The last blog post was on May 7^th. On May 8^th I went out for a night on the town with the guys instead of staying in to write a blog. I enjoyed some of the best chicken wings I have ever experienced, hung out with some of my best friends, and took in the Halifax nightlife. I didn’t even regret it, which was weird. Old Man Lever didn’t believe me, but his grasp on reality is being distorted by a Photoshop power trip anyway.

It feels like writing that last word on your final exam and just sitting there, soaking in the world as everyone else struggles to finish. A world which, for a that moment only, expects nothing of you. It feels like that first moment of summer when you realize that you have no commitments and can do as you please. Driving around in GTA without a mission, only you and the hooker riding shotgun, looking for ramps to jump off of and pedestrians to hit.

And in this case only, it felt like pulling a grueling energy-drink fuelled all-nighter to finish an assignment. Knowing that there are improvements you could make if your eyelids weren’t so heavy, but passing it in with a sense of pride anyway. It wasn’t your best work, but it was still better than most of your peers.

I’m happy with the IMBC bronze medallion. I’ll wear my consolation prize with pride. I’ve enjoyed my break, so I guess I can start writing again.

I’ll be the first to admit, I miss seeing “Exploration of Mayhem” pop up in my RSS feed. And I talk to myself all the time, so it’s not like I was missing out on anything. But you poor creepers, I’m not entirely sure how you have survived. I suspect it involves joining a vampire cult and feasting on the blood of unsuspecting arts students. I’ll be buying a garlic watch-strap just in case. You aren’t getting any of my delicious type-o negative goodness.

Right there, I almost went on a tirade about my blood type, giving blood and a phobia I’d need to battle. Then I realized that I don’t have a word quota anymore, so I don’t need to start typing as soon as an idea strolls into my head like he owns the place. This blogging without rules thing really is going to take some getting used to.

As of now, I am finishing up the final week of my 5 week project. I’ve been emailing resumes like crazy with little to no reply. At this point I think I’m going to bite the bullet, take a walk to the gas station down the street and hand them a resume. It’s in walking distance so gas money wouldn’t be an issue. With gas prices as they are, it may even be more cost effective to walk to a minimum wage job than it is to drive to a higher paying job.

But if I was to walk to work, what in the hell would I do with that car I bought? I purchased a used car for the sole purpose of driving to whatever summer job I found. Well, that’s not the only reason. Not relying on people for transportation is a major bonus too. That, and I needed a way to get to my classes next year because A-ron and I are taking different classes, so our schedules wouldn’t match up. Now I am in the process of relearning how to drive. It’s been a year and a half since my road test, which was my last time behind the wheel. And that didn’t involve driving a stick, which is a whole different ballgame in itself.

I am also going to be looking for a new blog host. Try out a couple and pick the best one. I really don’t like the fact that you need an account to make a comment on vox. I like readers input and don’t want to lose that as soon as a registration screen pops up. I understand the Piratebay guys set up some sort of blog service, I think that will be my first stop. I’ll certainly post a link here when I finally make the transition.

Get back to your bloodsucking and avoiding mirrors, and whatever the hell else you fanged transylvanian freaks do. I’m out.

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I've not really felt up to writing anything this weekend so far.
Maybe sometime next week.

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[[
Hi there, quick note before we begin. I'll be playing through as (personally) non-combat as I can. This is in evidence right here:

001001 - Creation

I played through this first bit a few times, and realized that this sort of character sucks at surviving the first bit, so I dialed the combat difficulty to low. I promise I'm going to change that as soon as I'm done in here.

everything inside [[]] is out of character, if you hadn't guessed]]

001002 - In front of the proving grounds.

So there I was, standing at the front door of the towns proving ground, needing to prove that I'm some sort of chosen one. I guess the fact I'm descended directly from The Vault Dweller means jack when it comes to proof, but is more then enough to toss me into a hole filled with radscorpions and ants big enough to give birth to me.

