After I arrived home this aft, the weather proceeded to produce thunder, lightning and borderline torrential downpour. By the time I had to head back to work it was bright and sunny. The extreme amounts of rain caused them to close the course right as I showed up. That water also turned the range into a giant sponge. No picker, I had to walk around for about three hours in the sun on a giant sponge with two handpickers. It was shit. Makes me glad we usually have the motorized picker, so much easier.
I got off work sometime around 9 last night, in again at 7 this morning. It’s tournament day, tons of people. The morning draw ended up getting cancelled after a couple holes, thunder and lightning and whatnot. I had to drive a cart through sheets of rain looking for stragglers. Now I’m home for some food and an hour or two of chill time, then back in at 3 for a range shift that I took for someone else. It adds up to a 12 hour work day.
Well, I ended up only having two days off instead of three (i took someone’s shift today). The two days I had were spent fucking around with the computer. I decided to mess with partitions and install Mandrake Linux. I really tooled around my box, ending up with a fresh windows installation and weird drive letters. I now have windows installed on my g: drive, it’s kind of weird. Mandrake never really ended up working. I don’t think the boot loader was calling the partitions right and I think the linux partition was crossing the 8gb boundary, which I don’t think it particularly likes. However, I didn’t reinstall Office, I’m going with OpenOffice.org, Eudora and Mozilla to see how I get along without it. Clean installs are nice, they just take awhile to get things back. There were a couple things I forgot to back up like contacts in outlook and my bookmarks.
I picked up a couple of new optical drives as well. I used to have a dvd/cdr combo drive, but I was starting to get a lot more burn errors. I picked up a Pioneer 16X DVD drive and a LiteOn 32X cd writer. The dvd player is slot load, which is kind of cool and the cdr is a whole lot faster than my last one (<4 mins for a full burn comparted to >15).
At the moment, I’m trying to repopulate my bookmarks. Suffice it to say there aren’t as many as their used to be. I haven’t been to tom’s site in awhile, so I’m noticing now that he has a new design up. Seeing as how I’m a bit of a bookmark whore and tend to mainly visit things inside the realm of what I’ve previously experienced, I’m finding that not having the bookmarks to rely on is rather difficult. So I just sit here in front of the box and stare at the browser, wondering what I’m doing. No wild and frienzied click-through. Type type type. Recommended links would be nice.
I’ve been ignoring my computer for awhile. I think I’ve worked the nine of the last ten days, generally 2pm until close (9ish). Wake up late, go to work, get home, shower, hang out with friends, goto bed. I have the next three days to reaquaint myself with the machine. Maybe a formatting, maybe some site design, who knows. The plan is to avoid entirely wasting it.
The new demo utilities at Google Labs are pretty cool. The glossary search is handy and the set search is pretty cool too.
Perhaps you’ve seen the new Gap commercial; the one with Dennis Hopper. Now as much as I like to hate Gap commercials this one makes me laugh. He’s just sitting there with that look, the one that says, “I’m the man.” And he’s sitting there thinking, “You all thought I was a fool for becoming involved with Waterworld. I knew what I was doing, it was over-budget because of me not that ponce Kevin Costner. I’m rich, look at me sitting in this lounge chair with the beautiful girl. Yeah.”
Hey kids. Neil has started up a new satire site, called The Big Jewel. This guy is one of the funniest people I know, he used to be my editor over at Golden Words. I advise you to check it out.
1. What shampoo do you use? I have a bottle of Herbal Essences right now, it was cheap. My housemate went home for the summer and left his Head and Shoulders around, so I’ve been using that a bit lately.
2. Do you use conditioner? What kind? Not usually, sometimes 2 in 1.
3. When was the last time you got your hair cut? I don’t remember. The last time I shaved all my hair off was January, I haven’t touched it since.
4. What styling products do you use? None.
5. What’s your worst hair-related experience? Nothing really, I think someone was giving me an undercut once and forgot to put that attachment on. Ended up shaving a little bald patch.
I’m supposed to work this afternoon, in about two hours. I was also supposed to work at leat four out of the last seven days. All of my shifts have been cancelled due to rain and course closure. It’s sunny outside right now, albeit a tad chilly so I’m guessing the golfers will still be heading out. When you need some money, it doesn’t help if you’re not working.
