Grimm's weblog

After 7 years of solid preformance, my Wacom Intuos 6x8 tablet has died. I got to complete one last piece of art with her, which I'll be blogging about later, so at least I can say she went out doing what she loved best... that is allowing me to draw.

I loved that tablet, sure it cost $500 back in the day when I bought it. But it was worth every penny. I can't imagine having any sort of digital art portfolio without it. I'm getting a bit misty here... this tablet, with it's serial connector, was so great. The only reasons I kept having to look so hard for MOBO's with serial ports over the years, was to be able to use my beautiful tablet.

Now I now need to get a replacement, and it looks like the digital camera purchase is put off yet again, because checking the prices, I've learnt that the Wacom Intuos III - 6x8, is still priced at $500!!! Thats the only time I've ever seen a computer peripheral not go down in price over the years, the fact that its the same identical price 7 years later is just bewildering.

If this post is gramatically crappy, please excuse me, I'm blogging while half asleep and upset about having lost a most treasured possesion. But mainly its the sleepyness.

There was an awsome Halloween party at Repub tonight, their first ever actually. It was very cool, the whole place was decorated as a haunted forest, and up on the stage they had a stone well, the whole theme was from "The Ring" movie. They had a freaky ring girl come out of the well, and there was fire, and smoke and samples from the movie were dropped in between tracks through out the night, and that weird The Ring video was played on the various monitors that suround the place.

The best costumes I saw were, this girl dressed as a Firefigher Jenna Jameson as seen in her classic movie Flashpoint.
The best guy costume was a guy dressed as Awesome-O from Southpark. I laughed my ass off when I saw him, it was such a great costume.

I was lame and recycled last years costume, because I didn't have the time to come up with a new one. So I was Donnie Darko again, and there was ONE other guy dressed just like me, we high-fived and complimented each others great costume idea.

Supposedly there are pictures of us from tonight, if I get my hands on them I'll put some up. If not well then... that's that.

Working on the Tribe.Noizex API has given me oportunity to do some fun data mining of all the data I've put into Tribe over the years.

For my ammusement and yours, here is a list of the top listend to artist (while blogging):

1. Korn
2. System Of A Down
3. Deftones
4. Rage Against The Machine
5. Lost Prophets
6. The Haunted
7. Azure Ray
8. Sevendust
9. Papa Roach
10. Linkin Park
11. Massive Attack
12. Princess Superstar
13. Boy Hits Car
14. Filter
15. Lamb

Some surprises in there, but all my favourites made it in, so it seems like a good zeitgeist of my music collection. I'm just surprised I listened to that much Princess Superstar : )

[addendum]:
For the sake of completeness, here is the most played according to my iPod data mining:

1. Nine Inch Nails
2. Deftones
3. P.O.D.
4. From Autumn to Ashes
5. The Used
6. System of a Down
7. Marilyn Manson
8. Korn
9. Lamb
10. Rage Against the Machine
11. Filter
12. Sevendust
13. Rammstein
14. Lostprophets
15. Static-X

Early in the day, I received a phone call reminding me that the Henry Rollins show was happening today. Unfortunately I had totally forgotten that he was coming to town this month, so I had failed to procure tickets of my own for this show. But Sarah had a ticket and had graciously offered it to me, since as I mentioned, I was stupid enough to completely forget about the show. As I was contemplating going, I remembered that I had a previous engatement, so I had to turn down her generous offer.

Fastforward to later on in the day, while I was at the mall. My afore mentioned prior commitment phoned to cancel on the awesome Halloween outing I had planned.
With plans canceled, and my short term memory being mysteriously short that day, I decided to purchase the SSX On Tour that I had gone there to acquire, and planned on spending my evening with that. Somewhere on the ride back home I short term memory remembered Sarahs ticket and the show! So I hurridly phoned up and luckily the ticket was still available! So off to the show we went!

This makes it about the 5th time I've seen Rollins live, and his shows are still going strong. His stories were as funny as ever, although quite a bit more political than usual, if that's even possible. Most of the times he spends a while, at the start of the show, talking about politics, and then moves on to his bizzare movie stories, and then about his trips to far off lands, and the like. Topics which he did cover tonight but far more briefly, the political stuff covered more than 80% of the show, which was understandable considering all the comic material that Bush, and his Cracker Jack team of screw ups have been providing.

