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January 17th, 2008
12:00 pm - cell phones
Brief explanation of why we can't have nice things the iPhone in Canada
tl;dr - Ted Rogers loves money more than geeks love the iPhone.
I had a job doing outsourced phone support for Cingular (AT&T) customers around this time last year. IIRC, we were trained to explain that video-on-demand required an unlimited data use plan, because the unlimited plan would pay for itself in something like two minutes of VOD use.
Why the hell was Rogers allowed to buy out Fido (Canada's only other GSM provider)? Was the CRTC too busy making sure there was enough awful Canadian music on the radio?
If only Virgin Mobile were a real provider, instead of just renting excess capacity. I'd love to see Richard Branson take on Ted Rogers directly.
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November 20th, 2007
12:00 pm - a bridge too far
Remember that crazy-expensive (cancelled) "bridge to nowhere" in Alaska? It was the kind of thing that really makes you ask, "Do we really want America to be the dominant superpower?"
Given that the only country that has any real chance of unseating them
forces five-year-olds to cross a raging river on a zip line, the answer is an emphatic "Yes".
(For anyone who's wondering, I haven't started filtering my posts, I just haven't been paying attention to LJ for months. I'll probably catch up soon.)
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October 5th, 2007
09:33 am - Who wants... to live... forevaaaaar?
I finally watched (Safari Guy's DVD of) the original Highlander movie recently. I watched a lot of the TV series when it was on Space (Wrenkin was very amused by the fact that my bicycle back then was - purely by coincidence - a "Highlander" model), so the spinoff (and the hilarious Robot Chicken parody of the movie - "My alcohol!") made the movie feel very familiar, even though I'd never seen it before.
The thing that really caught my attention was the impressive shot of the wrestling match at the start of the movie, where the camera flies in an arc around the arena. Highlander came out before decent CGI, you can't use a helicopter indoors, and the range and speed of motion was too great for a crane shot, so I was really curious how they pulled it off. The director commentary helpfully explained that they used a Skycam, which is basically a Steadicam that gets pulled around in various directions by computer-controlled cables. It would have been totally pimp if I'd got to use one back in my year of TV Broadcasting at college, but sadly our equipment was all roughly the level of what they used to make The Littlest Hobo.
Oh yeah, and this really deserves its own entry, but on the subject of 80's nostalgia, it turns out that the annoying kid from Voyage of the Mimi was none other than Ben Affleck. (Man, the deaf chick on the show was really annoying. Yes, yes, it's very impressive that you learned to vaguely approximate normal speech despite being deaf, but it'd really be easier for everyone if you just wrote stuff down on a notepad. Or if she'd used sign language throughout the show and was subtitled.)
I ended up largely ignoring LJ over the summer, so don't be surprised by a flurry of comments on your old posts.
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August 9th, 2007
07:45 pm - worth noting
The first Anime North took place ten years ago today, which means that I've been going to anime cons for a decade now.
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July 13th, 2007
09:17 pm - Northern Anime Festival
Kind of late to ask now, but I'm considering going to Northern Anime Festival tomorrow and was wondering what the buzz on the con is. I went in 2005 and wasn't impressed by what I found (not counting the Stargate in the courtyard, which wasn't there because of the con). Did anyone go last year?
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May 6th, 2007
11:17 pm - actual life update post real soon, I promise
Hurrah for the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy's success in France!
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March 1st, 2007
08:12 pm - Dubya ceases to be president in... 689 days
I just saw an old Colbert Report episode that mentioned the Backwards Bush keychains that count down the time left in Dubya's presidency. The episode ended with an odometer-style clock showing the remaining number of days left.
It'd be funny if they made it a regular feature at the end of every show, just like in Mahoromatic.
It's sad, but I think that it would take another eight years of Jeb to shock the Democrats into stopping and thinking about why enough Americans found them so repugnant that they were willing to re-elect a president as bad as Dubya (and his brother, potentially). Their whole "We deserve to run the country because Bush is a smelly cheater, whereas every single Democratic vote was 100% legitimate, and besides we're more educated!" attitude is really a major roadblock to the kind of pragmatism that's needed for basic liberal reforms in the US. Ha ha, things were so much simpler for the Dems when they were all about segregation "state rights".
On the bright side, the federal Conservatives here in Canada are all too aware of how little it would take to send the voters running back to the Liberals, and so have been running a tight ship.
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February 25th, 2007
12:00 pm
Instead of BBQing that poor lizard in the desert, Ghost Rider would have been a better movie if he randomly had to wait while a bunch of baby ducks crossed the road.
And for those of you who haven't seen it yet, there is nothing after the credits, so don't bother waiting like I did. Although it was funny to see "Satan's Penis" listed in the musical credits.
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February 20th, 2007
12:00 pm - Insert joke about unladen swallows here
On Sunday, I ate breakfast at a restaurant that had a vacation contest. As usual, the ballot had a mathematical skill-testing question. Not for the first time, I wondered "WTF? Why is remembering BEDMAS a requirement for winning a trip for two?".
The answer to this Canadian oddity is found in a particularly concise and informative wikipedia entry.
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February 6th, 2007
12:00 pm - "So what? They're ferns."
