I spent the first part of today cleaning up stuff around my apartment and answering random e-mails before heading over to Raphael and Florence's house to celebrate Raphael's (today) and my (tomorrow) birthday. Raphael made an excellent hot and pungent soup, and Florence baked awesome turkey legs. Two bottles of nice champagne, and all was well with the world.

It's always interesting when you get older to look back at how much you've changed over your life. It's a strange thing about birthdays, that unlike any other day of the year, they almost force you to confront both your mortality, and the fact and circumstances of your meager existance. I'm not sure if I recognize who I was 2 years, or even 1 year ago. Let alone 5 or 6 years ago when I was still in high school. I suppose when every year isn't such a large fraction of the whole, it becomes less of an issue, but at least for someone at my age, the changes are still comming fast and frequent.

We'll see what happens tomorrow on my birthday.

Yerp. It was my birthday today. Getting old. At work they brought lunch for raphael and myself along with a cake, which was excellent. Of course, raphael and I both disapeared as lunch was being procured, raphael to eat at the very place they were bringing lunch from, and myself to deal with yet another figure in powerpoint issue. [You'd think after having so many problems with the figures they'd learn. My bailing them out every time must not be enforcing the lesson with enough clarity.] Anyway, I had fun.

Then I wandered home and worked on some random stuff before deciding to head out and catch a flick. As luck would have it, I went to go see [http://us.imdb.com/Title?0292506|The Recruit], which was a moderately decent movie. Unfortunatly, as with many movies that have any technology or computers in them, they're buzzword ladden, but anyone who knows anything about computers or cryptogrophy or mathematics knows that it's all garbage.

Applied linear cryptography? A wireless webcast that takes over other monitors And non radio emitting crt's! A virus that is hardware agnostic that infects through electrical outlets? HAHAHAHA! I almost died laughing in the movie. Unfortunatly, I don't think anyone else who was watching the movie understood what was so funny.

Ever since Hackers: "Hack the GIBSON!" and Jurassic Park's "It's UNIX!" (NOT!), writers and directors have consistently shown computers in the most implausible ways. What's worse, is there are many extreemely cool and crazy things out there, but some writers just aren't aware of them, because they write in a buble, without doing the appropriate background research behind their topic. Of films in my memory, only [http://us.imdb.com/Title?0086567|WarGames] showed computers in a relatively correct situation, although the whole WOPR thing was a bit out there.

If any writers out there are reading this, here's one geek who will glady volunteer to help remove the technical problems from your scripts. Directors, same goes for you too. You wouldn't do a film about horse jockeys with unicorns in it, now would you? [Those of you who would, no, you're not shooting Stile from Piers Anthony's Juxtaposition.]

Rather interesting week. I probably should have updated this sooner, but you can sue me if you really care. Anyway, went to dicky's as usual on tuesday, played some more with my camera after eating Raphael's cake, and in general enjoyed myself.

However, on thursday, I managed to explode the vinyl pipe leading to my shower head. Obviously, it had been setup by an amateur who thought that unbraided vinyl pipe was appropriate for use in a shower where people take showers at a temperature greater than 10C. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you should be using vinyl braid pipe or better yet, copper for those high temperature runs. Of course, I, being lazy, just cut out the offending section, and proceeded to use the same vinyl tube, after replacing the tube clamp with a new one that actually clamped.

Onto friday. I picked up a few bottles of an awesome champagne from century liquuor along with a few bottles of wine along with Raphael. I then went to Rockets and spun for a bit, and played some chess. I probably should be carefull playing chess, since I play by brute force. A 30 minute game is extremely draining, as I don't have the skill to open or analyze from experience. That, and I hate to loose.

Anyway, after rocket, I was able to borrow Dave and Chyna's shower (as I didn't get to fix it until today) before going to tonic to hear Marty McFly spin breaks. His track selection was pretty awesome, and people seemed to be having fun, although, the transitions were absolute crap. I'm not sure if the monitors were bad, or if he was too drunk, but I'm sensitive to transitions. I intensly dislike trainwrecks. Anyway, Dave, Greg, and myself had a great time on the floor, even though some people seemed to just want to stand around, oogle girls [or take pictures of them without film] instead of dance.

On saturday, I played pool with Hassan at Jillian's, and then proceeded to watch Escaflowne in a marathon. Mmm... Escaflowne. Folken and Dryden are quite awesome. [Yes, I know. I do look like Dryden.]

Today, I checked out snowboard boots at Gallyan's, fixed the shower, and kept reading the Glass Bead Game at a coffee shop near downtown. Exciting, no?