And really, did they have to tie me up and drag me off in the middle of the night? When I asked Klint to let me back into Arroyo he was a jerk about it

001004 - Fuck you too Klint

So I did the only thing I could do. Aside from cry. I went back into the temple, and started killing Giant Ants.

001005 - Yay a spear

"Hey," I thought, "At least they gave me a spear, I shouldn't have any problems with this thing!

001006 - Boo a spear

It's really too bad it was made of lead though.

001007 - Killed an ant

That's more like it. I might have the upper body strength of a moth (What can I say, when you're as pretty as me you don't need to do chores) but I've always been a damn good jumper. Thankfully that seems to translate well into kicking the shit out of things. Who knew.

[[
Something I hadn't noticed about Fallout 2 before, if you kill all your enemies without being hit (which thanks to my agility is exactly what just happened) you get bonus exp.

Also, unarmed combat is handled better this time. your first weapon slot, if empty, makes you punch, and your second item slot makes you kick. Kicking is based off of agility. This means my kick is considered a "strong kick" and that's why I'm doing so much damage with it. My unarmed skill is still shit, so I'm hitting less then half the time, but when I DO hit I hit hard.
]]

001008 - CrossRoads

Just outside the first room I came to a fork in the path. After an intensive testing process (Eeny meeny miney moe; catch a radscorpion by the toe...) I decided to go right.

001009 - OH NO ANTS

And ran into more 13 damned ants.

The Holy Pip says that ants used to be really small, I have to wonder how they were ever killed in that case. Some mysteries, I guess, are just lost to time.

001010 - Healing powder GET

Inside the chamber there was some of my tribes healing powder. I could use it if I got hurt, but I'd be hearing colour for the next few hours if I do.
Sometimes I wonder if the best way to heal a cut is to make the person high, but then the elders yell at me.

001011 - OH NO IT R SCORPIONS

That way was a bust, so I headed off to the other path. as I passed a side chamber I heard a distinct clacking sound.

Scorpions.

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Hey there, Internet, a friend of mine started a blog for the Iron Man Blogging Competition. His blog is mostly about video games, however recently it's been more and more about his experiences with Fallout. He's been, essentially, chronicling his experiences with the game, while discussing what it does right, and what it does wrong. I've been enjoying those- if only because it was my prompting that made him continue.

I'm planning on ripping off his thing in a way while I play through Fallout 2. I never finished it the first time, so this should be fun.

I'm planning on playing what is essentially a charismatic twig.
It's at the point where I need to dial down the combat difficulty for the first bit.
Anywho, I hope someone enjoys this almost as much as I hope I do!

Also, I'll try to avoid any fallout 1 spoilers for you, OldManLever.

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I have officially royally screwed up my sleep schedule. Its not the first time I have done this, and it certainly wont be the last. I generally operate through the entire school year running on 4 hours sleep per night. When I don’t have a reason to be up I sleep in. When I sleep in I stay up later. Let that happen for a couple nights and all of a sudden I am lying awake until 7am and cursing at the sandman, waiting for him to show up so I can snap his sleep dust sprinkling neck.

Breaking a messed up sleep schedule is never fun either. It will either involve oversleeping or under sleeping. At this point under sleeping seems easiest. I could set my alarm and get up early tomorrow. I tried that earlier this week, and woke up 3 hours later than I had intended, my alarmclock blinking after having had every button pressed in search of the “shut off that god awful racket” button as I flailed around still more than half entrenched in the dreamworld. Maybe I should just accept it, and start doing productive things at night instead of rolling around counting sheep.

Well, I guess I wasn’t entirely unproductive last night. I did some more online job hunting. I sent off a couple more resumes with nothing back yet. It wasn’t until today I found a job ad which I got a response from. There was a nanny agency looking to have their website maintained for $9 an hour from home on an as-needed basis. I have spoken to the guy who runs the show over there and he seems pretty cool, and my web development skills far surpass what is needed of me. It wont be my summer job, but it will be easy spending money from the comfort of my own home after a hard day at my yet to be determined summer job. Plus relevant experience for my resume as well as a reference if I play my cards right.

