I Admit it, I’m a Lost Fan Too! People Hate Me for it.

February 13th, 2010 Thomasso

For Ten long agonizing months I waited while rerun after rerun played before the launch of season six kicked in on the boob-tube, or flat-screen this month. As of two weeks ago, season six of the television show Lost finally started, and life seems to be back to normal, although normal is such a loose word these days. I have being capturing the last two episodes on my home-made PVR so I can watch it during the times I have to myself. Many I know love the show. I love the show becuase it has a cool narrative and a plot that would make a prime-time soup-opera look like a skit on kid’s TV.

The nice thing about the whole plot are the never ending twists that each character takes. I mean you really need to take notes on some of these details that go on. I also enjoy finding mistakes, especially the continuity of one scene to another, or editing mistakes where make-up changes dramatically–a cut, or gun shot location on a actor’s piece of clothing. There are some really good websites too that have hundreds of them listed.

I also love it when people poke fun at the show. The Onion News Network is probably one of the best American parity shows on the web that I have seen. There are many spoofs of the show Lost on the web, but this one has a lot of truth to it–you either love it, or hate it to death.

We will see what the final season of Lost brings, 17 episodes of suspense, drama and gut wrenching plot. Hopefully they (the writers and producers) can really make everyone heads spin with weirdness as the plot goes where no plot has gone before. I can’t wait!

Posted in Events, General, Humour, Video | No Comments »

Is this Incredible Weather or What?

February 6th, 2010 Thomasso

For the last five weeks, I must admit, I was paranoid about having to go through another winter like the one we had last year in the Fraser Valley. For the first couple of week in December it looked as if we were going to endure another super cold one, but as luck would have it, we are getting California like weather in the middle of winter for 2010. Is this Incredible Weather or What?

I know that we should be worried about having such wonderful weather in a place like Canada this time of year because it is unnatural, and nature has a way of turning such a nice thing into a huge nuisance later on down the road. I am thinking of the mosquito problems we have here along the Fraser River. With every warm winter, there follows a wet spring, and mosquitoes love water to lay their eggs in. There are other bugs too that are loving this weather, take the Roach for example. Yes Fort Langley has Roaches–although some people I know will not admit it and call them something else, like a Termites. I saw one zipping out of the storm grate alone Glover Road yesterday when I was walking back home. That congered up bad memories from when I lived in Toronto, Ontario. Toronto is a place that has a huge roach problem. Also there is the infamous Pine Beetle that has destroyed a large portion of our Pine forests in BC–can  we say “Global Warming.”

Not having to deal with shovelling, huge heating expenses and the inconvenience of driving on snow and ice, I can enjoy this weather in the short term. I say keep it coming! I love thisI In fact, I am asking myself if I should even bother heading to Mexico, in stead, stay here where it is warm?

Posted in Bitching about weather, General, Humour, Photographs | No Comments »

Buns of Steel at 108C.

January 8th, 2010 Thomasso

I believe that I can prove that the old saying that people who are experts in their chosen field should not venture off into other fields and lay the claim that they are successful at them. Like the doctors who diagnose themselves, to the lawyers who represent themselves, there is a well defined reason why the patient and client should not become part of the treatment and challenge process. Professionals are best to conduct themselves at their craft and call that their landmark achievement, while leaving the cooking up to someone else who can do a better job.

Volunteering is a time honoured tradition among academics. It is how they get their foot in the door at the very beginning of their careers. But volunteering is also a two way street that if the wrong turn is made, this could land you down a dead-end alley with no way of backing out of it. To say, at the goodness of your heart, that you are going to use your time and effort for the greater good is the noble quality that sets one apart from the rest, but that time should also include your best performance too, or the cause may end with not so good of consequences.

Last night, after my last class of the week, my friends and I decided to go to a small gathering at Colleen’s house. (Not her real name). She lives less than five minutes from the University and is quite the host of small gatherings, in fact, legendary. About three years ago I first went to one of her gathering, and was amazed at her skills as a hostess because the whose who of the University go their from my clique, so you get to meet a wide spectrum of students from the campus there. It is also a great opportunity to meet some of the big-wigs too in the field of Criminology from the Vancouver area because of its location. But back then, the rule was, you bought your own food, like a pot-luck event, everyone was expected to do it. I did not know that there was a reason for this rule?

