Dream Homes

Oooooh... Arthur Black (the voice behind CBC's Basic Black) is on the Life Network with his show Weird Homes and he's going to be talking about my dream home: the Dome Home.

I've been obsessing about this type of house for years now, but the problem is that I would have to put it in a more rural part of the Montreal area. Not that I have a huge problem with that, but it would be a major change for me. It's not in the cards just yet.

Ever since I lived in that loft in Old Montreal (2 years in a 4000 sq.ft. loft), I've come to love the open-space concept. The Domehome is made of wood, it embraces the open-space concept fully, and it rotates! The entire structure sits on a 12 X 12 foot slab and it can rotate on itself. You have the option of unclamping the house and rotating it yourself, or you can get a motor installed that will rotate the house very slowly (so that you can force the living room to always face the sun).

These dome homes are kits you can buy and there's a place in Boisbriand where you can purchase them. I requested a price list a few years ago and got the package with the prices and the options. I did some research, pricing the land, the taxes, the work involved in construction (it takes about three months to put one of these together), and it all added up to a little over $200, 000. Pricey, but not too bad considering I'll have the house on a couple of acres of land.

We all have our dreams...

Lightspeed Meme

Picked up from Lightspeed Chick.

A meme:
1. Pick up a book.
2. Turn to page 23.
3. Pick out the fifth sentence.
4. Post it to your blog with these instructions.

The passage:

Popular culture has been determined to destroy respect for it, beginning with the "Maggie and Jiggs" and "Blondie and Dagwood" comics of the 1920s and 1930s, in which the man is always weak and foolish.

From Iron John by Robert Bly.

Neighborhood Old Guy

I'm officially old today. No... my birthday is less than a month from now, but I did something that turned me into that Old Guy in horror movies that ultimately bites it when the Godzilla-type monster rampages into town ("You're trampling my prized petunias, you freak of nature! I'm calling my Member of Parliment and then you'll be sorry!").

I was sitting in my office working on stuff when I heard an odd popping sound outside, followed by young tittering. I looked out my window and there were two kids (around 8 or 10 years old) breaking bottles in the street. My street is a dead end, stopping at the tracks and there are cars parked on either side.

Sighing, I got out on my balcony and shouted at them to stop. "All the cars on this street will get punctured tires from the broken glass!" The two kids looked around, almost seeing the cars for the first time. "Sorry," one of them called back. "We'll pick it up."

They picked most of it up, surprisingly. But I suddenly had an image of me standing on the balcony in a lime green shirt and brown pants, dropping my false teeth in my ranting and raving at the street kids.

I need to get a paintball gun. Heh.

Intolerance

During a heated 100+ comments discussion at Hot Abercrombie Chick's blog, I happen to disagree with Ron, who seems to be of the opininon that Muslims, as a general rule, are not unliken the Devil. Disagreeing with Ron is a No No, you see. That's why he came onto my blog and took his shot (in the Tumbleweeds post).

If you think I'm exagerrating, check out his blog at Starsplash. But if you want to save yourself the eyespace, his blog is the type of claptrap that gives good honorable Christians a bad name. Somedays, I don't know who outnumbers whom.

I know, I know... I really shouldn't get into debates with looneys like this guy (something about engaging in a battle of wits with an unarmed man), but my Looney Quota was low this month and I decided to poke holes in his logic.

During one heated debate, Ron's rebuke to one of my arguments was to call me a chicken and, to illustrate his point, he began to cluck like one. I always know I've won a point in a debate when my detractors start to imitate barnyard animals.

Other Ron gems, which were responses to my arguments, include:

And all I see is a liar and a cheater and a loser who is dead to God.
Hobbs,part of the lepard,enemy to the good honest hard working peoples of the world!

Personally, I love it when my detractors make basic spelling mistakes. My favorite has always been when someone called me an "idoit". It fills me with such satisfaction.

