Category Archives: Words Words Words

On The Fickleness Of Technology

You know, yesterday started off as such a fantastic day, and in the last couple of hours it went spiralling down in flames. This was made even more irritating by the fact that we were supposed to be celebrating Tal’s birthday, and I so desperately wanted to enjoy myself, but events conspired against me. I should have just stayed home.

A lot of the Bad Day-ness revolves around my wretched little smear of a printer and its thirty-dollar ink cartridges which require replacement much, much too often for the amount of printing that I do. It wouldn’t be so bad if the printer didn’t consume vast quantities of ink for no reason, particularly coloured ink, which I don’t use often at all. The printer requires both a functional black and colour cartridge in order to print in black only, for some lame reason, and yesterday not only did my colour cartridge run out, the printer decided to not recognise the new cartridges I put into it.

I will own a new printer by the weekend. The nice man in the independent print shop around the corner told me that many people had problems with this particular model and showed me a Canon printer priced at just under a hundred dollars, which prints faster than the one I’ve currently got and whose cartridges cost only six dollars. Since I have paid the original price of this printer several times over in ink cartridges alone over the past year I’ve owned it, I have no problem buying the new printer. One hundred dollars is equal to buying three cartridges for my current printer, after all..

So, please consider this a public apology to everyone whom I didn’t speak with last night at the pub. The demise of my printer fouled up three seperate projects all scheduled to be completed just before I left last night. That, plus half an hour looking for a parking space (which always puts me in a foul mood) made me Hel to be with. After such a terrific day, it was a real disappointment.

The good news, though, is that I won ten dollars on a lottery ticket. I feel smug, somehow.

Watching Movies

On t!’s recommendation, we watched Minority Report last night instead of tuning into the Oscars. It’s an excellent film – it made me jump in two places. Not that jumping is a standard by which I judge films; the exact opposite, actually. It’s just that this was well-paced, well-written, and well-acted, with a couple of nifty twists.

Unfortunately, even with a running time of two hours and twenty minutes, all of Minority Report could not safely obscure the Academy Awards completely. When we switched off the DVD, there they were, awarding the interesting stuff: soundtracks, best films, and so forth. I did have to check the website this morning though to discover that Spirited Away won Best Animated Feature. I’m thrilled. Actually, I was impressed with the general level of justice done at this year’s Oscars, except for one award: as much as I adored Chicago, it didn’t deserve Best Picture.

In general, I had a wonderful weekend, visiting with friends and cooking and achieving an overall state of relaxation. I seem to have finally hit a plateau after nine months of freelancing at home where I can actually relax and not feel guilty about it. Feeling a constant sense of anger due to the guilt inherently attached to inactivity when you walk away from the computer to sit down and read a book is a lousy way to live, let me tell you. It’s taken me this long to adjust to working in a non-traditional environment. It’s a small victory, but an important one.

Wiktory!

We have cable! Woo!

At 9.30 AM Saturday morning, the contractor showed up to flick the switch and give us wiring. I got to see a whole three minutes of ReBoot before I had to leave for an interview and class.

And, after all that angst, the universe had a grand old snicker at our expense by not showing Buffy on YTV Saturday night. The Powers That Be giveth, and The Powers That Be taketh away… (I hear last week’s Angel was pre-empted by the war, though, so that’s one less new episode I’ve missed.)

24, Season One

We finished watching 24 last night. I’m glad they went with the ending they did, because the alternate one was just awful. Overall, I’m impressed, and my only complaint lies with the weak wife/daughter storyline after episode twelve. It’s almost as if they said, “Hey, we have the full season go-ahead! Great! Jack can do all this cool stuff in the next ten episodes!” Then after a while they said, “Oh, wait… what are we going to do with the women?” and came up with some lame action that rendered them remarkably unsympathetic.

I have been promised cable today! It’s a bit of a pain that Videotron can’t be more specific about the installation, other than saying they’ll be here sometime between 7.30 AM and 8.00 PM, though.

Grumblings About Store Reorganization

My posts have become infrequent because, well, there just hasn’t been much going on in my head, really. Most of my time is spent sleeping or reading or rearranging that last pile of boxes to look smaller, somehow. I appear to have developed a need for a mid-afternoon nap, which is slightly embarrassing although not surprising after three weeks of sick and insomnia and moving. I think my body has taken the bit between the teeth and is now setting its own sleep-rules, denying my conscious mind of any input. I can’t seem to focus on work for any long period of time, and I think I’m undergoing an enforced vacation imposed by psyche and physical body alike.

It’s kind of a relief, actually.

I went downtown today to HMV to pick up a couple of recordings to help me out as I practice for orchestra, because I’m getting really frustrated. When I got there, I spent time upstairs in the relaxing classical section, bought the required CDs (three for $20, I feel so smug) then went downstairs to the basement to cast a quick eye over the soundtracks.

They’ve moved everything around. Again.

It made me grumpy, although the terrible, awful, horrible music they were playing might have had something to do with that as well. Then, I thought I’d check on the new DVDs releases, since it’s been forever since I’ve been in HMV, but the massive DVD section had somehow shrunk to a measly two displays and that little room once devoted to film is now acid. I walked around it in disbelief – what, had they decided to stop selling DVDs or something? – and finally went back upstairs to the main level, where I discovered that they had moved the DVD section there, so unsuspecting clients walk right smack into the stuff (unless, of course, you avoid the main floor like the plague, as I do, and head right upstairs for jazz and classical.). I walked through it to get my bearings and saw way, way too many movies I wanted to own in among the 2-for-$30 stickers. I was trying to decide which two to whittle my vast list down to when I realised my folly and made my escape into the clear cold morning. If I trip across a couple of hundred dollars, I know where I’m going.

I’ll just have to bring a guide with me, because they no doubt will have hidden what I want from me between now and then.

New Article Published!

Urk. When I wasn’t looking, the Owlyblog’s counter passed 10K. How did that happen?

My commentary on Oscar-nominated Lilo & Stitch has been officially web-published, and is up over at the fps site! It’s a five-fold project that looks at all the films nominated for Best Animated Feature Film category this year, each film examined by a different writer in a different light. The project centres around how each Oscar-nominated film stands for something within the animation industry, as opposed to “reviewing” or commenting on “Oscar-worthiness”. It was a really interesting exercise, and I enjoyed it a lot. I thank all the gods out there that Emru responded to the cry of “Who edits the editor?”, so that errors could be corrected and things flowed better. I can fix other people’s writing, but I’m always too involved with my own abstracts and thesis statements to do a final polish on my own work, because I know what I was trying to say all along.

By the way, do you think spring’s finally catching up with the calendar? Winter’s only got another three days, after all.