Works for me.

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May 6th, 2008.

I started using MSN messenger in elementary school. I had tried ICQ, and had dabbled in IRC, but neither of them could match MSN. Somewhere along the line MSN became the standard IM program.

I understand that this isn’t the case everywhere. I have this theory that geography plays heavily into the IM application of choice. For instance, while working the call center I would sometimes need the customers e-mail address and 90% of the time they would have a yahoo email address. And scores of people were calling in about yahoo messenger, which I didn’t even know existed. This shocked me because nobody in my area uses yahoo for anything, let alone email. The only person I know who uses a yahoo email address is Oldmanlever. AIM is another one. I know one guy who uses AIM, and only because he has a lot of friends in the states.

I watched MSN messenger grow. I started using it somewhere between versions 2.0 and 3.0. At that time it was a pretty basic IM application, and it was especially popular because all of my friends had hotmail accounts already. I spent a lot of time talking to friends on MSN messenger, so I was always looking for ways to spruce up the experience. It started pretty innocently with block checkers, finding ways around the words which they would not allow in contact names, displaying multi-line contact names, creating ascii art and things like that.

Then people started coding messenger bots. Suddenly I had a contact on my list which would tell me a joke when I issued a command, or do a quick math calculation or return a definition from the dictionary for me. I was squeezing functionality out of the program that nobody else knew about, no matter how lame it may seem now.

That got old pretty quickly too. But then the patching started. Programmers all over the world were putting out these patches which kept on adding functionality to messenger. There was the polygami patch which would allow you to have more than one instance open. There were patches to make the window transparent, and to change the alert noises and the logos. You could send emoticons until someone elses computer crashed, or just use login pop-ups to show a message on your friends machine. Then a guy named Patchou came out of the woodwork and dropped a pretty hefty piece of messenger history onto our laps. Messenger plus.

Messenger plus took all of the patches and combined them into one application which integrated itself right into the background of messenger. Suddenly MSN names could be rainbow coloured, and chat sessions were being logged, and you could send messages with noises. There were more font options, dynamic msn names, custom scripts you could install. The sky was the limit for these people.

The place to find out the latest messenger news was a little Belgian site called mess.be. These guys were ahead of everybody when it came to messenger. If there was a new version of messenger they had it 2 months before it was released, with patches ready to go within the first couple days. If some Russian Microsoft developer took screenshots of a new feature in the next build they knew about it. If there was a vulnerability, bug or easter egg they were the first to report it. I spent more time on this website than I should have.

Now, as a 19 year old IT student I don’t screw around when it comes to my instant messaging. I make sure my MSN is pimped out to the brim because Microsoft sure as hell didn’t get it right the first time. I use a combination of WindowsLiveMessenger 8.5 MessengerPlus and the messpatch to make my IM experience fit my exact specifications. Some of the non-standard features I use the most are;

•             Chat logs encrypted with 1024-bit encryption
•             Timestamp added on the end of every message
•             Unlimited nudging
•             Tabbed message windows (Firefox spoiled me)
•             Password protected preferences
•             Show users as idle rather than away when appropriate
•             Boss protection; hides messenger with a keypress
•             Extension of message length limits

Old ManMessenger and his tricked out ride

This makes things difficult for me because my tricked out messenger can’t follow me across platforms. If I could port this and utorrent to linux I would switch to Ubuntu in a heartbeat. I’ve tried things like Pidgin, and truly wish I could switch to an open source messenger without losing all of my features. Maybe it will happen some day, until then I'll be rubbing elbows with Bill Gates.

