Trilobite

Saturday was the Skeleton Park Music Festival and, Holy Cow, it was good! It was like a little Glastonbury in my backyard. Not that I’ve ever been to Glastonbury, but I imagine I would enjoy it. I took a couple hundred pictures and movies of all these great Kingston bands but lost them when my hard drive crashed. Oh well. I’ll just have to get by with wetware memories like everybody else does. The best act of the day was Karyn Ellis. She sang a waltz called Hearts Fall that made me cry. (I’m such a sissy!) I bought one of her CD’s and have been listening to it quite a bit over the past few days. I hope there’s another festival next year.

Last Wednesday was my graduation ceremony. I didn’t go, mostly because it would have been a big hassle to be in Toronto at 8:30am. It was webcast and I watched parts of it but it was too boring to sit through the whole thing, even with a fast forward button. The non-streaming wmv file is about 100MB. It made me laugh when the chancellor got up to read the names of all the students who were receiving their degrees in absentia and suddenly the sound cut out, she moved her lips silently for a few seconds, and then the video showed everybody standing up and filing out the convocation hall.

This stupid bachelor’s degree seemed like such a big deal when I was still at school and it was so incredibly stressful, but now that I’ve got a job my degree seems more like the bare minimum, sort of like kindergarten. I guess it’s good to have. But it’s better to have it out of the way. To celebrate I signed all my loan consolidation forms and took them to the bank. I’m going to be making $479.17 in student loan payments every month for the next 10 years.

I just finished watching The Barbarian Invasions and think it probably deserves a spot somewhere in my top ten list. What I really liked about the film was Nathalie’s character, and not just because she was a heroin addict. (That was a joke, Mom.) I liked a lot of the same things about her that I liked about Renton from Trainspotting. They both made a mess of their lives but somehow figured out a way to solve their problems. In Renton’s case it meant doing something pretty despicable, but in doing so he managed to escape his current situation and start a new life. Nathalie also did something funny at the end of Barbarian Invasions, but what she did changed my opinion about one of the other characters in the movie.

The Barbarian Invasions dvds have two versions of the film: the full 112 minute version and the edited 98 minute version. The only thing I can imagine being edited out is the drug use and I can’t imagine how the movie could be even half as good without the contrast between the main characters and the “barbarians.” I’m curious to watch this 98 minute version, but I probably would just find it an annoying 98 minutes of snobs eating truffles and talking about art.

I’m going to have to rent some more Denys Arcand movies.

Grrr. My hard drive died last night and my last backup was in December 2004. I could have sworn I had a backup from 6 months ago, but no such luck. I’ve even been meaning to buy a dvd burner for the past week or two and back everything up just in case something like this happened. I would say it’s a bit ironic but it’s not really. It’s more like me being stupid.

So far I’ve been able to figure out that BIOS won’t recognize the drive unless it’s jumpered a slave (cable select doesn’t work), and that the Linux kernel thinks it has a bad superblock. I hope I can somehow recover at least some of my files, but it doesn’t look very promising.

I’m glad I had one of these Knoppix CD’s lying around so I can use my computer until I buy a new hard drive. If anybody has sent me any email in the past 18 months, can you please re-send it 😉

Monday night I turned on my TV to watch game 7 of the Stanley Cup finals and was surprised to see the reception was much worse than usual. I could tell what colour jerseys the players were wearing but there was too much static to see the puck and it was pretty hard to follow the action. So after the first period I went to The Toucan to watch the rest of the game on their big screen TV.

I got worried during the second period when a band began setting up their equipment on the stage in front of the TV and I quickly started making a mental list of other places within walking distance that might be showing the hockey game. That was until Sarah Harmer walked past me on her way to the bar. It took me about two seconds to decide that even if the TV got turned off just as the game was going into overtime, I would stay right there and watch the band. The pub left the TV on for the whole game after all (which was entertaining, despite the Oilers not winning the cup) and Ghetto Express started playing shortly afterwards.

At the end of the first set the band told everybody there would be a special guest later on, which really got my hopes up. I even started to think of the songs I hoped Sarah Harmer would sing and I almost went over to her table to ask if she would play Trouble in the Fields! In retrospect I’m glad I didn’t do that, especially since she got up and left the pub right after I decided not to harass her. The special guest turned out to be Tracie Morgan, not Sarah Harmer after all. Oh well. I still had a good night, and now I have another CD by another local musician.

This past weekend I spent a lot of time outdoors and my muscles are still kinda sore from it. On Saturday I went out hiking in the woods with a couple of strangers I met on the internet. (Hah. I couldn’t help being overly dramatic there. It’s okay though, they were geocachers.) We found a couple of geocaches in the Depot Lakes Conservation Area, one of which I’ve been keen to get to for about three years. Photos: swamp bridge, power lines, campsite, strangler vine, picnic futon.

On Sunday Christine and I went for a bike ride on Wolfe Island. The weather was a bit smoggy and the ozone bothered my throat but it was nice to finally get out on my bike again. We rode along the route of the Wolfe Island Classic running race out to the Simcoe Island ferry, and I enjoyed watching the kilometer markers go by. One day I’ll get off my butt and enter one of those races. We passed by my favourite goat a couple of times (she’s as fat as always), and also stopped to visit a couple of horses.

Peter bought me a dvd player for my birthday and since Classic Video is just around the corner I’ve been renting a lot of films lately. I’m sure there are some good ones I’ve forgotten, but off the top of my head here are my ten favourite movies.

1. Princess Mononoke
2. Amélie
3. Trainspotting
4. Star Wars
5. The Incredibles
6. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
7. Spirited Away
8. Fargo
9. Castle in the Sky
10. 42 Up

I just noticed that somebody cut and pasted one of my web pages into their own tripod site. They didn’t even bother to change the title from “my” grandmother’s beigli recipe, and they are leeching my beigli photo off of Peter’s web server! I guess that’s just the way the web works. After all, I download copyrighted stuff all the time. I don’t think it’s the copying that bothers me, it’s that she’s claiming the recipe and photo are her own. Hmph.

I’ve been thinking lately about getting a couple of rats. I’ve read that every rat has a very distinctive personality and they make really good pets. They can be house trained and even come when you call their name. They can easily identify humans by their smell and are loyal to their owners just like dogs are. I even read about one rat owner on the web who would crawl on her hands and knees on the floor with her rat on her back, and the rat learned to drive around the room her like a car!

I think the closest rattery to Kingston is in Ottawa, so maybe I will have take a trip on the train. Or maybe I’ll go to the Belleville Humane Society. I know I don’t want to buy any rats from a pet store since almost all of them buy their rodents from rat mills that exist primarily to make a profit providing live meals for snakes.

Today I subscribed to the mailing list of the Ontario Chapter of The Rat and Mouse Club of America.

Here’s a video of somebody’s pet rat. It looks like they have a three-storey powder-coated steel cage from this company in Pennsylvania. Those cages are really nice, but they cost about $100 US, and I bet shipping and customs is quite a bit too. Maybe I can make my own cage somehow…

My sister-in-law is due to have her baby in about 6 weeks. Both Gina and Little Angus (who’s name will likely be changed again before he is born) are doing well. When Peter came to visit for Christine’s and my birthday last week he showed us all the sonogram videos (including the 3D one), which I found very interesting. (I feel an inexplicable urge to add another parenthesized statement here. Of course Oscar, just stay here and watch the train.)

On my birthday I got to go to one of my favourite places in the world. My family already knows where this is, but there are a few geocachers and other random internet lurkers who read this blog. Can you guess where I mean? The X on my shirt is for Mac OS X (which baffles me, Kate Walker).