She’s eleven now.

She’s changing significantly. She’s growing up. In spite of her Aspie traits, she is becoming more responsible. She’s genuinely interested in more adult-oriented activities. Where in the past she’s actively avoided responsibility wherever and whenever she could, now she’s actively seeking it in many situations.

She still likes to do “kid stuff”. She still takes some things too far because she’s still a child at the core of her being (I actually hope she never loses that). But she isn’t a little girl any more.

I looked at my son, and the same thing is happening. He’s six – and yet, he WANTS to do chores. He wants to help out. He’s getting his mother to teach him how to do laundry because he sees it as a way he can assist with the house. He WANTS to do this.

I was suddenly overwhelmed with a flood of feelings about missed opportunities. All those things “normal” dads do with their kids, like playing catch and teaching them sports and games and running around having squirt-gun fights.

My kids are growing up, and I’m missing it.

AND I’VE BEEN RIGHT HERE THE WHOLE TIME.

I hate this illness.

This morning, when I powered it on, it did it again. No amount of battery pulling made any difference, it would just start and show the line-through-battery screen.

I have 5 bloody weeks left on my contract, and I will be damned if I am going to replace the phone. It doesn’t make sense to do so.

I assumed that the symbol showing on the screen was an indicator that there was no battery in the phone. Since the battery is virtually brand new (it and the trackball are the only things I have replaced in 3 years of ownership) and was holding a charge perfectly, I became concerned that something internal was wrong… maybe the OS was corrupted, or the contacts were bent. There is nothing visually wrong with the contacts, though… they are clean and in the positions they should be in. Unlike many BB users, I rarely do battery pulls, preferring instead to do the Ctrl-Alt-Del (well, Alt-RightShift-Del on the BB) to reboot it, so it isn’t like there has been a lot of wear-and-tear there. Still, I cleaned the connection areas with an eraser, made sure the contacts were up where they should be, poking them and lifting them with a toothpick.

Battery-with-a-line-through-it.

I’ve had 3 hours of sleep and had only noticed the phone problem because I woke up to pee. I’ve got a pounding migraine. I’m not firing on all cylinders – indeed, I’d call my condition substantially impaired right now. But, I turned on the computer and googled (and like an idiot, came here afterwards too).

The primary, most-recommended method to resolve this problem, according to BB forum users around the world?

Drop it.

Yes, hold the phone 3-4 feet off the floor, screen-side up, and drop it.

I’ve been protecting this phone and cherishing it for nigh on 3 years. On a couple of occasions, it has fallen off a 2-foot-high bedside table, or the windowsill in the bathroom, and I have nearly had heart failure every single time.

But like I said, substantially impaired. 5 weeks.

Nothing, really, to lose, if the phone is already dead.

So I held it up and dropped it.

Nothing changed.

I did it again.

And it works.

Percussive maintenance is a thing now.

We’ve wondered if it was something that could be passed along to the kids. We thought perhaps my daughter was a supertaster, too, as she sometimes decides that a food she liked “tastes funny” and won’t eat it again. It’s hard to tell, though, as she seems to have some very mild Aspie traits she’s inherited from her mother (the discussion of mild Asperger’s/Autism probably could take a year of posts, so I won’t elaborate at the moment). So – it could be that she tastes things more intensely. Or it could be that she just simply has an internal on/off switch for certain foods when the mood strikes her.

A friend bought me a bottle of vitamin water today. I’ve had it before. I’ve never liked it. This was a different brand, so I decided to try it.

It tastes awful. HORRIBLE. It tastes like chemicals. I’m sure it tastes like the urine of someone who takes a lot of medications… that will surely be confirmed if I am ever inclined to taste urine. I’d say it tastes like ass, but I am pretty sure ass tastes a LOT better than this.

It’s supposed to be some kind of strawberry-kiwi. I handed the bottle to She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed, and she took a sip and said, “It tastes just like strawberry-kiwi Kool-Aid.”

