave. NE Minneapolis. Here is some satellite survelliance of the area … The dark road heading diagonally across the picture (bottom to top) is Highway 65. The two lighter diagonal roads (right to left) are 1st Avenue NE and E Hennepinn Ave (top to bottom). The triangular region formed by the intersection of Highway 65 and 1st Avenue NE, Highway 65 and E Hennepinn, and 1st Avenue NE and E Hennepinn should contain the white castle … which one it is I know not.

Fuck shit bullcrap and shit and fuck and shit hell damn fuck!

So I just heard about the City’s (Regina’s) new automated garbage collection system. Our illustrious city council passed the bill implementing the automated system yesterday. Am I the only one who didn’t hear about this at all before this? This brand new system is going to cost $2 million to implement and cost $1.45 million a year to operate. The current system only costs $1.4 million. So they are spending $2 million and increasing the yearly costs by $50 thousand. Brilliant, I can see none of them can do basic math. On top of that, this includes getting rid of the four garbage guys whose jobs just became redundant … they aren’t going to lay ‘em off though, they are just going to allocate ‘em elsewhere. What a stupid idea. Not only are we paying like $50k more of this new system a year, but we are also paying for four less people which means the actual price difference is larger … and some other department just went up by the difference. Fun! There are no savings here and I fail to see the added value.

What is the new system? Well they’ve decided to get rid of manual garbage disposal and replace it with large automated roll-out bin collection. One just puts their garbage in one of these “Large Bins” and then when garbage day comes around one rolls it to the curb. Brilliant. So what am I so pissed off about you inquire, well, WHERE THE HELL AM I GOING TO PUT A “LARGE BIN”? I CAN BARELY FIT MY CAR IN MY GARAGE! On top of that the city is going to raise property taxes again to cover this most recent mess, I just know it. ARGH!

When I become god, I’m going to kill everything and start again.