Now Colleen is a very nice person, and she gave me permission to write this, but I also wanted to keep her real identity a secret because she too taunts people with her secret—and the surprise is always best kept for the newbie. Her sense of humour is unmatched by any standard. I heard of her through the campus grapevine, but the rumour was nothing close to what I saw when I first met her because you see, I was told that she had “buns of steel.” What I saw was nothing close to a body builder’s perfect form, but the opposite; the heaviest thing she lifts are her textbooks, and maybe only two or three at a time.

We entered the threshold of her home and the smell of baking bread was in the air. We all sat down in the living room where several chairs had being strategically laid out, and then Colleen greeted us with orange juice, coffee and muffins. I sat directly by the “fake” fireplace, and was automatically in charge of adding more chairs because the extra chairs are kept there too. Sitting in that location also meant that I was right in the path of the on coming traffic from the kitchen area. It was then, as I just sat down and made myself comfortable, that I heard Colleen asking me to help her in the kitchen.

Like a page out of a horror novel, there sitting in a tin tray were freshly baked buns of bread. With her oven mitts on, she picked up the tray and shook the buns off into a wicker basket and asked me to try one. Not even a fork could penetrate the mortar encased shell of the pumpernickel. We laughed as I said, “My dear, you do indeed have buns of steel.” And she replied, “I guess formula 108C doesn’t work either…”

Posted in Criminology, General, Humour | No Comments »

Doomsday Documentaries Are Really Stupid

January 7th, 2010 Thomasso

OK, you have seen them, on the Discovery Channel, stories of prophecies where some dude two or three hundred years ago writes a bunch of letters that says the Earth will end either in some fiery ball, or mankind nukes himself to death and all life ceases. They come in all forms, from biblical predictions, to a crazy guy who might have been severely nuts in today’s standards, all saying the same thing – the Earth will end.

Whether the predictions come to pass or not, it is the people that I run into who make me laugh when they tell me about them. When the air time on television increases the numbers of these doomsday documentaries, the more entrenched some of my regulars become. They become so transfixed that this is the honest truth because of the proliferation of these documentaries that arguing with them that they are just predictions becomes a moot point. From the Mayan Calendar that only tells time up until 2012, to the earth loosing its magnetic field in twenty years, these are just some of the weird things I hear people  saying that will spell doom for the Earth.

The problem is that even the documentaries get it wrong, or they just focus on the out come like fear-mongering, rather than asking the real questions of what the prognosticators are really saying, or not saying. And of course stuff gets lost in the translation. The point I am making here is that all of these predictions are so steeped in vagueness and ambiguity that they could literally translate into anything for anyone, especially if you have an agenda like profiting from doomsday documentary making?

Maybe the real question here is why are people so caught up in these prophets and their prophesies? Wishful thinking that they, the believers, will be only ones left on the planet and it will be up to them to sow the seeds of mankind thereafter. So much for the gene pool.

There is so much scientific observations that proves otherwise that it is so hard not to keep a straight face when hearing the doomsday conspiracies. The predictions are just so absurd to logic that it becomes really good comedy. The man who told me about the Earth loosing its magnetic field said that we will float away, our atmosphere will get sucked into space, and only those who choose to live in underground homes will survive. It is the “no atmosphere” part that throws a ringer into my buddy’s plans. But hey, he supposedly got if from a documentary so who am I to argue!

Posted in Diatribe, General, Humour, Law and Order | No Comments »

Post New Years Disorder

January 4th, 2010 Thomasso

Now that everyone is nicely in debt, suffering from the flu, and ready to get back to work, I now must take a step back and see the world that I am part of and ask myself why people do what they do, especially pondering the question of why is everyone so pissed off this time of year? Since the new year has started I have noticed a shift in the people around me, and more so from those who I work with, but this also applies to some of my friends too. However, I think there is more to it than meets the eye?

We just got off of two long weekends in a row with two paid statutory holidays. We went through, for most cultures, the most festive season in the calender; of course, I am the exception as I don’t celebrate the Christian, Jewish or Muslim traditions, but the Season of Tom (sic), which is 365 days per year–I am not a lemming. I enjoy everyday and treat everyday like it is New Years. So most people gave each other gifts and had fun with family and friends, and I am sure it was time well spent, but what happened afterwords, when it is time to go back and renew the year, the week, and continue on with our jobs?