No. It unequivocally does NOT. Not to me!

So I asked my daughter to taste it. “Mmm… it IS just like Kool-Aid!”

So.

Now we know.

She’s not a supertaster.

I’ve loved playing The Sims for years, and I was delighted to find this social-networking version. I’ve been playing regularly since a few days after it went public. Sadly, as a “hard core” player, visiting many times a day has shown that many gameplay elements are severely broken.

As it’s a “social” game, you’re expected to share back-and-forth with your game “neighbours”. Unfortunately, the internal messaging/sharing system is severely broken. Your requests often won’t get to their recipients, and when they do your friends try responses frequently vanish. The game asks you to post your in-game milestones to your wall, yet it won’t let anyone CLAIM all the simoleons from those posts. There are situations where the integration with facebook’s messaging system causes the game to hang and other random crashes. Your sim’s condition completely unpredictable when you re-enter the game – I’ve left for 2 mins and found almost every stat red upon returning, while leaving for hours has left a virtually all-green sim. And I won’t even go into detail about the ridiculous real-money pricing on in-game items – to buy just a few of skill items, it costs more than it cost me to furnish my first real-life apartment! Considering there’s already sponsorship from Dunkin’ Donuts and other exceptional income opportunities from in-game product ads, EA is clearly being greedy, trying to make this a MAJOR cash cow (forget about the fact that it is an advertisement and gateway drug for their not-free-at-all-expansion-pack-ridden free-standing Sims games).

I don’t begrudge a business making money, but between the bugs and the outrageous SimCash store, I can’t endorse this at this time for anyone except those who may play for only a few minutes per week. Instead, buy The Sims 3 and ALL the expansions – it’ll be cheaper in the long run.

As in, WAY too much interest.

As in, lunging and jumping at the cage when they’re moving around, too much interest.

I decided that I was going to train her while she’s still young and, at least theoretically, trainable. In the past, I’ve trained cats with squirt bottles and various other methods (noisemakers like squeakers or cans filled with coins, putting things with undesirable smells/textures in locations cats aren’t allowed, etc) and it’s been only semi-effective, depending on the cat. This time, I decided I’d step the squirt bottle up a notch and about 3 weeks ago I bought a medium-sized squirt gun – the kind that pumps up, but not the huge version of that type that sends the kind wall of water that would destroy Japan.

We have a clicker that was given to us for training the dog, but it hasn’t been in proper use because we had only one, with too many people handling it – so of course, it’s been misplaced. Last week, I was in the pet store and found they had clickers for $1.49, so I bought two. This purchase was, you understand, for training the dog.

Now, in first 2 weeks after I got the squirt gun, I’d actually fired it at the cat twice. It’s never nearby when I catch her doing something she isn’t supposed to be, so she’s been getting away with a lot of stuff – including harassing the bird cage. I’d only actually HIT her with water once out of those two attempts.

After I got the clickers, I got a brilliant idea. Seriously, brilliant. Write it down. Go ahead, get a pencil… I’ll wait.

Got one? Paper, too?

Good.

I decided I would click the clicker 3 times when I caught the cat when she was up to mischief. Then, if she persisted, I would click it 3 times again followed by squirting water.

I spent 4 days lying in wait, squirt gun and clicker at the ready, waiting for her to violate the kitty-cat Geneva Convention so I could follow my Rules of Engagement for Anti-Social Feline Behaviour Modification or ASFeBeMo for short.

Screw that, ASFeBeMo is a fucking lame acronym.

Finally, on Monday, she was eyeball-riveted on the bird cage. Then she started winding up for one of those pounces – you know, where the cat wiggles its back end like a stripper waiting for you to slip an single into her G-string.

Not, you understand, that I’ve ever actually BEEN to see a stripper.

But I’ve heard stories.

And played Grand Theft Auto IV.

Anyway, I digress.