But Ron's blog is filled with such Hate Rhethoric that I thought it might violate the Blogger Terms of Service which state that a blog should not:

(a) upload, post or otherwise transmit any Content that is unlawful, harmful, threatening, abusive, harassing, tortious, defamatory, vulgar, obscene, libelous, invasive of another's privacy, hateful, or racially, ethnically or otherwise objectionable;

When I emailed Blogger to ask if it did violate the TOS, Blogger responded saying that it did not take responsibility for the contents of the blogs that it hosted.

I found that to be an odd contradiction. I'm sure if a pedophile was putting up pictures of the children he/she was involved with and describing their "dates", that site would get taken down, but a site that spews Racist remarks like "Muslims are Barbarians" and "Muslims ain't peaceful. They are of the Devil!", that gets to stay up.

Amazing.

Tumbleweeds have Stealth Mode

So my sister and her roommate have come by Montreal to visit for a couple of days and we'll be crashing with me, so I gave the apartment a quick once over. It's times like these that I wish I kept my house in a bit better shape. You never know when someone is going to come by unexpectedly and you're hastily snatching socks from the lampshades.

My sis is a bit allergic to cats, so I wanted to make sure there was no cat hair crammed into the corners and under furniture. My own vaccuum cleaner is on the fritz, so I borrowed the neightbor's upright. I scoured the floors, cleaned out the corners, moved furniture around, making sure I got everything.

When I moved out of my old place and all the furniture had been removed, there was so much cat hair behind stuff, it looked like a cat had exploded in every room. Embarrassing. I don't want my new place to get like that.

As I was packing up the upright, I was astonished to see a ball of cat hair roll past me, like a tumbleweed in an old western. Argh! I snatched it up and then started Swiffering.

The proof is in the pudding, however. My guests just left this morning and there have been no allergic reactions so far. But I need to make sure that the cat hair problem stays under control.

The vaccuum cleaner is on the fritz, but my clippers are working fine. Hmmmmmmmmmmm...

The Uniform Used to Mean Something

That whole Seinfeld/Superman thing finally gets film and offered on the Net (with a wee commercial spin that's not too distracting). Be sure to click on Uniform and enjoy (thanks be to Scott).

I love that the voice of Supes is none other than that of the Might Cronk. The Emperor's New Groove was the first DVD I bought when I got my player. I know why it did badly in the theatres, but that's because it can be a bit more subtle than something like Finding Nemo (which I liked, but les Triplettes should've won the Oscar -- call me an animation snob if you must).

My cold has now moved out of my head and has spent the evening setting itself up in my chest. Now the coughing rattles around in my noggin', leaving me weak and depleted.

I am reminded on an explanation given by my father (tongue in cheek, of course) about the difference between Male Germs and Female Germs. "Male Germs," he said, leaning forward, raising his finger, "are much more powerful and deveastating than Female Germs."

At this, my mum sighs dramatically and says "Franchement Reid."

"No no... It's true," he said. We're all grinning now. "When a man gets a cold, it completely destroys him. He can't do anything, he can't function. But when a woman gets a cold, she keeps right on going like there's nothing wrong. That must mean that if a man were to catch Female Germs, he could shrug them off. But if a woman were to catch Male Germs, they would probably kill her."

Just in case you were wondering where some of my sense of humour comes from...

Weekend in Taranta

I've just gotten back from four days in the windy city. No... not Chicago! Toronto was unexpectedly cold and windy this past weekend, and so now I'm stuck with a head cold and a fever. Wah!

This year's Toronto Storytelling Festival was very uneven. Some nights were fantastic while others were painful in parts. The highlight of the weekend was the Saturday night concert where I got to see some fantastic tellers including the famous Canadian storyteller and author Robert Munsch (the author of Love you Forever).

I got to tell a story or two over the weekend, but I was there mostly to hear stories. I heard a great story called The Blind Princess which I must now try to learn (it's already been requested).

I must also give a shout-out to Ms. Carotte who acted as my charming hostess in Toronto. My last few trips to TO weren't as fun, but apparently that was because I needed a quality tour guide.

I owe you a cranberry scone or two, Ms. Carotte. Offer only valid in Montreal. Void where prohibited.

I got no strings to hold me down...

Growing up in Quebec city in the 70's, I watched many shows in their French versions and never even considered that there had been English versions. Any adult who grew up in this province will probably tell you they saw at least one episode of Goldorak, Albator, or Les Sentinelles de l'Air.