I really should know better than to sip my beverage during a McKay scene.
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February 4th, 2007
05:47 pm - The sky is purple right now.
Not as impressive as the sunset back in July where it looked like the sky was on fire, but still a reminder that I need to get myself a decent camera.
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December 23rd, 2006
04:55 pm - You know France's next revolution is overdue WHEN...
So in the process of trying to find that creepy oxygen-selling-machine Greenpeace commercial from my childhood, I stumbled upon the story of the sinking of the Rainbow Warrior.
How did this possibly seem like a good idea to the French government? If Greenpeace tried to make an incursion into the French military zone where the nukes were to be tested, they'd have justification to board the ship with marines and slap on the ziptie cuffs. But instead they decided to secretly bomb the ship.
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02:31 am - Don't mess with football Texas
A gang in Texas robs a used car lot. The cops come and go, and one of the gang members shows up and not only threatens the lot owner, but also takes a shot at him. The owner never gets a good look at the criminal's face, but does manage to put a bullet in his head. So now, rather hilariously, the teenaged gang member refuses to have the 9 mm bullet removed from his forehead because it would be used as evidence against him.
It's great that the punk survived. Not only is he a living testament to why violent crime doesn't pay (in armed states, anyway), but since he's only seventeen, he would have become another one of those "kids killed by guns" statistics that the Brady bunch love to throw around.
I wonder if he figured out that his initial "Urr, I got hurt playing basketball..." excuse wouldn't cut it whenever he sets off metal detectors for the rest of his life?
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December 21st, 2006
02:01 pm - Christmas meme
On the twelfth day of Christmas,  tartrazine sent to me... Twelve rin_sakaguchis drumming Eleven lumpchunkers piping Ten mutabilities a-leaping Nine torfindras dancing Eight kenshin_no_mikos a-milking Seven theengineers a-swimming Six schtoltheims a-laying Five co-o-o-omputers Four politics Three justice lords Two video games ...and an anime in a firefly.
There really is a three-pack of Justice Lord action figures, and it would be creepy if I actually got it for Christmas.
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December 5th, 2006
03:52 pm - next time, I will try bringing some limes along
"The driver will not evict the child and the behaviour of an intoxicated or deranged passenger must be quite obnoxious before the coach operator will become involved."
This is like an exceptionally polite version of my hatred for travelling by bus, lack of any mention about rap music notwithstanding.
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December 4th, 2006
December 3rd, 2006
12:38 am - Bill Nye's music videos were lame
1983-1986 version of the 3-2-1 Contact opening - great TV opening, or the greatest TV opening?
I remember the inferior later version better, though. That cow eyeball is still gross.
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November 28th, 2006
10:24 pm - let's be serial here for a moment...
At first, I didn't believe that An Inconvenient Truth could really just be failed presidential candidate Al Gore giving a boring Powerpoint presentation for an hour. I mean, even if Gore didn't sound like the bastard child of Ben Stein and Dr. Phil, was taping someone giving a lecture really the best way to warn us about ManBearPig global warming? Clearly not, since I was only able to endure about five minutes of it.
The scary thing is that the movie is now hitting DVD. See, when AIT was in theatres, it was pretty much only watched by people who wanted to see it. Some hippies (who produce relatively few children, thankfully) forced their young to endure the movie, and some young men also sat through it in a bid to please their she-hippie dates, but mostly it was watched appreciately by the kind of people who pretend that the Kyoto Protocol wasn't dead on arrival.
The DVD release changes that. In high school, I took two courses (Media and World Issues) that were thinly veiled excuses to show us leftist propaganda videos. None of those videos, not even the ridiculous pro-Chomsky one, was as painfully boring as An Inconvenient Truth. Sadly, because of its high profile, Gore's borefest will be forced upon thousands of students in the years to come. (Their only crime was to not be lucky enough to be homeschooled, far away from the federally designated victim zones of the public education system!)
The really sad part is that the Who Killed the Electric Car? movie touches on many of the same issues, but is quite entertaining! Oh, and it's narrated by Martin Sheen, who's actually an appropriate choice as a movie narrator... unlike Gore. The movie's premise that the EV1 electric car was viable but unfairly killed is incorrect (they point out that the Japanese rushed to start work on hybrids to avoid losing market share to the Americans, but they dance around the little matter of the Japanese being smart enough to stay the hell away from pure electrics), but it's a really fun movie. Hopefully plug-in hybrids will be affordable once I can finally afford to buy a car. (Hurray for Ontario building new nuclear power plants to charge such future vehicles!) And make sure to watch for Mel Gibson (sporting a crazy-looking beard) discussing how the people with the biggest noses sticks get to make the rules in life.
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November 24th, 2006
10:07 am - the obvious question
What happened to Annarchy? Did she catch Downs Syndrome? I was under the impression that it was caused by a genetic defect, and thus not communicable.
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November 21st, 2006
09:42 am - Hurray for lies!
stolen from ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) captainecchi:
Give me a fandom [TV show, book, movie, game, comic, manga, anime, indie rock band, local sports team] you know or think I'm not into, and I'll tell you what I think it's about based on what I've picked up online. If I do know the media in question, it is possible I will lie entertainingly.
A multiple fandoms reply is fine too.
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