Kitty is twitching her booty. I grab the clicker, and click 3 times. She hesitates, briefly, looking behind her wondering what the sound was (and presumably checking for a dollar in her G-string). Then she turns back to the birds, coiling up the springs again.

I click 3 more times, and fire the squirt gun. I mostly missed, only grazing her ear, but the sound – the SOUND of that squirt gun is most impressive – the water comes out with a roaring-whistling noise so loud that you’d swear the end of Alderaan is nigh. The cat ran like her arse had been set on fire.

Phase One: SUCCESS!

The problem is, since Monday, she’s barely looked at the bird cage (when I’ve been watching). I mean, how can you have training if it doesn’t happen on a nearly-daily basis? How am I supposed to reinforce the message? And really, who DOESN’T love a shapely butt in a G-string?

But today, I got my big chance. My second kick at the can. Another shot at the brass ring. A waltz with the Big Kahuna. (Wait, wut?)

The cat caught sight of the birds. She climbed up on a box near their cage, and began readying her attack. I quickly and silently scooped up the squirt gun, carefully keeping it concealed, and made sure it was pumped up and ready. I reached out and picked up the clicker.

I clicked 3 times.

The cat froze, and looked around. She turned and looked back at the birds. And hightailed it like Rob Ford on Gay Pride Day.

I didn’t even get to the second 3 clicks, let alone actually letting slip the dogs of war.

I confess: I’m disappointed.

The day we brought them home, the kids chose names for their turtles. We hadn’t observed them at all, so knew nothing about their personalities – heck, we didn’t even know they really HAD personalities because our turtle knowledge was very rudimentary. We put them in a small fish tank with no filter and left them there until we could find something strong enough to support the large tank (even half full, a 33 gallon fish tank with only water in it will weigh in excess of 65kg/140lbs).

My daughter chose the larger of the two (it was about the size of a Canadian $2 coin – henceforth referred to as a Toonie†) and named her†† “Bubbles”. My son couldn’t decide on a name at first, but finally settled on “Splash E.” – not sure what the E is short for in his head.

A few days ago, we found (more like “reinforced with 2x4s”) something suitably sturdy to hold the tank, and I set about configuring Turtopia. I put in the large filter we received as part of the initial setup, and a small air pump and a shell-shaped air stone. I built them a land area of stones to bask under the lights and a sloping underwater bottom for them to explore and dig around in.

Now the air stone gurgles away all day long, and most of the day Bubbles the turtle will hover over it, bobbing to the surface and diving to the bottom over and over grabbing bubbles in her mouth. The other turtle mostly ignores it – 95% of the time, it’s Bubbles in the bubbles.

The tank is mostly silent. The filters are very quiet, turtles don’t make any vocal sounds, and other than the aforementioned air pump producing bubbles, you’d hear more noise in a tomb. Except when, periodically, one of the turtles starts thrashing around while swimming or diving off the rocks that make up their “shoreline”. The turtle the makes all the ruckus splashing about? Splash E.

I’ve been considering putting the kids in for James Randi’s One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge, but I guess that’s only open to “celebrities” now.

†How the hell we got to spelling it “Toonie” I have no idea; the LOONIE or one dollar coin has a loon on it… the $2 coin looks absolutely nothing like it, and has no loon, and really should be spelled “Twonie” or something like that but I suppose that would lead to people pronouncing it twahn-ee or something because we’re kind of collectively stupid that way.

††We have no idea if they are boys or girls because they are too young to know, so we just call the girl’s turtle “her” and the boy’s turtle “him”.

Late yesterday, I decided to make a signature image for forums relating to Star Trek/STO.

I wanted to incorporate one of my ships, my captains, and so on and so forth to personalize it.

I took screenshots in-game and lifted the various components off their backgrounds, and merged the images together last night. It didn’t take that long. I added the text that I wanted, spending about 10 minutes trying out different fonts, finally settling on the one used for the Original Series titles. (I tried out TNG, DS9, various movie fonts, stuff that appeared onscreen in the shows, and about everything else Trek-ish I could think of).