His travel story this time around focused on a trip he took on the Siberian Express. It was a 7 day train trip, on what was described as a very shoddy maintained train, across the frozen Siberian tundras. It got so cold by the end of the trip, that the outside facing wall of his cabin was frosted over. Now that's what I call a cold train. He also traveled a to Iraq, and again to Afghanistan, within the last year since he was last here.

I'd like to stay here writing more, but SSX On Tour is sitting on my desk begging me to open it, so I'm going to wrap this story up now.... wrap.

I have decided that I'd like to have a theme song. Something that I'd like to hear being loudly played whenever I walk into a room. The song I've settled on to be my theme song, is The Haunted's Dark Intentions.

Just picture it now, how bad ass would I be, as I strut into a room, most likely in slow motion, while that song plays? I'll probably need to grow long hair and have a fan blowing said hair back as I walk into the room for extra cool slow motion effect. But even without the wind blowing awesomeness, I still think I'll look quite bad ass as long as I have my song.

Might I raise the point that it's thought provoking drivel such as this that causes me to leave the headphones on all day. Lewis Black is much more entertaining than anything you come up with.

(BTW guess what I'm listening to right now? I'll give you a hint, there's awesome white headphones involved : P )

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Thank god it's my weekend now. If I don't see that place for the next 4 days it'll be too soon.

As is usuall with my three day weekend schedule, I had the day off today.

Since I was suppose to meet Mellisa downtown for lunch (Paulissa Mellisa not the Turk [just to clear up any confusion]), like I was saying, since we were going for lunch downtown, and since she works two blocks away from Monika, it was decided that we all get together for said lunch.
The last two places that Mon has choosen to eat at have ended in disaster (spousal abuse, and electrical fire/blackout), so I was hessitant to let her pick another place. But after much arguing she won and we went to her restaurant. She brought along a new friend of hers, this Dutch, foreign exchange type student who is here getting her bachelors degree in biological something or other. She works in the same Lab that Mon works at, that's how they met.
So with 3 science nerd ladies on hand we went to this Thai restuarant. Where lunch was enjoyed. After which we left... this is where the post falls apart since there's nothing else to write about, yes it's an anti-climactic ending to a story, but what can you do.

Today, we went to the see the highly lauded Body Worlds 2 exhibit. For those unfamiliar with this amazing exhibit here's the breakdown from their website:

The primary goal of BODY WORLDS and BODY WORLDS 2 is health education. On the one hand, 200 individual specimens are used to compare healthy and diseased organs, i.e., a healthy lung with that of a smoker, to emphasize the importance of a healthy life-style. On the other hand, 25 life-like posed whole-body plastinates illustrate where in our bodies these organs are positioned and what we are: naturally fragile in a mechanized world.

Basically they have 200 pieces in the exhbit consisting of real human bodyparts frozen in time with this neat plastination process. You can see full organs and bodys, at different levels of disection, all the way from the skin down to the bones, along with the fat tissue, muscles, veins and everything else in between. It really gives you respect for all the stuff tucked away under your flesh. I very highly recommend it.

Here's some pictures of the exhibit to whet your interests:

I'm too lazy for a full blown account of the show, but needless to say it was hilarious, his last bit at the end about his sick dog, had me laughing so hard I ran out of air, and thought I was goign to pass out, it was that funny.
Here's a quote from the good people at Massey Hall:

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.

I was doing some experimenting with the Porter Stemming algorithm, and have encountered some problems. What I wanted to experiemnt with was its ability to handle the difference between a word that can be used as a verb or a noun, such as the verb "was running", to the noun "the runner". I happily discovered that it handled the difference in those words quite well. Unfortunately I discovered that it wasnt the case for all insteances for "****er" ending words that were turned into nouns. Photographer is getting stemmed to photograph, and in an odd quirk photography is getting stemmed to photographi, I'm not even sure what that weirdness is about. Unfortunately this means that I can't apply the stemming as an automated process. It'll require some human intervention to make sure it's results are accurate. At least it's a start and get's me 90% of the way there.