theMediaman.com

There are a lot of little things we left behind in Canada. Daily Internet access, large cars, regular phone calls from the parents, etc.  The one thing I think we really miss so far is a grid pattern for street layout.

In only the first week we’ve gotten lost while driving from point A to point B more times than I can count.  Signage is great, but when it fails it does so spectacularly. A road will fork, and the best indication of which way to go is only to 1) follow the freshest lines on the road or tarmack, 2) follow other cars, or 3) flip a fucking coin.

If our trip were a song, the chorus would be “it’s not on the map!”; Simone’s refrain every couple of minutes as we drive through one-horse towns, that gave no indication where the hell we were.

In spite of this, I’m quite happy I didn’t bother buying a GPS for this trip. While we didn’t necessarily find any points of interest by getting lost, it is still a thrill to see the parts of Portugal not yet sanitized for tourist viewing.

On the way up to Porto, we stayed at a few Pousadas, stopped in Fatima at the site of the Miracle of the Sun, and saw dinosaur footprints; two fascinating places for both the spiritual and scientific sides of my personality.

More details when we get back, as well as many photos. Many, many photos. We’ve been backing them up on the laptop to make sure that we get them back safely, so you can be guarenteed a long, slow slideshow of our two weeks here.

A bad pun I had to create a posting for just to use it.

The company Syl’s working for, Dynacon, is putting a Micro-satellite into orbit with help from the CSA. Very cool. I’ve never worked for a company Slashdot-worthy.

I kind of pictured a “Micro-satellite” as something that looks like the Hubble Space Telescope but about the size of my thumbnail… like a scale model or something that got caught in a shrink ray.

Instead, ‘NEOSSat will be the size of a large suitcase‘. Com’on! This thing tracks killer asteroids! Get more imaginative! At least put some bumper stickers on it.

Either way, it’s pretty cool whenever something you’ve worked on gets applied to the real world space.

Edit July 2, 2008: Updated to correct nomenclature and past/future tense.

Just spent ten minutes writing about Phantom of the Opera, and a bug in Blogger just deleted it.

I fucking hate this site, and even though Google bought it ages ago, it’s still as disfunctional as ever.

I plan for this to be my last post until I rebuild theMediaman.com.

</end>

For the moment, while I live in denial, my age is 30 + 1.

theMediaman.age = 30;theMediaman.age++

(Can someone check to see if my code is right?)

Thanks to everyone who wished me well today. I didn’t always have the time to give you my appreciation for the sentiment. I spent much of the day doing Boredom_Ensues type Photoshop work and slapping them into a PowerPoint presentation. I hate PowerPoint.

Regardless, if you’re reading this, or if you’re typically in the vicinity of Front and Church on a Friday night, I hope you’ll come to my birthday party at the Jersey Giant. If you haven’t got an evite yet, email me. Otherwise, you can check the evite I sent you for details.

I went to see Phantom of the Opera for the first time in ten years last night. It was my gift from Simone. So much I forgot, but there were a few things I’m convinced was new. I hope to post a more comprehensive review soon, or at least before they close again in June.

One activity I’ve started during my hour+ commute every day is looking at what other people are reading. It’s my own little way of being nosy. Unfortunately for me, most (>80%) of people are just reading The Metro. Even if they were reading a non-free newspaper, it would glean more about them than I get from looking at the same headline-news tabloid.

The other day I was blessed with a very interesting collection of readers. The first, a pudgy guy, with buzzed haircut and about 15 lbs. overweight, was reading some historical fiction taking place during some Roman war. At least, that’s what I understood from the artwork on the cover. This guy will probably go home tonight to a game of Age of Empires.

The next was a woman. She was sort of like the “bookworm girl” in 80’s teen movies who the hero ultimately falls for. She was reading “Life of Pi“. My guess: Single (alone), and waiting for her “John Cusack”.

Second to the Metro readers, the most common readers I see are of both genders, and all races, reading technical whitepapers. Printed on eight-and-a-half-by-eleven by a laser printer and stapled at the top left. These are the engineers who share the bus with me since IBM is one block East.

However, the last person I saw yesterday was the most interesting. Reading the classic self-help literature, How to Win Friends & Influence People was an attractive, blonde woman (This is the part of the blog that might get me in trouble). She wasn’t a 10, but certainly an 8 or above. Spending my high school life with the unpopular crowd, you always imagine that the attractive ones - and hence, the popular ones - can easily “Win Friends & Influence People (to do their math homework for them)”.

The other people were easy to judge by the materials they were reading, but this woman was a bit more challenging. Does she have a bad attitude? Low self-esteem? Does she find it difficult to speak publicly? Did she just move here and leave her friends and family behind? Or is she just honing her near-perfect skills of manipulating others? The last one is my guess, but that’s probably the bitter, unpopular-in-high-school nerd in me talking.

I went back to my book on Quantum Mechanics.

One final side note. Reading the following in a few months will be irrelevant, but for now go to www.Indigo.Chapters.ca (stupid URL) and search for just about any book at all. Everything you search for will list the shipping details, publication date, dimensions, synopsis and reviews. BUT BEFORE ALL THAT is a paragraph promoting the pre-sale of the new Harry Potter book. ON EVERY PAGE FOR EVERY BOOK!

I understand how hype works just as well as the next media-geek. There’s still something wrong when the first paragraph of information below the title, “Sex For Dummies” is;

Muggles rejoice! The 7th and final instalment in J.K. Rowling’s celebrated boy wizard series Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows arrives on bookshelves July 21st. Pre-order your copy today, and save 46%.