So why does everyone seem so pissed off? Is it becuase the party is over? Hum? No, I think it goes deeper than that?

I think part of the answer is in the frustration that times are leaner, and becuase of the tight economic era that we now live in, people are “taking it out” on the first person that they encounter becuase they are frustrated with themselves . People have over spent. As the cost of living shoots upwards, so does the cost of giving in the monetary sense. So far since I have come back to work I have heard nothing but complaining about how in debt everyone is, and how expensive things are getting. Also, the labourers seem unwilling to motivate themselves as one person put it, “How can I work for this much when it now costs me more to do the job in the first place…” When they complain, the management resorts to apathy towards them. When they come to me, they act sometimes so vulgar and pathetic that I tune them out too.

Take for example the “Coughing More-On.” Today while I was setting everything up to start my day, this one guy comes in coughing and hacking his lunges out becuase he is in the full throws of the flu. First, he shows up at work so sick that he could pass out from coughing so much.  He then starts coughing without covering his mouth. He told me that If he caught it, then it should get it passed around also so he can “give it back” to whom ever he caught it from down the line. Stupendous logic here, eh? I know for someone with AIDS, there is a section in the Criminal Code of Canada that deals with that, and under the Infectious Diseases and Control Act, there are provisions for dealing with those people, but there ought to be something in there to the flu too, especially on the job. But I ask this question, because he is sick, does that mean he must make everyone else around him sick too?

So money and health seem to be the first casualties of the new year. This does not surprise me? I heard on CBC Radio One that the stats on consumer spending surveyed by the Bank of Montreal says that Canadians are confident about the economy. First, a Bank telling us that we are happy with the economy – now that is a joke. But it also says that if the Banks are happy with the way we are spending, and unemployment is still increasing, than that only leave debt as the only logical answer to this social phenomenon. Throw in some flu germs and you now have the recipe for Post New Years Disorder.

Posted in Bitching about work, Diatribe, General, Humour, Social Justice, Social economics | 3 Comments »

Woo-Hoo, First Post for 2010 & Drawing Cherries With InkScape!

January 1st, 2010 Thomasso

Now, …what should I type? Awh, later.

OK, I am back. Today I am going to talk about InkScape, becuase I am getting a lot of emails from my friends about some of the images I have being posting on my blog. First of all, if you are the unfortunate who is running Window$, and  feel for you, you are still in luck becuase InkScape does run on it, but I have noticed that it is not completely stable in my experiences on the OS. With that out of the way, Vector image programs are completely different from those programs that manipulate images. InkScape does work with photographs, but not in the same way that programs like the GIMP do.

Think of Vector images as drawing with Math, in other words, every shape or element of the image you create is just a bunch of numbers that represents what you are seeing. This means two things. First, you can increase, or decrease the size of the image without compromising any loss of detail. Second, you must render the finished product into a image so that your audience can see your lovely creation.

I have created these cherries.

Each cherry has six elements, or components in it. The two basic shapes, or primitives, are a circle and a rectangle. The stems are made of two rectangles, twisted to curve into the shape and each shape also is shaded with a different colour, darker colour on the bottom, and the lighter on the top layer. The cherry is just one big circle with red colour fill, and three smaller circles, with different sizes, each with lighter colours, with the effects of transparency and blur added to give the reflective look from the light in the virtual room the cherries are in.

If you want to see the SVG file for yourself, click here, “Cherries01.svg” to down load it, and then run it with InkScape. Also note that this was created on  version 0.47 at the time of this writing. Enjoy the file.

Posted in Art, Events, General, Humour, Linux, Photographs, Software | 2 Comments »

Happy New Year! Another Has Come and Gone!

December 31st, 2009 Thomasso

Well, I can’t really say that 2009 was one my best years. In fact, I would put this year close to the lower end of the average scale. I am however, looking forward to this new year for a couple of reasons. One, I will graduate with my BA, and hopefully an honours degree attached to it. Two, I may relocate and find a more permanent home, but still in the Lower Mainland/Fraser Valley. Three, more income.