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April 5^th 2008

Today I restarted the job hunt. First thing was to touch up the resume. I was never good the whole resume thing. Something about summarizing everything I have to offer to an employer in a sheet of paper is damn near impossible. These kinds of things are the kind of thing I think I can best show off in person. Its hard to show how personable you are through a generic piece of paper. Having very little work experience to put on my resume also isn’t very comforting.

Sometimes I wish I had started working earlier. I wanted to focus on studies so I held off on getting a job until I was finished with high school. Figured I would focus on studies instead. Probably would have been a good idea to find a crappy restaurant to work at and build up some work experience. As of now all I have as far as real work goes is a 5 month stint in a call center. I did well there, but we were essentially numbers in that place, so despite doing well in that place it wasn’t like I was getting a reference out of that place.

I’m hoping that I don’t need to go back to the call center this summer. I’m going to exhaust every option short of fast food before I hand in a resume at the call center. And if I find a job that is IT related it would count as a work term, and I wouldn’t have to do the 5 week project. I’d hate to do that to my team, but it would be nice to get paid and get a school credit rather than spending 5 weeks working on an application. I love cash.

Douce wanted me to comment on how he just scratched his balls. And again, second time. Merry Christmas Remer. I don’t know what your going to do with all of this internet fame.

Later folks.

IMBC: 330

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Sometimes you have one of those days when there is absolutely nothing happening. You sit at home on your ass wondering why in the hell there isn’t anybody available or some fun to be had. You dream of finding something to do as you sit there being bummed out. Last night was not one of those nights.

I have a pretty close group of friends who I hang out with almost every weekend. The guys who stuck around the neighborhood instead of moving away or living in residence.  Some of my favorite dudes in the world, but outside of that group of friends I don’t see as many people as I would like to. I thrive on social interaction, meeting new people and talking to them. Hearing their take on the world, their experiences and their attitudes. Last night I got to hang out with some people I may have seen once since High School, which is great. Other people I haven’t seen in five or more years.

The beginnings of a roof party

Last night was pretty relaxed. People had some beers, sat around listening to music and chatting with old friends. Then midnight hit, and everyone climbed out of a second floor window and sat on the roof with an acoustic guitar. Friendly acoustic sing-along’s under a clear moonlit sky. The Halifax Harbor dancing in the distance with the lights of the city. Voices booming into the night over an otherwise dead neighborhood, smiles had all around as we just enjoyed each others company.

Then we said our goodbyes to the hosts, piled six people into a car and drove home listening to Phil Anselmo sing sweet nothings in our ears. Cramped in the backseat with 3 other people but rocking out just the same. Stopped into the gas station to gas up and decided that we weren’t quite ready to call it a day yet. Rather than driving home we started blasting Acid Bath’s Pagan Terrorism tactics album (my favorite) and started down the dark twisty roads which lead to the beach. Too cold for the water, and too dark for much of anything but we pulled up to Lawrencetown beach regardless, got out and walked down the rocky sand until we were just beyond the reach of the waves. Just as we pulled up we had reached the part of the song Dead Girl which goes "The sound of the ocean is dead, its just the echo of the blood in your head. Sister, burn the temple and stand beneath the moon." It seemed so fitting. The only lights which were even visible were the stars, which always come out in full force that far away from the city. We just stood there watching the waves crash amongst themselves then rush towards us, each time making a little more progress. While the rest of the world was sleeping, I was standing on a beach with my favorite band stuck in my head, just being. Its the little things that count.

The night was so awesome that I almost forgot about the part where I saw cocaine in person for the first time, as it was on its way up a tube and into nostrils of some of my friends. It didn’t sadden me so much that they were doing it, just that I was having just as much fun, if not more, without such things. I wish there was some kind of secret I could share, or that people in their early 20's would believe that they can enjoy themselves without booze or pot or whatever else is around. Its all a matter of perspective I suppose.

On a related note, I just walked out on my back porch where my father was sitting on a chair in the sun with the dog lying in the shade beneath him as he sipped a beer and listened to the radio. I asked him "What's going on?" to which he replied "Nothing. Just enjoying life."

