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Category: Personal

Desktop Publishing is Hard

Published by NiteMayr on June 11, 2008

I’ve never found it difficult to put pen to paper when I have something to say.  Inspiration moves me easily and I can just fire out the words until my ideas are spent.  This comes in handy when I’m writing for fun or creating a knowledge-management entry or just documenting my work.

Converting the raw work into something I can sell, that has proven to be troublesome.  It’s not the words that are failing me, it’s arranging them with pictures for a vanity work that is killing me.  I sit down to it, fire up the software then get about 5 pages in and decide that I’m not getting anywhere, half because the picture system is so cumbersome and half because I lose the inspiration that got me there in the first place.

I’m using booksmart, has anyone had any experience with it? Is there a better system?

Have you ever made a vanity book?

Started work on my First "Book"

Published by NiteMayr on June 6, 2008

I’m finally going to put some of my less emo poetry together with my more stirring photography to make a photo book I can give as a gift and keep for posterity.

I snagged all of my old blog posts and now I’m going to have to get my poetry together too.

The working title is “Sometimes with Family”

First Heat Advisory of the Year

Published by NiteMayr on June 6, 2008

680News – ALL NEWS RADIO.

Environment Canada has issued a humidex advisory for tomorrow with readings expected to be near 40 degrees Celsius.
The advisory stretches from Windsor to Barrie and Orillia and includes Toronto and all of the 905.
A pronounced warm front will cross southern Ontario tonight and introduce the first heat wave of the season.
In fact several days of heat and humidity are in store for the southern portions of the province.

It’s already fairly hot in here, it must suck outside. Yesterday was terrible for me (I had on a heavy undershirt), I’m gonna go undershirt-less today I think.

So Sweaty…

Published by NiteMayr on June 5, 2008

Helped move PCs Yo

Left iPod in my pocket

Now iPod is broke

How nice, a haiku to my broken iPod.

It’s hot and sticky outside, I am trying to resist the temptation to complain about it, even though I had to work outside in it and get so sweaty that I think I may have developed trench foot from sock sweat. There are Germans from World War I who had drier socks than I have now.

The plant was worse; humid, sticky and smelly to boot.

We moved a ton of computers then cling-wrapped them using a big industrial roll of cling wrap that we had to carry around and so on by hand.

I better be losing weight doing all this stuff, I can certainly feel the burn in my muscles at the end of the day and I haven’t given up on salads instead of fries at lunch and so on. In fact, I’ve been eating fruit in favor of snacks during the day too.

It only "looks" like murder

Published by NiteMayr on June 3, 2008

it only “looks” like murder, originally uploaded by NiteMayr.

Over the Victoria Day weekend (May Two Four weekend for the kids) we attended a picnic in the Back Yard of family friends. Many burgers were masticated and some marshmallows were immolated.

Their back yard was so massive, it had a forest in it!

We sat around a fire and shivered, I was wearing a short-sleeved over-shirt and everyone had to ask me if I wanted a coat or blanket or something (as they were freezing). No way! I have at least 6 inches of blubber keeping me warm at all times.

We played boccie and ate and then moved on; thanks Laura and Shawn!

I know the pain of a Gizmodo Editor

Published by NiteMayr on May 30, 2008

How my wife castrated my DVD collection

I know Mark feels. When we moved down to the states, I had to save space so I moved all of my DVDs into big CD wallets and threw out a number of VHS tapes (but put some into storage at my ‘rents).

When we were moving back we decided to sell the DVDs that we weren’t going to watch again and still ended up with three boxes of DVDs.

I don’t think I could part with the cases now though, I like the idea of displaying all of my DVDs on big shelves where we can easily pull them and watch at our leisure.  Add to that my 5 disc platter player and you get nice easy viewing of whole DVD sets and so on.

I guess what separates me from Mark is that it was my decision to castrate my collection.

What games are you playing?

Published by NiteMayr on May 30, 2008

On My PC I’m playing:

Rise of Legends

Postal 2 (plus mods)

Turret Defense Games

Hellgate: London

On my 360 I’m playing:

Rock Band

Halo 3

Rez HD

What are you playing?

Head invading cleaning products

Published by NiteMayr on May 29, 2008

I sleep with the television on, if it turned off while I was asleep I probably wouldn’t notice it, but I have a strange need for the noise of it to fall asleep (it drowns out the rest of the world I think).

So, in the night you’ll find me looking for something to play on DVD or stream from the PC or just flick to on the tube and leave on while I pass into the dream state, blissfully unaware the Bobba Fett has just taken Han Solo prisoner or whatever.  When I fall into a deep sleep, the world is just gone and I tend to dream about whatever strong images I experienced the day before.  However, come the early morning my sleep is a bit lighter and the noises in the room tend to invade my dreams.  Sometimes in the morning my dreams are invaded by infomertials

This morning my head was invaded by cleaning products, specifically a swiffer type product that (in my head) was mounted on a ball joint that made for easy transitions.  Of course I was trying to use it to clean the Alpha Alpha Alpha party pit in the middle of some dirty forest with it.  This made logical sense in the dream, I would use the amazing cleaning tool to wipe up the mess of a thousand debauched Frat-boy parties in the middle of some random forest.

Dreams can be like that.

However, my “cleaning extravaganza” wasn’t over.  I found myself in Kincardine wandering down the street engaging all the people I knew and they would regale me with tales of easy purchase options and cleaning strengths.

Clearly this was a long dream and even longer commercial.

I woke up and flipped the TV over the Black Adder and got out of bed.  5:42 AM.  Augh.

I’m going to have to show Jen how to use the “sleep” function on the TV so that it turns off at night, or convince her to leave it on BBC Kids or City overnight so I don’t end up in infomercial hell.

Have you ever experienced this?

Winter is gone?

Published by NiteMayr on May 29, 2008

When winter was just getting going; I snapped this photo of my dad as he walked the dog ahead of me.

This was just before the winter started in earnest (right after Christmas).  A nice walk on Boxing Day was great, as it wasn’t all that cold really.  We were able to walk along the shore and see water slapping the meager ice there and see the steam rise from the wet sand.

Since then we’ve only walked up the shore a few times; but the winter has retreated and walking the shore is easy again.

It looks like the winter has finally gasped it’s last and spring/summer is about to come on in earnest, making shirts go sleeveless and skirts get shorter.  It’s a warmer day today.

The winter always lurks just outside the door though.