Shannon’s Guide To The Galaxy
How cute are the tweenbots?
Tweenbots are human-dependent robots that navigate the city with the help of pedestrians they encounter. Rolling at a constant speed, in a straight line, Tweenbots have a destination displayed on a flag, and rely on people they meet to read this flag and to aim them in the right direction to reach their goal.
It was the first year of university. Paradoxical Overtones had broken up, everyone had moved on to different universities, and I was missing the whole band thing. Sitting on my bed on the 7th floor of Laurier Hall, strumming my unplugged guitar, I stared daggers at my room mate’s half of the room. Britney Spears stared back. I knew that it was going to be a long year… somehow, I imagined that Lara wasn’t enjoying my Rancid skull and crossbones poster.
Courtney lived a couple of blocks from the university. We’d known each other for a few years, having been at the same church retreats. We bonded over caffeinated teen antics. I knew she’d played the drums in high school, but I had no idea if she’d want to play with me. After all, I wasn’t very good. Lem always said that I was the dead weight in Paradoxical Overtones, and I know she was right. Over coffee, Courtney and I decided to try and find a couple of other people to make some noise and see if we could make it pretty.
Erin lived an hour away and played the bass, and we know she’d love hanging out with us, since we were cool university students and she was still stuck in high school. She jumped at the chance, and Paul rounded out our band with a second guitar. In my mind, Paul was a guitar god. He took me under his wings and that’s when I really learned how to play. My fingers were so calloused and sore that sometimes I could barely type, but I progressed quickly and caught up to him enough to no longer feel like I was dragging the other three down. To be quite honest, I had a crush on Paul in those early days, but that was before I met Eric. He was a guy in one of my classes, and well, that’s a story for another day…
We practiced for three months before our first gig. It certainly wasn’t glamorous, but to us it was magical. For four people struggling through university and early adulthood, the band allowed us to jump out of our day to day lives and be the party people, one or two nights a week. Erin would come down twice a month, and we’d play cover songs and a few originals at the local bars: Big Dick’s, Spicoli’s, the Pub… the names and places have all sort of blended together at this point. Erin and I took turns singing, and Paul would tell stories between songs. The girls loved Paul…
In the summer after my first year of university, we released our first EP, Leave My Soul Alone. We made 700 copies of it, and sold it at the shows. It had five tracks:
Puny Express - Leave My Soul Alone
Anyways, the LMSA EP wasn’t very good, but we soldiered on. I’ve talked with Courtney, and she wants to continue the story over at her blog. Maybe after all this, Paul and Erin will give us their takes of what life was like on the Puny Express. I know it was a ride I’ll never forget, and despite the rocky points that came later, I will always look back on those early days fondly.
Well, at least one of you loves me. The lovely and talented Courtney tagged me as a creative blogger. The rules? List 7 things I love and then to tag 7 people who will play along. But I’m a rule breaker, mostly because I don’t know seven people who read my blog who also blog.
So I will give you a double shot of things I love. That means fourteen things I love. Here goes:
So there you are! Fourteen things I love. And possibly one of the most shallow lists I’ve ever produced. Maybe I should have included kittens and bunnies. They’re pretty great as well.
January 4, 2009 – January 10, 2009
Well, I spent most of this week sick with a head cold that knocked me down for a few days. Regardless, here goes my list for the week. One of these entries is sarcastic. Try to guess which one.
Neil DeGrasse Tyson: Death by Black Hole.
An incredibly interesting and funny interview with astrophysicist Neil DeGrasse Tyson. He talks about the process of dying in a black hole, defines one of my new favourite words, “spaghettification”, and tells the audience about the asteroid that may destroy the Pacific Coast. A fascinating discussion about some terrible things that may happen to the Earth.
“Ninety nine percent of all species that ever existed are now extinct. That is not the signature of a planet that is in love with life.”
Learning that none of my JavaScript works in Internet Explorer 6.
My boss went to Cambodia for two weeks after Christmas. The day she returns, we are to present her with a full, bug-free copy of our latest project. On Wednesday, we discovered that next to none of our Javascript works in Internet Explorer 6. I know it was rather remiss of us not to test, but we’re not the best at browser-compatibility testing.
Anyways, IE6 is a mystifying piece of badness. There are lots of things in it that make no sense at all, like how select boxes are drawn by the operating system, and not the browser. What this means is that modal dialog boxes, as well as mouseover-style menus, don’t draw themselves on top of those elements. Web 2.0 style applications use these sorts of elements quite often. The solution? Something called an iframe shim, which makes no sense at all. I have so far wasted a number of days attempting to make these elements play well together. We need to find a new way to draw modal dialog boxes, drop down style menus and a calendar widget. Before tomorrow morning at 830 am. I’m not expecting that to go well.
Secret Diary of a Call Girl
I loved watching Billie Piper as Rose Tyler in Doctor Who, so I decided to download the show Secret Diary of a Call Girl to see if she could really act or not, and I learned that she can. It is an odd cross between a comedy, a drama, and a softcore porn. I have now seen far too much of Billie Piper’s body, but I still found the show excellent. Her character is quite compelling and I enjoyed watching the two parts of her personality conflicting with each other. I would recommend this show to a couple of friends, though I’m not sure if it would be my friends who are obsessed with Doctor Who or not.
Getting our spare room set up.
Alan and I recently housed a friend of ours for about four or five months. In that time, he stayed in our spare room, which had formerly been our computer room. Since our computers were nice and cozy in their new home, and we wanted to hide our TV a bit more, we turned our spare room into a TV room. We put the TV and our gaming systems in the closet so we can hide it when we have guests, and the spare room now has our DVD shelf, our plastic shelving units, and our futon. The living room is fantastically empty, and will make a great space for dance contests and Twister. Or our cozy chair can go there for our new reading corner.
