Category: life

Just got back from a conference from the surprisingly sunny, windless Quebec City. We stayed at the Chateau Frontenac and partook in the charming surroundings of Vieux-Quebec. Oh, and it’s very hilly. You could see why the French and British fought to control the city; Fortress Quebec made defending the mouth of the St-Lawrence River (aka La Riviere St-Laurent) a cinch.

At the Frontenac, we stayed on the Gold club floor. They have a lettermail chute running down alongside the elevator shafts, and ashcans with the Fairmont logo embossed in the sand.

Two weekends ago, I paid my parents a visit. I needed to practice some driving, and they needed me to spruce up their computer and insult me on random transgressions in my life. (The first words my mother said to me was, “What’s wrong with your face?”) They recently saw the light and ditched AOL and switched to Sympatico DSL Basic, and needed help configuring their mail.
Oh, and the computer is a WindowsME machine. Oh joy.

While I was installing Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird, my dad complained that he couldn’t play this Chinese mohgoung movies* on any of his DVD players or DVD drives. I explained to him the whole regioning copy protection the DVD manufacturers and moviemakers cooked up so that all the movies you buy in China (Region 6) or elsewhere wouldn’t play on a North American DVD player (Region 1), or vice versa.

He replied, “Hell, they are trying to stop me from playing movies I legitimately own with crippled DVD players? So now, not only have lost my DVD business, I’m not going to buy these expensive American DVD players either.” A friend of his had lent him an inexpensive, region-free Chinese-made DVD player.

No truer words have been spoken.

__*Mohgoung movies are popular Chinese films that feature acrobatic kungfu experts and soap opera plotlines in medieval settings. This one featured a woman that could cut piano wire by flinging a pebble and a bearded old guy who could smash swords with his cane in midair. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” is of this genre.__

We saw a young couple beside us actually do these things when I took Silverlotus to the Yamato Japanese Restaurant in Yorkville for her birthday:

# Don’t give strange cheapskate drink requests, like “iced tea with a teeny, teeny, tiny bit of cranberry juice in it.”
# Don’t ask the waitress if you can have the teppan fried rice without the rice (“And give me twice the vegetables instead.”)
# Don’t pretend you’re rich by idly inquiring about the kobe beef special, find out it costs $75, and then change your order to the teriyaki special.
# Don’t suddenly announce to the waitress bringing your onion soup in beef broth that you are in fact a staunch vegetarian, and then instruct the waitress to dump it out and give you a nice miso soup instead.
# Do not then proceed to eat your salmon main dish (didn’t you know? fish grows on trees!)
# Don’t walk out leaving half of your painstakingly prepared teppanyaki meal untouched.

With those words, __Star Trek: Enterprise__ and the Star Trek franchise as a whole, came to an abrupt conclusion.

After watching the series finale, “These Are The Voyages,” I couldn’t help thinking that Berman and Braga designed this episode to be more of a tribute toward themselves, rather than their fans. After all, the episode chronologically takes place in __Star Trek: The Next Generation__’s seventh season, aka 1993 – the glory days where it seemed the final frontier of the franchise seemed limitless. They even revisited that tried and true hackneyed plot device – the holodeck.

Sadly, the cast of __Enterprise__ became bit players on their own show. And as I watched TNG’s Commander Riker, roleplaying as the confidante chef in a holographic recreation of the NX-01, rubbed elbows with this cast, I sadly realized we knew more about Riker’s id than Reed, Sato and Mayweather combined. They seemed to be cardboard cutouts than people in comparison.

So why has Trek died not with a bang, but with a whimper? Some say it’s the abysmal scripts. Others blame a saturated geek’s market of __CSI__’s and __Smallville__’s, a multitude of strong science and fantasy shows to choose from. I say it’s that character development and high concept sci-fi has been replaced by banal phase pistol gunfights and bare midriffs.

I own both the TNG and DS9 Technical Manuals. I continue to contribute to Memory Alpha. Star Trek inspired me in my adolescence, back when it wasn’t hip to be a nerd. For that, I say thanks. May it return, strong than ever, somewhere…out there.

V once told me that good quality audio was like crack for your ears, and colour me a believer. After hearing Juice had snagged up a 4.0 home theatre system, I inquired to V about snagging the basics: two 6.5″ front speakers, a 100W (continuous) subwoofer, and a 5-channel A/V receiver to plug everything into. Everything in black ash, made and designed in Canada.

When the padded truck comes for me, my excuse will be this: they had a sale on and I got a great deal, and I simply can’t ignore a good deal, can I? 😉

Last Saturday, V came over to hook everything up. I’ll still have to grab a Toslink cable to enable DTS and Dolby Surround on the PlayStation 2, but the sound changes are already quite apparent just by using the FM tuner on the receiver.

The speakers output sound that is incredibly clear and rich. Even at -50dB, I can make out the words to a song. When watching the news, I can hear the wind wooshing through the reporter’s microphone as he interviews the village idiot on the street.

The subwoofer generates rumbling lows that sound like a passing subway train, not like a tuned Honda Civic with incontinence. My system is in the value segment, and it’s the best sounding thing I’ve ever owned. I sound like an audiophile magazine, but you get the drift.

Oh, and V got the speaker company’s founder to sign the back of one of my speakers. How cool is that!

