Grimm's weblog

The Tax Man sent me, yet another, cheque in the mail today. About $300, which I find ammusing, because it makes me think of the Lewis Black track where he talks about his $300 tax credit from the government.

In the true spirit of Lewis Black, I have big plans of frivilously wasting that money on fun. Because that is what random government cheques are all about : )

Had a crappy cup of coffee, but quite a lovely time with Liz last night. We went to Sharky's Cafe in the Bloor-West Village, where I enjoyed some sorbert which I could not get her to try, along with a terrible cup of coffee. She had grapefruit juice. From there we went on a stroll through the neighbourhood while doing some window shopping. Later on, in our walk, we found a charming waterfall fountain whom's edge we perched on. We stayed there admiring the cascading water, for what seemed to be no time at all, but in fact turned out to be quite a while. I must say, it was a lovely view we had, and a lovely time.

If the measure of a good trip to the store, is not being in pain, and not bleeding all over your shoe. Then we can safely say that the trip I just took to the store did not measure well at all.

Cursed sock drawer.

After I took a fresh pair of socks out of my sock drawer, I closed the drawer, as I am acustomed to doing. But it did not close all the way and was left slightly ajar.

Not noticing this, I turned around and walked away from the drawer. But somehow while lifting my left foot to take a step, I cought the bottom edge of the drawer with my heel, and ripped of a pretty big chunk of skin. Needless to say it's been oozing blood for a few minutes now, and appears to not want to coagulate.
Which, if you had been paying attention at the begining of the story, is just not good news, since I was getting those socks for a reason. It was in order to put on my shoes, in order to leave the damn house. Now I'm stuck here, cursing the fact that I can't put my shoes on.

This weekend has sucked!

Two days ago, I woke up with a high fever. For no apperant reason what so ever. I had no other symptons, that would indicate I had a cold or some other ailment. Nope, just a high fever, a mysterious fever.
Anyone familiar with the current, scorching, Toronto weather, would know that this stupid heat is really not the best time to have extra heat due to a fever.
Yesterday I was doing better, and today I seem to be recupirated enough to be able to leave the house. But pretty much my whole weekend was shot, stupid fever.

Before playing Battlefield 2, please be sure that your firewall is allowing traffic through the following ports.
Server Ports:

UDP 27900
UDP/TCP 29900
TCP 80
TCP 4711
TCP 29901
UDP 1500-4999
UDP/TCP 1024-1124
UDP 28910
UDP 16567
UDP 55123-55125

Seriously, what the hell is this? Why doesn't EA just ask me to trash my firewall all together, turn on netbios, and install goddamn Gator on my computer while we're at it?

HOLY CRAP, the best gaming magazine of the 20th century has returned!

[Next-Generation's] goal was to provide a game magazine from a mature adult perspective. Its content didn't focus on screenshots, walkthroughs, and cheat codes like GamePro, EGM, or other video game magazines targeted at the adolescent crowd. Instead the content was more focused on the game industry from an artistic perspective.
[WikiPedia Entry]

I use to read NextGen religiously until it's bitter demise (DAMN YOU IMAGINE PUBLISHING). In fact to this day, I still have all of my issues kept in hermetically sealed storage.

I can't belive no one had told me it had come back in this online form. Aperantly it launched in June, so I'm not too far behind. Lets just home this isn't another PCXL(PC Accelerator) online rebirth, canceled in 2 months, fiasco... again, DAMN YOU IMAGINE PUBLISHING.

From his anchor chair of Comedy Central's, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, Jon Stewart is the Walter Cronkite for a younger generation. Known for his sarcastic, sardonic and incisive sense of humour, Stewart has emerged as one of America's top social and comedic voices.

At Massey Hall this Oct, and I have two tickets. w00t!!

(Thanks to Flylife for the heads up)

... trying to explain to Allan why I was using C# rather than other languages, I said that for the project I was working on I had been looking for a language that had good OOP support, and that had strong typing.

His response?

"You don't need types, types are for girls."
[Hixie's Natural Log]

Like the old saying goes, a good type is like a good the ladie.