All told, all that took maybe an hour and a half.

But I didn’t like it. I really didn’t have a space to put my in-game name or forum name short of making a frame around the pic or just randomly placing it in the image, which I didn’t think suited it. So I decided to use a sort of Star Trek computer interface (LCARS) to tie it together and give me text spaces.

So, before going to sleep, I tried to find a simplistic guide to creating LCARS – just how to place the colours, what formats and layouts the various shows used, and so on. I bookmarked a couple of pages, and resumed today when I was functional for the day. Then, the more I read, the more I wanted to be accurate.. and there was a lot of contradictory info out there. So I read, and searched, and searched and read…

I just finished this 15 minutes ago, after agonizing over every decision. I kept getting hung up on details and flaws. It is neither perfectionism nor OCD, as it isn’t really entirely right – I took some minor liberties, and it is far from perfect. I just wanted it to be sort-of right, and not have glaring inconsistencies with established designs. Yet, it has still taken me around 6 hours to do what should have been the EASY part when it only took 90 minutes to do the “hard” part.

And this, folks, is why I will never be a graphic designer.

We saw 4 films, which I would rate as follows:

1. Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — 4/10
2. Thor — 8/10
3. No Strings Attached — 7/10
4. Paul — 9/10

I knew Pirates was probably going to be crappy. I’d heard around the web that in spite of its big box office numbers, it was just not that great… and it was all true. The pleasant surprise was No Strings Attached (which has sketchy numbers at Rotten Tomatoes) but turned out to be a funny romcom – even if it turned out formulaic in the end. I had actually said to SWMBO that I wished we could go home and catch a nap between Thor and Paul… and I am very glad we couldn’t! In retrospect, I wish we could have just showed up about 137 minutes late.

Obviously, these are just my opinions, and the critics don’t entirely agree… but screw those guys anyway. Paul was a lot like watching Spaced, which made it a win for me. So overall, I’d recommend seeing everything BUT Pirates (teehee… I said butt pirates), and you probably can skip No Strings if you don’t like sappy, because it starts out raunchy-funny but snaps back to the standard boy-meets-girl-loses-girl-gets-girl-again pattern.

But the best part of the mostly-enjoyable evening was the following two snippets of songs which appeared in the background of Strings and Paul, respectively:

A country cover of 99 Problems – which is BRILLIANT!

A bluegrassy version of the Cantina song from Star Wars.

I laughed out loud immediately when I heard both of them, but I spent a lot of time laughing at the direct sci-fi/geeky references in Paul.

When it comes out on DVD/Blu-Ray, it better have an Homage-O-Meter.

It wasn’t a mistake, I knew this would happen. I’ve been putting off the change for some time because I didn’t want to lose all the auto-generated bit.ly links and such, but it had to be done in order to accommodate a change I would like to make to navigation someday in the future.

I tried to work out a redirect method, but I’m not with it enough today to write the little script to handle it, so for now – there’s the search function if you want to find something specific. The other option is to manually edit the old URL which has /archive/yyyy-mm-dd/postname.php and make it /yyyy/mm/postname.php.

I’m not sorry. It’s very un-Canadian of me.

Just this:

Or this.

Or this.

Of course, Christians will cry out about being “persecuted” and that the actions of a small minority like Harold Camping and his followers should not reflect on the majority. Oh, Christians, we’re so sorry you’ve had it so bad since the Crusades didn’t turn out how you wanted.

So tell me again why we have campaigns for things like “Back to Sleep” when crib death happens in such a miniscule number of cases (Odds: 1000 to 1 against at least)? How many kids actually got hurt going down stairs in baby walkers – yet they were banned (Odds: 15000 to 1)? How many other minor, rare dangers do we make against the law, “just to be safe”?

I’m becoming more Hitchens-minded every day.

Religion.
Poisons.
Everything.

