theMediaman.com

Joined Twitter. Can only speak in 140 characters at a time. I’m a little uncomfortable with that since so many of my ideas need complex explanations.

However, Simone says I tend to over-describe things, so maybe this is a good way to start getting my blog entries down from thousand-word essays on nothing in particular.

Just for that, I’m going to state that if I win one more Roll-Up-The-Rim coffee this month then I’m even odds with winning the 6/49. EOM.

NASA and ESA have announced their next major space launch - flights to the Galileian moons, including Europa.

http://www.nasa.gov/topics/solarsystem/features/20090218.html

Clearly, 2010 is the worse time to launch such a mission.

All these worlds are yours, except Europa. Attempt no landing there. Use them together. Use them in peace. 

If this sees the light of day, this doesn’t even need to have a good script.

Following my move in with Simone, I found I had to change my viewing habits to find things more worth my time. As a result, I really haven’t visited the horror section of the Rogers Video for some time, and I’m more inclined to throwing in a tried and true blockbuster Sci-fi than a B-movie.

Working on the DVD for the Canadian distribution version of “Screamers 2: The Hunting” and seeing a handful of Canadian actors play in congested corridors revived my desire. So as I was doing research in the local Blockbuster (and yes, I can call it “research” now), when I picked up “The Black Hole” - a TV movie/Direct-to-DVD disaster flick that features a black hole created by a LHC-style machine, a monster made of electricity, and Judd Nelson playing a neo-maxi-zoom-dweebie scientist.

Actually, he looks a bit like my friend, Jo, through the entire film.

Almost in homage (but more likely just a revealing mistake) to Jurassic Park where they were watching the “live camera” on a QuickTime player, the start of the movie involves playing back “real time statistics” in Windows Media Player. That, along with some people in the background of a supposedly evacuated facility and the brutally cheesy dialogue make this a fun waste of 90 minutes.

Perhaps the most entertaining part was before the movie even started, as the other TV movie/Direct-to-DVD disaster flicks aire trailers beforehand. 

The first trailer is the much-anticipated sequel to 10.5, “10.5 Apocalypse”. Starring Dean Cain. Woo!

As if getting a new job, getting married, a big-ass TV and a PS3 weren’t enough to change my life. Last week Simone and I bought a house over on the east side of Toronto.

It’s a five minute walk north of the Danforth between Donlands and Greenwood. It’s a pretty good neighbourhood. For some reason, it didn’t rise in price as quickly as other parts of Toronto. I think it might have something to do with the fact that it’s never gone downhill. Such a thing would result in a “gentrification”, and a subsequent rise in prices coming from a “trendy” label. It’s not uncommon for some of the houses in the area to be owned by the same person or family for many decades. Once place we looked at had the same owner for nearly 60 years. A good, steady neighbourhood I figure has kept the prices reasonable and Simone and I were able to find a place that we liked.

 This is the third place we bid on, and we were willing to go a bit further in the price because there’s really no work needed before moving in. There’s no issues with the place, and further than that there’s no indication that there are any surprises to be had.

It’s a bungalow in an older area, but there are a lot of houses that have been upgraded with a second floor. A good indication that the house is built well. There are a lot of upgrades, but unlike many of the houses we’ve seen before this there’s no indication that any of the work was the job of someone who bought the house, renovated and flipped it. All of the work is top-notch, and there’s no sign of cut corners. 

Things got a bit slow at work this week and I’ve already started figuring out the network. There will be a WLAN upstairs, and a gigabit switch downstairs for the server and PS3. They can be easily connected by a cable that has already been hooked up between the den upstairs and a wall outlet downstairs.

Even though the logistics are done, there’s still a lot to do. The nice thing about this house is that it’s all stuff that we want to do to make the house “ours”. There’s no real work that needs to be done just to bring the place up to a “livable” status.

Simone’s making her plans for the garden out back. There’s not as much room as some other places we’ve looked at, but it’s decent. And I get the feeling that given several acres of land Simone could still fill it up so she’ll just have to do with what plot of dirt she is given. As long as I have a barbeque back there, I’ll be happy.

Well, McAfee makes it more difficult than ever to navigate their site to find manual updates available for download. The auto-update on my parents’ dialup connection was estimating several hours of full bandwidth hogging downloading. You can’t do ANYTHING while the software is forcing an update.

I contacted the online support for help in finding the downloads page so I could download the updates from a broadband connection to a USB drive, then install manually. 

When I see that the technical support person’s name is “Sibu Chacko”, it’s a little easier to believe that’s his real name. More than once I’ve been on the phone to Dell’s technical support with someone who has a mish-mash of Indian and a southern US drawl, and goes by the name “Adrian”.

To his credit, I was able to get the link to McAfee manual updates. It still feels most days like the cure is worse than the disease when having to deal with any anti-virus software.