Here is what you need to remember about electromagnetic storms, electromagnetic beams, and electromagnetic pulses, and their effects on your personal electronic devices.

Your microwave is in fact an effective miniature Faraday Cage. Which means that if and when an electromagnetic disturbance hits. All you need to do is put your iPod, backup iPod, and some batteries and flashlights... I guess... if you really want to. Anyway, you take the pod, and those other devices and stick them in a closed, unplugged microwave.
Once the electromagnetic disturbance is over you can take your iPod out of the microwave and be assured that it will be functioning flawlessly, unlike your wrist watch, cell phone, or car.

So don't stop get it, get it
Until your Cheddar's heavy
And watch the way I navigate
Watch me as I gravitate hahaha

After I acquire this bass, my band is bound to take off! Well after I acquire said guitar, and Eddy Van Halen, nootch.

Earlier this week Liz had expressed interest in getting out of the city, but had no particular destination in mind. Being ever the well traveled Ontarian, I suggested several grand places in this fair province of our. Places such as the majestic town of Pickering, the hallowed halls of Oshawa, the auspicious township of Waterloo, amongst other destinations. In the end we settled on the always scenic Niagara Falls, since it seemed a little more exciting than the other places... no offence to the 'shawa kids in the house : P
Besides I promised Liz I'd teach her my award wining casino busting techniques, the ones that in the past have allowed me to DOUBLE my money. So we needed a casino hosting city such as Niagara to do that. So to the Falls we went.

We left work last night, promptly at 8 o'clock. After going home to quickly change, and get ready (well not really quickly, you know how girls are with their hair and such [took forever! {...I might get my ass kicked for this comment!}]), we eventually manged to leave for our destination.

I believe we arrived there around 10:30 to 11:00pm not quite sure. We made great time there since there's no traffic on the QEW that late at night. As a side note, the trip totalled 288KM and we used 17L of gas which if we do 288/17 = 16.94L per KM, which is not at all bad considering my old car would have probably needed 3 refills on the way there, since it was so horrible with it's fuel consumption.

Once at the Falls, and a parking spot was secured, we decided to go for a walk by the Falls before going to the Casino. The Clifton Hill area we walked through on the way to the Falls was far too crowded, and full of rowdy people. So a nice walk far away from the crowds was indeed the better idea.

And a nice walk it was. We took the path along the falls, all the way down the superior Canadian section of the Niagara Falls. Stopping along the way, of course, to admire the scenery and aromas (from the botanical gardens *cough*). We spent a couple of hours wandering, sitting, and exploring amongst the gardens and pathways of the area. We spent such a long time there, that they eventually shut the lights off on us! There was an upside to being there that late into the night, and that would be that there were no people around. We had the whole place to ourselves, which was quite nice.

By the time we headed back into the downtown area, it was near 3am, and the street was much less busy than when we got there. Most shops were closing up, but luckily for us, the haunted house was not!
She was a hesitant at first, but after some slight trepidation, Liz mustered up her nerves and agreed to go in.
Entering the house, we screwed up almost immediately. We ended up going through the whole place backwards. Which actually worked out in Liz's favour, since a lot of the traps and sensors were missing us until we went passed the scary parts of the rooms. The few parts where they did get us, she was quite brave though.
I can attest to the fact that she did not draw much blood, or at least the scars left on my hands don't appear to be too deep (from her nails digging into my arm [is the imagery I'm trying to convey]). Poor thing was shaking a bit, and event got a little flushed, it was the most adorable thing ever. But she did not get nearly as scared as the couple that crossed our path in there. The girl in that couple was completely freaking out, and we could hear her yells from the other end of the house. So in those regards, Liz was quite the brave trooper... in those regards.
The coolest part of the house, was this creepy mirrored maze. It had strobe lights going off, and creepy sound effects coming from everywhere, and infinite mirror tunnels happening wherever you looked, it was very surreal and freaky. Walking into walls sucks! Not that I have much experience, doing that...

