Our new kitty Harley Quinn has been showing too much interest in the budgies.

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. Read the rest of this entry »

A few months back, we were given some painted turtles. Apparently someone bought them and their young kids didn’t pay any attention to them at all, so they decided to get rid of them. With the turtles came the whole setup to make them a home for several years, including a filter and a large aquarium. The filter alone is worth about $92, so for the incredibly low price of free, we could not turn down the offer. (The cynical side of me thinks it’s equally likely that alternatively, they bought turtles, heard something about the over-hyped salmonella fears, and decided to get rid of them tout-de-suite.)

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 Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Went to an all-nighter at the drive-in last night.

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, Read the rest of this entry »

I changed the permalink structure of this site. It has broken just about every past link to specific articles on the site through facebook, twitter or anything else.

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.