Little did we know that the rest of Canada knew these shows as Grandizer, Captain Harlock, or the Thunderbirds. The reason I'm thinking of this now is that I've been made aware (thanks be to Toast) that yet another TV show has been made into a movie.

I'm not sure how the Thunderbirds will work as a movie, especially since they're not using the string puppets. Granted, I remember always feeling a little creeped out about those string puppets for some reason, but at least the look and feel of the ships they fly around in has been preserved.

Oh... who am I kidding? Of course I'll go see it. Maybe I'll rent an episode of the original Thunderbirds before I go see the movie, but then again, it woud be the first time I see the Thunderbirds in English (instead of Les Sentinelles de l'Air).

A few years ago, I went to the Cinematheque to watch a two-hour Goldorak movie in French, which was really four episodes of Goldorak put back-to-back and in sequence. There was about 60 of us in the theatre and we were all about the same age. The nostalgia factor was great, but everyone in the theatre seemed to be thinking the same thing "This is so CHEESEY! I can't believe I used to get so excited about this cartoon!" That was a translated quote from the guy sitting next to me when we both looked at each other and rolled our eyes.

Ah... the filtering and adaptive powers of memory.

Big Savings

In my business, I occasionally have to write online help, which can be that stuff that appears when you select Contents and Index from the Help menu in your applications (whaddya mean you never open that menu?!?).

To be able to write this type of documentation, I need to use tools like Framemaker, Webworks, or RoboHelp. And if you think Windows or MS Office is expensive, you should see these pocketbook gougers.

Framemaker with Webworks can easily set you back $1200 CDN and RoboHelp Office can cost anywhere from $999 USD to $2000 USD. What's worse, RoboHelp gets upgraded several times a year, so if you blink too much, your copy of RoboHelp will be obsolete before you create two hyperlinks.

Personally, I think RoboHelp is so expensive because they pour so much money into their marketing and sales departments. If you only saw some of the full-colour postcards that get dropped at conferences and sent to potential buyers... Their marketing budget must rival their development budget.

So now I have to buy a copy of RoboHelp Office for one of my contracts, which means I'll have to shell out the $999 USD. I was checking out the RoboHelp website to make sure I needed Office and not Office Pro when I noticed this little piece of marketing trash at the top of the column:

You mean for only almost double the price, I could get 15 extra features? Oh joy... Oh bliss! What a fantastic deal! You must really like me to give me such a discount.

Fer fuck's sake. I've often said that if I could count, I wouldn't be a writer, but even I'm not this dim. It must be nice to have such a stranglehold on the industry that they can charge such ridiculous prices.

But a stranglehold is exactly what they do have on the documentation market, unfortunately. There are a few other similar products on the market, but they're all about the same price. Maybe making some affordable documentation tools is what my company should be getting into.

Apparently, people will pay just about anything for a good tool. There's a sound market strategy if I ever heard of one.

Hmmmmmm... *wringing capitalist hands eagerly*

Pile on the Meat

After the Day from Hell (tm), I went out to meet the gang to celebrate Proust's birthday. We met up at Milsa, a brazilian resto on Bishop below de Maisonneuve. I must say I have never eaten so many varieties of meat in my life.

The way this place works is that you don't even place an order for anything. They bring you some salad, fried mushrooms, and rice, and then the meat starts piling on. Several waiters armed with one or two pronged swords start walking around to offereing different types of meat. If you accept the offer, a waiter will plonk the prongs down upon your plate and either slice off a hunk of meat or slide a chunk off the prong into your plate.

And they keep coming, sliding more and more beef into your plate until you sit back, pop the top button on your pants, and sigh happily. It's like a scene out of a Vegan's nightmare.

But it ain't cheap. Granted, we had a couple of bottles of wine and we were paying for Proust's meal, and we all had a little Brazilian cocktail to start, so it came out to about $60 each. But if you were to go there for a normal meal, it should set you back about $40 per person.

I won't be going there every second Tuesday, but it's on my list of cool places to visit for an interesting meal.