After surviving the Haunted House, we decided to call it a night, since it was nearing 4am, and some of us had to be up for work in 5 hours. The drive back, seemed relatively quick, we saw two very bad car accidents on the QEW. But no one seemed to be badly hurt in either one, so that was good.
When we finally arrived in Toronto the sky was getting light, which did not bode well for my 9am wakeup call. It was 4:50am when I dropped Liz off at home, 14min later I arrived at my place, where I proceeded to pass out.

I had a feeling, that I'd be hurting from that lack of sleep in the morning, and I really am. I have a headache, and need to hookup some sort of coffee intravenous apparatus. But it was well worth it, I'd totally do it again next weekend ; )

**images courtesy images.google (full picture)

Looks like I spoke too hastily in a previous post.

The nice revenuers, have reassessed my tax return, applied some British Columbia tax credit, and worked out some other black magic, which all results in me getting a nice fat re-adjusted, $792 dollar tax return. w00t!!

Had to work today, fortunately so did Liz. When we got off work. I, being the courteous fellow that I am, gave her a ride home.
On our way to her place, we decided that since it was Saturday night, and said night was young. It would be in our best interest to go out for said night... that I said already... said : P
After much planning and plotting on both our parts, she came up with the unconventional idea of renting some movies and staying in rather than going out. And that is where the Amputations part of the title for this post comes from. It's because we rented Saw, which involves... well I don't want to ruin it for anyone, so forget I mentioned the amputations. Come to think of it, I should have said that's where the Movies part of the title came from, yes that would have been a bit less graphic, what with the lack of amputational imagery and all, but I digress.
We also got Shaun of Dead, which Liz hadn't seen, and it came highly recommended, by me, so it was an easy pick. With movies on hand back to her place we went.

It was then a fun filled night of zombies, dismembered body parts, and way too much blood. And that is where the Cherries part of the tile comes in, we had cherries while watching the movies. Well actually they were too sweet and I didnt really eat them because I'm all about the sour cherries. But I think my point is well made. Actually I don't think I made a point, but I'm tired and have to go back to work tomorrow, and do some incredibly boring work, so I'm just pulling the plug on this rambling post now.

Since she had this week off from school, Liz suggested we go out sometime during my weekday "weekend" which conincides with her week off this week, you see what just happend there? with all the week talk? exellent lets move on.

I happily accepted this invitation to go out, and came up with the bright idea of going to the Metro Toronto Zoo yesterday. A grand idea indeed, on a normal day that is. But today was no normal day. With a sever heat warning, walking kilometers, upon kilometers, in the baking hot sun, with the humidity kicking it up to 37°c or so, well that is no "bright idea".

Apart from the heat though, we had a fun time. We got to see monkeys peeeing, I mean, that right there is worth the heatstroke.

We also saw a guy tiger get shot down by a lady tiger. This girl tiger was up on some perch in their enclosure, just laying there relaxing. The male tiger saw here up there, he strutted over looked at her tiger ass for a while, then suddenly jumped up on the perch to get on top of her, and tapping her ass with his big paw on his way there. Freaked out, the girl tiger instictively kicked him and let out a LOUD scarry growl which showed off all her large sharp teeth, he went flying off the perch and fell back to the ground. His ego suffering a large blow, he went off to sulk at the other end of the cage.

Liz also did a great job of keeping me far and away from all the scarry snakes in the place. I was most greatful for her help, and I did my best to keep her away from all the rodents, so all phobias were kept well under control by our efforts :)

Here are some pictures to enjoy:
A Llama:

Hanging out with some bears:


An elephant, and his poo:

At 11:00am this morning (about 30min ago), Darksyde called me, to tell me of his crazy adventure. I'll let him blog with full details later, for now you'll have the Coles Notes version.

After leaving an after hours club at 7am, he stumbled upon a Canada Days celebration, at Nathan Philip Square. He snuck on to the backstage area there and has been scamming food, water, bossing people around, and other hilarious hyjinx.

While talking to him he reassured me he was still not sober from the night before, which I could belive because he kept repeating stories over and over, it was quite funny.
If he's not arrested there are tentative plans to hit the russian mob club later tonight.