I nearly forgot that a few days ago I found an interesting cart floating around in the office, with the text "Property of General Thou Shall Not Steal" in dymo marker. Since I don't work in general, nor general dentistry, I assume that someone had managed to steal this cart somehow anyway. Possibly multiple pictures. And then, the hapless person to whom this cart at one time belonged had the audacity to quote the ten commandments in hopes of shaming some poor fool into returning the cart.

A few minutes later, I had improved the labeling of the cart to fit its current status as an obviously "liberated" piece of equipment. "Thou shalt not steal this cart and get caught." The significance of this change is probably lost on everyone in the office. Oh well.

It also looks like the squirrels that were living in the attic here have finally made their way out, and hopefully I won't be hearing from them again. It also managed to snow pretty heavily today, which was subsequently followed by high winds. Seeing the snow being blowed around reminded me of the dunes that fine sand forms in the desert.

I almost forgot to put up the pictures I shot of the snow from yesterday that totally blanketed the parking lot. And ideed, as I write this, it's started to come down again. It's much nicer when everything is covered in a layer of white. (At least, it's better than when the snow starts melting and turns grey and black.)

Anyway, I worked for a while at work, then ended up playing at dicky's from 12-1. One of these days I'll have to get around to cutting a demo cd that I can hand out. On the way back, I had some fun sliding around in my car... driving on icy roads is definetly one of the more exciting things to do here.

As much of the world braces itself for the seemingly imminent resumption of war in the middle east, I went about my business much as I have for the past few weeks. On Tuesday, I ended up spinning at dicky's for a bit, then on Thursday, I played at Greg's house with Raj and Greg.

Friday was slightly more eventful as I ended up eating dinner with my Raphael and his family at their home. After a nice dinner, I went out to Tilt for Bliss, which, as always was fairly good, with James Revival and Al throwing some choice tracks throughout the night. After bliss I ate a late snack with Jerry, Dave and Chyna at some little diner on East and Winton. As all decent diners go, the food was decent, although not high quality.

Saturday got out of control. I spent 6 hours playing pool at Jillians, which is has decent 8ft pool tables, and more importantly, an awesome deal for pool before 6 PM. Yes, yours truly is becoming a pool nut. After that, I hung about for a bit at my apartment reading before heading over to Jerry's pad to run the circuit of parties on Saturday. We started out at Gee's place, and chilled there for a bit (I ran into a few people I've met before) then went to Al's house. The party at Al's was going nicely, and I ended up killing the bottle of champagne that I had brought with me in a little over an hour. Awesome French champagne from St. Hillarne's can't be beaten by anything within it's price range. People at the party were having a good time, getting drunk as usual. Granted, the proclivity towards happy hardcore is not something that I like to hear, but having been through a happy hardcore phase in my own musical journey, I understand.

More importantly than my petty little experiences on Saturday, though, is what quite a few people in the rest of the nation did, protesting the war against Iraq. Granted, a few people out there seem to think that people protesting the war are the equivalent of supports of Saddam, but my troll meter continues to go off scale when I read messages from them.

It's refreshing to see that millions of American citizens and people throughout the globe are willing to take time to make their views publicly known in such a peaceful and powerful manner. Granted, there were some instances of violence, both perpetrated by the police, and instigated by specific blocs of protesters, but by and large people came, marched, rallied, and their views were noted. It almost makes me sad that I wasn't able to participate in the marching on Saturday, being, as I am, out of the major metropolitan areas for the time being.

Well, once again, it's been a terribly long time since I've written anything, and a whole lot has happened to me. I've been to dicky's twice, both times had quite a bit of fun, and went to bliss and spun at the Rocket Cafe again.

On saturday, I played pool (again) at Jillians, and went out to Jungle Bums to see some of the DJ's who were playing there. Unfortunatly, the sound system in the main room was really crappy. Bad balance between the tables and the MC's, no real base definition, and definetly no volume. However, the sound system downstairs was out of control, and definetly banging. Granted it was a little bit boomy because it was in a solid brick wall basement backed by soil, and it could have used a few heavy base traps hidden throughout, it was still much better than upstairs.

People were dancing their legs off most of the night to DJ Mighty, Owen the Soyboy, Richie, and quite a few others. Track selection was on tip, although a few times the mixes got a bit rough. But who cares? I danced, and had a great time.

On sunday I ended up watching Rouge [of the Rougue, Blanc, and Bleu series]. Quite nice, although I must confess, of the two that I've seen, I like Blanc better. I'm also slowly introducing Raphael to Anime, as we watched a few more episodes of Escaflowne.