Last night, we stayed at the Aloft hotel near the airport. Nice place with comfy beds. It’s part of the W chain of hotels. I’d recommend it for anybody not spending a lot of time in town, but it’s a bit too far out to really be a good base of operations.

Vacation. Two weeks. In southern France. Possibly with no Internet and no phone. I’m looking forward to copious amounts of wine and cheese and taking lots of pictures of the local ruins. And of course, hanging out with Deb and my friends in a decidedly non-tech environment.

See you in two weeks!

I woke up feeling a little creative this morning and didn’t feel compelled to put together shelves or unpack boxes. So I dug out my Korg EA-1, plugged it into my midi box (which finally has Leopard-compatible drivers) and whipped-up this little bit of synth noise.

Junk Drawer.mp3 (192kbps VBR MP3)

or

Junk Drawer.m4a (177kbps VBR AAC)

3’27″.

I’m going to try something a little different for this post. I don’t normally talk about myself much here, I intentionally keep a low-profile and babble about things like computers and iPods. Today, I’m going to talk about feelings. Specifically, how I feel about moving.

Y’see, I moved recently. All the way from Ottawa back to my home-town of Moncton where I spent a big portion of my formative years. I had some good reasons to do this and I think we’re going to be pretty comfortable here.

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about. I want to talk about the actual process of moving. In short: it sucks. Big ones.

Now that we’re finally getting settled in and can reflect on the whole ugly business, there are a few thing that really stand out. It was time-consuming, for one. I spent whole days in different vehicles traveling many thousands of kilometers. Redirecting utilities and getting things like internet hookup and satellite dishes and telephones and all that stuff? It’s tedious and it eats time. But I think I’m through the worst of that.

The absolute WORST part of the whole process was dealing with the moving company. I’m not going to name them, though I’m really tempted to. I don’t know if it was malicious or if it was purely incompetence that caused it, but the moving company really tried to give us the shaft. We were given a quote, then, after all our stuff was packed up and hauled away in a truck, we were told that the weight was 50% higher than the original estimate. The revised bill was adjusted commensurately. I took exception to this. After much complaining in email and phone calls, they agreed to honor their original quote.

This is an unbelievable position. Our stuff is literally held hostage in this situation. We have no recourse. The driver shows up and if he doesn’t get a certified cheque, he drives away with all your belongings. Neat! They can make up whatever fares they want. You don’t even get to see the tariff.

In the end, they charged us what they originally estimated but the time and stress involved was not something I’ll get back. In addition, they destroyed deb’s $3000 computer and cracked my acoustic guitar. These are both going through their insurance process for replacement but I’m already hearing them saying that the computer is going to be a problem because we didn’t pack it properly and they’ll want a technician to look at it. A custom-built, silent gaming PC that looked like it had been dropped from the top of a building. The cost of replacement of both of these items is almost as much as the whole move.

And then the kicker. The person I’d been dealing with for most of this emailed asking if the move was OK and congratulations on the new house. Best of all, the reweigh on our stuff came out just a little over the original estimate and wasn’t that funny how the scale broke at “just that time”? Yeah, right.

Nice.

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Pictured is my entry into the Build your own Rock Album meme on flickr (672 images and growing!). Image pasted using the new and kind of awesome Flickr Helper tool in Ecto 3. It’s still a bit new with some missing features, but I’m looking forward to it’s completion. Its sibling, the Amazon helper looks similarly awesome and should be a bit easier to figure out for first-time users than the previous version’s Amazon tool.

There are a few rough edges. There was no ability (that I could find) to import Ecto 2′s settings forcing me to enter my login info and Amazon affiliate id. One of my earlier posts here was displayed in the preview using center alignment for the text after an inline image (we’ll see if this one does the same), even though the tag was closed. But hey, it’s Beta software and software is Hard, right?

Some new welcome features: Editing post in an external editor (options include, BBEdit, TextWrangler, SubEthaEdit, and my personal fave, TextMate). Also, links can now be created using a “URL from clipboard” context menu, eliminating the need for an extra dialog. Nice (but how ’bout a shortcut?). Also, I understand this is a complete rewrite, so I’m sure there are many more improvements under the covers.

I look forward to writing more with this app in the coming days. Mad props to Adriaan for his hard work.

apple, ecto, General, General, os x, software

Also, I’m a little hung-over. The Special Ultra came down for a visit last night and we got a bit tuned. It could be a bit of a rough day.

If you had any doubts that this wasn’t a well-designed piece of hardware, let’s do some math:

me: 2 x xbox360s -> 2 dead
friend a: 1 x xbox360 -> 1 dead
friend b: 2 x xbox360 -> 1 dead
friend c: 2 x xbox360 -> 1 dead
friend d: 1 x xbox360 -> 0 dead (?)
friend e: 2 x xbox360 -> 1 dead
…

Out of 10 xbox360s between me and some friends, 6 are now dead. Friend “d” whose xbox360 arrived last year right after xmas is screwed. It’s only a matter of time before his xbox360 dies too. I hope he’s taken out some insurance. I’m not saying this to scare him. I’m not trying to be cruel. He doesn’t even read this because he thinks reading blogs is “gay”, so I can pretty much say whatever I want about him. He’s not even really that close a friend, hence his enumeration way down at letter “d”. He didn’t even bother to write a supportive note about my xbox eating its own genitals when I wrote about it on our forums. Some friend… (his name’s Prod)

So, say what you will about Sony taking their sweet time releasing the PS3, I have little doubt they’re far more reliable than these crappy pieces of electronics. Way to go, Microsoft. You’ve screwed me again.

PS, aside to the person who smeared a muffin on my car’s mirror and door this morning and left the remains sitting on my mirror for me to discover: You are a dick.

Technorati Tags: Consoles, Games, Hardware, Xbox360

As a diversion from playing EVE and Munchkin, my latest gaming obsessions –one of which doesn’t even require a computer! I went to see the movie Ghost Rider yesterday. It was every bit as bad as you could imagine, with a few humourous scenes (intentional and that other kind) thrown in for good measure. As one internetizen claimed, Eva Mendes’ breasts put in an excellent performance. Shame about the rest of her.

And that’s about all I can say about that!