Living your life by a moral code accepted by millions isn’t a bad thing, as long as you understand that the moral code written in religious books comes from man and portions of it are obsolete. Living that code out of fear of punishment (or desire for rewards) from a magical sky wizard or wizards, however, is just plain foolish.

When it comes to parents harming or abandoning their children for religion, shouldn’t we do something about it?

After all (and I’ll use the most hated phrase I know from the fear-brokers of the world): THINK OF THE CHILDREN!

I’ve wanted one for ages. It isn’t trivia or a skill/knowledge thing; the question is:

“What kind of pizza would you cut with the Star Trek Enterprise Pizza Cutter?”

This is my answer:

It’s a random selection since it’s a “Sweepstakes” and not a best-answer thing, so it won’t matter that I spend a half an hour photoshopping a Romulan Bird of Pizza.

But hey… I had to enter. It was a moral imperative.

*EDIT*

I added to the above image to show the proper use of the product:

3 out of 5 have been defective.

All my life, in spite of taking very good care of my things, I have had a higher failure rate than average. If there is a faulty item on the shelf in a store, I seem to always be able to pick it at random. I’m not talking about clearance or open box items, either. I am talking about factory-sealed, unmolested, apparently untouched-by-human-hands-since-manufacture things.

Almost everything I have to return is something electrically powered. It’s like I have a dark little cloud floating over me… and the cloud is made of some kind of bizarre electromagnetic field powered by static electricity. The number of BRAND-NEW items I have had to take back to the store and exchange is ree-donk-you-luss.

Do I chalk this up to some kind of silly superstition? The wife has picked up on the trend, so when we are purchasing anything in the store, SHE selects the item and she takes it to the cash so that my “curse” doesn’t affect it. It’s to the point that when buying something, I will handle the display model, or the one the clerk takes out of the box, but I won’t buy that one – because I touched it, and now it’s cursed.

I’m sure it is strictly just a load of coincidences. I’m not, by nature, the kind of person who believes in fate or bad luck. I constantly look for scientific explanations for things; I’m a chronic analyzer. I feel like there is a rational and predictable cause of everything that happens, and there are patterns even in chaos.

Therefore, I’ve arrived at the conclusion that I’m a mutant with an intermittently-active, electricity-disrupting superpower that occasionally overloads or destroys things that have to be plugged in and/or run on batteries.

If only I could control it, it could come in very

I’d heard some negative things about the service, but I think that has more to do with people having overly high expectations. What you  will NOT find is a bunch of recent blockbuster movies available. Most of the big-name productions that can be streamed are older, although there are some real gems among those selections. The newer films are usually those which didn’t do all that well at the box office, and films that are destined for “cult classic” status. What IS available, though, is a broad selection of television programs, movies, and documentaries. I was delighted to find shows like Red Dwarf, the original run of Doctor Who, Mad Men and Weeds right there for me to watch any time on my Xbox 360, Wii or computer – although I found it odd that you could find the complete Angel series but nary an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I’ve always used documentaries to assist in homeschooling the kids, and there are a number of very informative ones available. The ability to pause, rewind, or stop to answer questions or just to take a break makes it superior to watching programs “live” on PBS, and being able to choose and press play has made gathering teaching materials easy – no more trips to the video store or waiting for something to come on television. Much more time is available to watch and broaden their knowledge by providing parental commentary when no travel or search time is required.

If you’re looking for a way to see the newest blockbuster on the day it is released on Blu-ray or the episode of House you missed last Monday, this service isn’t for you. However, if you want something to give you on-demand access to some older shows and movies that you can watch on anything from your laptop to your big screen TV using your gaming console, this will do the job quite nicely. We don’t have satellite or cable television and can pick up only a few channels with our current antenna arrangement, so this gives me the ability to “tune-in” to entertainment during the long hours I have to spend resting in bed. It’s like being able to channel surf without needing to tune in on the hour and half-hour in order to not miss anything – and all for only 8 bucks a month!

I give this one a big furry thumb up.

I’ll just leave this right here.