I hate looking back over the last twelve months during new years becuase it doesn’t make sense to me to do that. I mean why? What is so different from this month to the next, or this year to the next becuase looking back like this sort of puts a faults sense of preceptive on it. I like to look at things by the season. For example, I like to compare summers and winters to each other. I also like it when I can say that last winter was brutal compared to the one before it. It is ridiculous to say that the last major snowstorm last year, but really it was the year before becuase winter started in 2008, December 21, but we think the storm was in 2009–wrong!

But who am I to kid around. It is a really good excuse to have a long weekend! I love long weekends. Who doesn’t love them?

So here we are, another long weekend, another year end, and tomorrow when I wake up, another year to remeber everytime when I write the date on my invoives.

Posted in Diatribe, Events, General, Humour, Photographs | No Comments »

I had no Idea?

December 30th, 2009 Thomasso

Today sure started off the same as any other average day. I woke up, performed my ablutions, hopped in the vehicle and did the commute to work. Opened up the building, turned on the lights, fired up the Dell, watched Bill Gate’s operating system slowly sputter up to greet me on the login page, and then I checked for incoming emails. In all, a very average start to a average day.

The only real plan for today was a meeting with the some of the top bosses for late in the afternoon. They were scheduled to pop in for a visit so we could brain-storm on setting up a series of changes that would streamline our operation. I decided that when the day started to slow down I would clean up a little more than I would normally. I also prepared a table and some chairs out in the warehouse so everyone could see from my vantage point what the the warehouse and the rest of the building looked like so the brain-storming process would stay on track. The conference call over the phone would not work when describing physical problems that would hinder a new system of operations; only the face to face meeting would work to keep all on board.

Roughly 2:00pm rolled around and my guests arrived. I was actually excited because this was the first time of having all the major players in one room at one time, as this has never taken place since my time at the company, and to have them all at the Surrey operation was, well, a bonus. I was the star of the show. As we talked about what would be the ideal direction to go in, the topic of emails came up.

I restrain myself to the extreme when I type out emails to my co-workers. I always read, think, then ponder before I hit the “enter” button. I have a rule when greeting everyone – always say something positive, and end with a positive note – even when I am writing a letter of complaint. I really try and make a huge effort of making sure my emails are simple, unambiguous, and grammatically correct. I try not to be verbose in my replies, nor do I type out three word cryptic answers that are meaningless and have no bearing on the topic from the email’s header when replying. I also try to sum up in one email rather than fifteen, unlike some members from my group of co-workers who have being given the nick-name, “Email Nazi,” associating to them to the endless email-threads that exceed twenty to thirty emails per topic and giving orders like a drill Sargent. Yeah, following those emails is like reading a harlequin romance novel written by Charles Manson during a parole hearing.

Well, the highest honour that I could possible receive was presented to me today. Apparently my emails are the stuff of legends. My emails have been circulated from one end of the country to other, and have been posted on lunch room bulletin boards, and have appeared in power point presentations; they have being read aloud during meetings, and recorded into minutes from our board members; accounts have been won because of the framing of content of the queries in them, and phrases and content copied and reproduced into other emails as fact. My humour and semantics have garnered me much respect, and a wide audience. If reproduction is the highest form of flattery, then I have a huge cult following of plagiarists.

I wish I had known about this fame long before. No one told me this until today. One side of me feels embarrassed, but the other side of me is honoured, and this proves that the pen, or keyboard, is mightier than the sword. Sure, I can answer the phone, but I prefer the email because it stays, and speaks for itself, where as talk is cheap and is easily dismissed.

Posted in Bitching about work, General, Humour | 4 Comments »

Now We Are Getting A Little Nippy Out

December 26th, 2009 Thomasso

OK, maybe not as cold as what those poor saps in Alberta are getting, but for us “less seasoned” people, any time the mercury sinks below the freezing mark, we whine about it. So I am throwing this lovely photo I took today to mark the kind of day it was – nice and sunny with a touch of frost. You can not ask for a better winter’s day than this, eh?

The weird thing about the weather today has being how close it reaches the two to three degree Celsius mark, then drops to minus two or three, but never a huge difference.

Book Review – The Gift I read! Two Thumbs Up!

A very good friend of mine, Diane from DianeOutLoud.ca, gave me a book for the holidays called, Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar…, Understanding Philosophy through Jokes.  In my undergraduate days, though technically I am still one today, I had done five Philosophy classes in the past. So reading this book was a very good refresher. But the book’s best quality are the hundreds of jokes that the authors tell to illustrate their point to reinforce the point of Philosophy in all of its complexities.