I think I know where I get it from.

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This blog is an extension of yesterdays blog which can be found here;
http://torbox.vox.com/library/post/more-movie-talk.html

... Another film which had that effect on me was A Beautiful Mind. I guess it must be movies that show a distorted sense of reality blending into the real world. I think even the Matrix has the same quality to it to a lower extent. But that is neither here nor there.

The Signal

Another film which ‘The Signal’ reminded me of was Shawn of the Dead. One of the directors has a sick sense of humor, and it shines through amazingly. For the most part the action is taken seriously, but during a few scenes they throw in some of the darkest humor ever. They contrast a ridiculously terrible scenario with some laughs, which I always think is a great combination. Not nearly as comical as Shawn of the Dead, but that mood which is set by cracking jokes while surrounded by zombies is still there.

So as of now my description would have you believe the movie is 28 Days Later meets Requiem for a Dream meets Shawn of the Dead meets From Dusk Till Dawn. With comparisons like that I don’t think there is any logical way to avoid seeing this movie. Then you can watch it, hate it, and pop my delusional bubble about the awesomeness of this movie. I encourage this type of behavior because I am always interested in a discussion, although sometimes its hard to have a debate on such an objective topic as a film.

I am currently searching IMDB to see what else these directors have done, perhaps they have pulled off another film like this that I haven’t heard of. I’ll keep you posted on my findings, if there are any. The search for cinema greatness has only just begun.

TOTD: What is your favorite vegetable?

Seeing as this blog is the tail end of a film review I didn’t finish yesterday I am out of words. Looks like the topic of the day will have to remedy that.

I was always one of those kids who didn’t get along well with vegetables. I’d eat broccoli or celery with cheese whiz, or onion on a burger, or potatoes if they were in the form of a french-fry. I’d eat a salad with red or green peppers in it. But I was a picky eater and didn’t make any ventures into the world of vegetables much deeper than that. Well, I still am a picky eater. To this day I can’t stand the consistency of cooked vegetables. Its weird, but I’m fine with it. I take my vitamins so there’s nothing to worry about.

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11:26 pm - I don't think I could cut it much closer. I've been on the go all day. I went to school this morning to work on the project again. A lot of people showed up today - Pat and his team (John, Scott, Luke, Aaron) were all there. It was good to see all the guys - God, I haven't seen Pat IRL in ages. I told everybody we'd throw a party at my place at the end of May, when project management is over. Pat may havce one too - he has a pool, apparently, so I'm rooting for a party at his place.

The team found a fantastic tutorial on how to make Flash side-scrolling games today - a real boost, as it will help guide our art asset and code production significantly. I'm really looking forward to getting my office set up. I miss my computer; the last few posts I've made have been on Christine's laptop. Once the office and my PC are set up, I think the team will be meeting more often at my place. The computers at school are a little too clunky to work efficiently. I have a wireless motherboard so I can set up an access point, and Emily and Brandon can connect wirelessly with their laptops.

The rest of my day was spent putting up curtains and and building bookcases. The living room is starting to come together; all of the colors that Christine and I picked out look fantastic. The rug in particular is really cool - I'll have to take some pictures once we unpack the camera. We also just got the bed together and are presently lying in it. Christine is as snug as a bug under a big poofy duvet; I'm lying on top of it with the laptop, typing furiously. We just had some sushi from Hamachi Kita, a little restaurant no more than 1 minute away from our front door, and we are both ready for bed. We have another early day tomorrow; we're driving to Truro with Christine's brother Steven to pick up the rest of Christine's stuff. I want to start on the office (and I still might unpack a few boxes) but my body is definitely being the shutdown cycle.

The IMBC has narrowed to 3 competitors - me, Pat, and Hammy. The difference a month makes. Good luck, you guys.

Convenient sushi is one of the best parts of our neighborhood.

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