Check out Rich’s new project: snap your desk. Take a photo of your workspace and send it along. He might need to redo the interface, if more people submit pictures it’s going to get kind of tedious trying to see ones that you haven’t seen already. Some sort of database implementation where people had an account and could change their photo to reflect their current space.
I started using mozilla as my primary browser a day or two ago. So far I’m liking it, especially the tabbed browsing feature. It’s upto release candidate 2, so we can expect version 1.0 shortly.
I’m curious to know if many people have tried OpenOffice.org and what they think. It looks like things are starting to get to the point where you don’t neccesarily need to be running Windows with Office.
Nullsoft has released Beep, it makes your computer sound like the ones in the movies. It’s good for a laugh at least. It might confuse other people that use the computer as well.
I highly recommend watching Donnie Darko. The website is fun too, tought to get around but it looks good. The movie is about Donnie Darko, a somewhat twisted kid who sees a giant rabbit named Frank. Throw in some time travel for good measure and you have a nice dark comedy.
A run down of the movies I’ve watched in the last few days: Moulin Rouge, Spiderman, Heist, No Man’s Land. Which one did I like the best? That would be No Man’s Land.
I wasn’t sure if I’d ever let myself sit down and watch Moulin Rouge, it just seemed wrong to me. Never the less, I did end up seeing it. Visually, I found the movie stunning, it was awesome. The songs were blah, it’s nice to do medley’s with other people’s music but it became pretty annoying in parts. And the plot/story? Yeah, that was horrible.
On to Spiderman. I watched a vcd version of it, I’ll probably check it out on the big screen for the eye candy. Lots of eye candy. Some more effort could have been put into the dialogue, although comic books aren’t known for their brilliance on that front.
Heist was blah. It’s a decent caper flick but I didn’t find anything that made it stand out in the crowd. It’s time filler I guess.
Lastly, No Man’s Land - well deserving of it’s Oscar win as best foreign film. It’s not an easy movie to watch, although not many war movies are. They almost make you feel guilty for being alive and living in comfort while people are dying. There are lighter moments, especially the difficulties that come into play with the multitude of different languages that are involved. The cinematography is pretty amazing as well, I recommend watching the widescreen version.
I’ve been on hiatus from the box for the last week or two. Working at a golf course cleaning clubs and whatnot. It’s not great work, but it’s not bad work either. It’s a nice course, and staff members can get out on it once or twice a week.
Other than work, I’ve just been chilling; watching movies, reading some books, pretending to be a vegetable. I’m working on some things right now, the site should become a little bit more active. School’s out, I seemed to have passed all my courses. Things are looking good.
Worky worky early in the morning? Yes, indeed.
I just finished up watching The Hidden Fortress, it’s a Kurasowa film. The Criterion dvd has an interview with George Lucas, in which he says that he was heavily influenced by Kurosawa and drew from this movie for his Star Wars films. As far as the movie itself goes, I enjoyed it. Two of the main characters are bumbling idiots and it’s tough to decide if you love them or hate them. It’s worth watching.
I watched Zoolander and Drop Dead Gorgeous a couple of days ago. I’m sitting on the fence with Zoolander, there are some things I found absolutely hilarious and other moments I found absolutely horrifying. Owen Wilson and Ben Stiller definitely have some chemistry together on screen, I’d say I liked the Royal Tennenbaums better though. I wrote off Drop Dead Gorgeous a long time ago, it’s a shame. It really is a funny movie.
I seem to be having trouble getting motivated to write anything these days. I’ve been working and partying, generally ignoring the internet and the accompanying beige box. We’ve gone our separate ways for the summer months, so we won’t be killing time by getting stupid and forgetting what we learned this year.
I think I’m going to try and teach myself some mysql stuff and create a reviews section on the website. Something with a web interface that would be easy to update.
The first day of May, how nice. It seems to be the day of choice for moving out and moving in. Andrew and Shawn are both taking off today; Eilis, Mike… the list goes on. Kingston’s an alright town to be in during the summer, but the neighbourhood just doesn’t have the same feel with most of the students missing. There will still be plenty of people around, it’s a shame more don’t stay.
I played some basketball yesterday, it’s left me a little bit stiff. I have to head into work in a couple of hours and sling golf clubs around. Should be fun.