Some things I’ve learned about setting up home theatre systems:

* The sound industry fudges numbers even more than the video industry. Power ratings on equipment is usually rated PMPO (the wattage that is achieved just as the amplifier explodes) or when the speaker is playing a 1kHz blip. My receiver can push 50W to 4 channels continuously, in normal listening ranges, without distortion.
* The receiver will get hot. It doesn’t like enclosed spaces.
* Speakers can be hooked up with lowly lamp cord, AWG24 wire, or even unravelled strands from CAT 5e cabling.
* Get the cheapest toslink cable you can find. Digital cable is digital cable; it either works or it doesn’t. You don’t need that $200 Monster FX-4000 Ultra Super Great cable.
* To get uncooperative screws into speaker stands, rub their threads beforehand with a little wet soap.

Remember when spaceship shoot’em ups cost $70 and took up an entire cartridge? Now they’re free for the PC, and they work with your gamepad too! (They are also all Japanese made, go figure)

* Cho Ren Sha 68K Translated as “Ultra Rapid Fire”, you’ll be blasting baddies Raiden-style.

* Warning Forever It’s just you and the “boss”, but what makes this game unique is that the bosses adapt to your attack patterns. For example, if you destroy a boss with close-range frontal assaults, the next boss will feature armour and rotating turrets on its bow.

* Torus Trooper A game of chicken, and a road to ruin. Travel as fast as you dare, while blasting or avoiding enemies.

In the PlayStation2: Katamari Damacy. It was only $26 on Amazon.ca, and what a wacky addictive game it is. Very therapeutic to first be dwarfed by banana peels, and then eventually roll your way to success and crushing oil tankers with your fearsome, trippy katamari ball.

In Toronto, riding the public transit in 2005 means being hit with yet another 5% fare increase and yet another impending union strike, while enjoying the same miserable service. Keep in mind that this is after the Ontario government gave the TTC several million bucks (I wrote about what the TTC should do with it here).

I can’t help but look up for guidance – or rather, looking toward the north, toward York Region. The York Region Transit services these far-flung affluent suburbs, where it is not uncommon to see Boxsters and Benzos parked outside the local WalMart. Apparently, the YRT has been widely successful with its automated fare machines and clean-smelling buses; the YRT reported its fourth straight year of increased ridership.

And they’re not stopping there. In September, the YRT will unveil VIVA, their express bus rapid transit system. Everything about VIVA will be cutting edge: the VanHool low rider buses will be equipped with bucket seats, GPS systems, and stoplight changing transponders. Bus stops will have lights, automated fare kiosks and LED displays indicating when the next bus will arrive. To increase efficiency further, the buses will run on an honour system.

This dream network, which will cover everything from Aurora to Markham, will cost York Region $11 million this year, but they are confident that it will boost ridership levels by one-third. And that’s not all; YRT plans to replace the bus rapid transit with LRT or subway trains in twenty years.

Maybe I’m comparing apples and oranges here, but it appears one transit authority has its buses in a row, and another doesn’t.

Two thirtysomething ladies, one armed with a baby and stroller, are chatting on the subway. Occasionally the baby will growl, and one of the ladies will pop the lid off a small tupperware with some Cheerios in it. The baby grabs a bunch of O’s, throws them away, and then picks up one, and laboriously sticks it in his mouth. The mother closes the container and the two ladies continue their conversation:

“We were interviewing some people for a position, and when we asked what was the greatest change or highlight in their lives, some of them said the iPod!”

UPDATE: I won a 20GB iPod.

Well, that was fun. My computer died two weeks ago, and I have been experiencing a gamut of unpleasant emotions and saying several four-letter words with anatomical references. It truly passed with a bang – or more specifically, a blue screen of death. Rebooting it only resulted in bringing my PC into a coma-like fugue, with the HDD light worryingly stuck on. Verdict: toasted motherboard. I suspect it had something to do with last year’s problems with the northbridge chipset.

It was a better excuse to upgrade than I could ever come up on my own, so after a week of staring at computer guts heaped on top of my writing desk, I went to my local Chinese-run computer shop and bought an Athlon64, new motherboard, and RAM. Unfortunately, the adventure didn’t stop there – the new computer proved to be quite unstable. I’ve become a little too intimate with Asus motherboard arcanum and the trinity of troubleshooting tools – Prime95, Memtest86, and 3DMark03. Verdict: A disobedient stick of RAM.

Prime95 actually has an amusing story. It’s actually a distributed client designed to look for prime numbers. However, overclocking enthusiasts discovered it gave their hardware a thorough workout, and now it’s reknown more for its “torture tests” than its Marsennes-finding abilities.

The funny thing is, I wasn’t terribly stressed out about the whole thing. I do regular backups, I was due for an upgrade, and I was financially prepared to buy lots of computer stuff at a moment’s notice. Also, with the advent of web services, less and less of my work and data is tied to one computer. Or maybe I’m just growing up. Nah.

1. Default Nokia Jingle – the flashing “12:00” of mobile devices
2. Motorola Marketing Jingle – obnoxious electronica while a chip voice blurts out “Hello Moto!”
3. Three-ring Chime – reminds me of the sound Daytona USA makes when you drive your car through a checkpoint. I want to yell out “Time Extension!” everytime I hear it
4. Sappy Song Refrain – visualize the instrumentals of a Dan Hill lovesong made by last year’s Hong Kong pop idol
5. Shrill Ring Set To Maximum Volume – And it’s always buried at the bottom of some woman’s three gallon purse

   “If you can get her to say my name then I would buy it. I need that kind of personal attention.”

   – New Yorker Julian McCullough, on Jenna Jameson’s new moaning ringtones