In my first year university, my very first Philosophy class, I had the privilege of being taught by one my favourite professors, Dr. Wayne Fenske, who is a seasoned veteran in the art of Philosophy at Kwantlen Polytechnic University in British Columbia. He used his own version of humour and satire for getting his point across about all aspects of Philosophy, and reading this book brought back lots of very good memories of those first classes. There is no doubt a point in which you need a little joke to get you through a day when teaching some very heavy mental subject material like Ethics and Logic.

Perhaps the best moment I had was when Dr. Fenske was lecturing on Metaphilosophy, and he used his Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonation to make the point that asks “are we the same person from one moment of time to the next.” I still snicker out loud when I think of that day. He did the Arnold routine for twenty minutes, answering all the questions with the thick Austrian ascent, and calling anyone who did not get it, a “little girly man.” Sometimes he drives the point home by throwing a piece of chock at the back of the classroom to wake everyone up. Some would call the chock throwing a violent act, but he does use it as a means to teach his point to the class. However, when I looked him up on “Rate Your Professor,” he does have some bad reviews, which I thought were a little unfair, but then I realised that the complainers were the ones failing his course in the first place.

I thank you Diane for the lovely gift. I read it on Christmas day, and it was a good read becuase it made me laugh over and over and over. It brought back a lot of fond memories too, and I got to refamiliarize myself on some of my past classes of Philosophy too!

Posted in Criminology, Diatribe, General, Humour, Photographs, University classes | 1 Comment »

To Cast the Net Beyond the Fringe and Say the Hell With it!

December 19th, 2009 Thomasso

I got mad at my ISP last night. Every time I tried to upload a movie file to my website, it either timed out, or it took two hours to go through the upload process. I gave up. I heard that the University Library was open until 10:30pm week days, and 10:00pm during the weekends, so I hopped in the truck and drove to the Surrey campus. The Langley campus was closed.

In the mean time I was having troubles with some other web sites also – so naturally I assumed that it was the fault of my ISP. When I tried to download a web page, it would time-out. It was not a good night to go surfing on the net.

When I got to the University Library, the first thing I did was fired up my lap top and connected through Wi-Fi. Once connected, things seemed a little faster, but when I tried to connect to my web site, the same things happened–hardly any connectivity. This told me that it was not my IPS, but my web provider!

Some other students in the computer lab old me that most of the kids are off from school as of Friday, and that it might be possible that most of them are on-line textting each other, clogging up the net. I thought about that, and figured that this might be the cause. The only thing that didn’t add up was I only had a few web sites that I went to which were slow or not working, so I doubted that it could be the on-line kids? I managed to up load everything I needed to, and then I went home.

This morning I checked to see if the connection rate was still slow, or shut down, and when I logged on, there was a notice posted on the server page. It said that they had service interruptions over the last 24 hours, and that now every was back to normal. I then went to the server’s blog and read that they had some vandalism on their server-farm, and that someone tried to take some equipment. They said that their local law enforcement officials caught the person and they noted that none of the equipment was taken. Cost in damages, however, was about $5,000.00 US.

I started thinking about this today, about how fragile our network really is. I remembered in my class on terrorism from last summer, studying about how important our information network is in today’s world, and asking the question would we be crippled from having no network? Although it would not indirectly harm us if the entire Intranet collapsed becuase of terrorists, but it would certainly hurt us over a longer period. By collapse, I mean no web browsing, email and VIOP, possibly cell-phone and land-line phone service too. I know most Banking and some forms of commerce would stop, but most businesses would manage to keep on operating.

On a humorous note, I wondered how many people would go through Intranet withdraw, if the idea of Internet Addiction really exists? Would I be one of those people? After all, I do spend a hideous amount of time sitting in front my keyboard and monitor, and hlaf that time connected to the internet. I treat emails like they were phone calls for goodness sakes. Does this mean I’m sick–I have an addiction that affects my social life, if their is such a thing as a social life?

Nope-things are all good. I have network connection and life goes on. My ISP are doing their job and I can sympathise with my web provider about their misfortune. Once again I am happy.

Posted in Blog Problems, General, Humour, Photographs, Social Justice | No Comments »