that ring of confidence

It's Euro 2008 today

While I'm at work Euro 2008 is going to be winding up as the final is played between Germany and Spain at 11 am Pacific Standard Time today.  It's German versus Spain, and hopefully it'll be a fine ending to a fine tournament.  A tournament that for the most part I did not get to see, because it was held largely during the afternoon when I'm working.

Ah well, I'll try to catch updates online if it's not busy.  For my blog posts on the Euros check out my football (soccer) blog The Vancouver Gunner [av].  Likely it'll be another slow Sunday, what with the weather being so very beautiful.  It's like Okanagan level hot outside even this early in the morning, so I hope the air-conditioning holds out all day otherwise I'm going to be drowning in my own sweat. 

Wake me when it's fall and we've all relaxed a little

I started work at Elfsar, the Yaletown comic book store, last month and was hoping that it would be a good source of additional income. I was also hoping that working there would break up work at the Rogers, the way that working at the theatre used to break up working at Rogers back in Kelowna. The trouble is because it's been slow, they just have no shifts for me. After two shifts this month, I'm not working there at all in July.

At least I've got my staff discount I guess.

Meanwhile the iPhone hasn't even arrived and I'm starting to get tired of it. Every day is a flood of people wanting to know things, which would be fine if Rogers told us anything. Today we weren't even allowed to tell people about the recently announced plans despite the fact that they were in the newspaper and on Rogers' site. I feel like we should just wear t-shirts that say, "We know even less than MonkeyJizz365 on Howard Forums, so don't bother asking."

Meanwhile the internet's turned into a festival of idiots over the Canadian iPhone plans. Why people expected them to be the same price as the AT&T plans in the US I'm not sure. Anyone who had spent about ten minutes looking at Canada's data rates could have guessed what the plans were going to be within about five dollars. The fact that they're better than any current data rates in the country isn't the issue, the issue is that they're not the best in the world. Or something. People just need to go back to high school and retake economics or business education, of course typing "iPhone FAIL" into their blog gets more hits.

And hey look, I'm not someone who defends Rogers blindly. They make mistakes, but for the most part they make fewer mistakes than Telus or Bell and the ones they make tend to be the classic big corporation mistakes that any company with several hundred employees make.

Telus for example sent Lydia a bill last week for over $1100, even though she hasn't had a phone with them since 2003. It seems that when she closed her home account to switch to Shaw they kept her account open, and kept charging her without sending her a bill until five years later they were about to send it to collections. Or something. They never actually told her why she owed this money, or even how much she owed since the amount kept changing every time she called them.

A few hours on hold later and she got them to delete that, thankfully.

Meanwhile my mother wanted me to delete a previous post mentioning the iPhone, scared that I'd be fired. It seems that some Rogers dealers are firing people for just that, and others are making their employees sign paper work saying that they can't say anything bad about the iPhone or they'll get the sack. The amount of money that people are imagining that Rogers is going to make off of this is turning everyone into fraking idiots. We weren't this concerned as a nation when we helped invade Afghanistan.

I loved my iPhone, that I now can't use or I'll be fired, and I'm sure I'll get a 3G one and love it even more but it's just a phone. It doesn't cure cancer. It doesn't make you good at playing Dr. Mario. It's super cool and the best phone I've ever used but it's just a phone.

I can't wait until summer is over and everyone relaxes a little.

At least Telus doesn't believe that I owe them money. Then I'd really need some Elfsar shifts.

My travels in the world of Windows Mobile begin

 

I've blogged about my troubles with getting a phone to use.  Banned from using my iPhone by work, and having sold off my BlackBerry 8800 I'm now trying out a work loaned Palm Treo 750.

I always loved my Palm Tungsten, which was my first PDA, but since the Treo line of phones have embraced the Windows Mobile platform I've been reluctant to try using one.  The main issue being the lack of Mac syncing, which has meant that I've been spending the last few hours trying to get this setup.

Currently though things are going well. I've got Tiny Twitter running on it and I'm blogging this very post on the phone. 

I just have to keep telling myself it's just until the iPhone 3G arrives, or I buy a BlackBerry Bold.

Edit:  As you can tell from the ganky picture, the camera portion of the device is kind of crappy.  Why the mobile posting application decides to put it in so large, thus exposing how terrible the picture quality is, is beyond me.

Going to see Nathan

This morning I'm off to see Nathan early in the morning.  We've been talking around the notion of doing something, like a video show or a podcast for years and I'd like to finally record something.  I'm sure the fact that we've yet to come up with a subject, format or method of working together will in no way affect the quality of what we end up producing.  I mean let's face it, it's not like half the stuff in your average art gallery was made with any sort of planning.  Art isn't what you plan at, art is what happens when you just let yourself create.

Or at least that's what I'm sure my high school art teacher would have taught me if I hadn't of switched into band after the first week because I found the art kids too weird.  Now there's an alternate life to think about, how would I have settled into Okanagan Mission Secondary School if I'd have stayed in art. 

I'll tell you one thing for sure I would not have gotten lost in the bad part of Anaheim California with Karen Wilson while on a band trip.  Not that anything came of that adventure, we neither made out nor were we murdered for our Air Jordan's.

How I discovered The Big Bang Theory

Isaac, one of the corporate sales reps at work, suggested that I check out the sitcom The Big Bang Theory [stc], but his description of the cast (featuring one of the kids from Rosanne) wasn't quite enough to get me watching it right away.  However when Andy Ihnatko [twtr] started Twittering that the show was a certain type of people's Sex In The City, I figured I'd better check it out.  I mean the people that Ihnatko was talking about was nerds, and I'm kind of a big nerd.

At first I was worried I was going to be annoyed at the show, at least until I got to the above scene where the science of the first Superman movie was discussed.  Granted I'm not really a science guy, but I've got a book on the science of superheroes, and would love to get into that sort of totally dorky debate.  I mean I do work part-time at a comic book store, though sadly the job has yet to provide me with one "Who could win in a fight" style debate.

The scene is sort of ruined by the weird addition of music over it, as if strings make something funnier.  Still it's a good show, though unlike something like Friday Night Lights, I probably wouldn't recommend it to everyone.  I think maybe you've got to have something of the geek in you to really enjoy it, which I suppose is saying something about Isaac that he might not want spread about the internet.

Some music to pass your day

Here is my Last.fm playlist.  Click on it, play it, listen to it and hopefully if you do those three things properly you'll also enjoy it.  I haven't updated it for awhile, so it might not be an accurate reflection of what I'm listening to right now, but since only my favorite songs get added to the playlist then it's something I'll still stand behind even now months since I've last looked at it.

Twittering for directions and David Cross in China

I went to Matt and Oana's place tonight as they resurrected their (nearly) weekly movie night.  Or if they did not resurrect it, then I've been able to finally make amends for whatever social mistakes I might have made the last time I was at their movie night, and got another invite.  The last time I was there we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark, and this time it was The Vice Guide to Travel which was a compilation of short travel films by Vice Magazine featuring the sort of trips you'd never take to the places that no sane person would ever go.

Getting to their place was a bit of adventure [mbv], but thanks to Twitter I managed to find my way.  You might have seen my Tweets asking for help on my blog here.  I got lost and not having Matt and Oana's phone number, nor Ryan Cousineau's [wc] who was also going to be at the party, I had to Twitter from my phone asking for help.  A few minutes later a stranger called me and using Google Maps we managed to find my way there.

So Mark Hamilton, thanks for the help.

Above is one of the bonus features on the DVD, which shows David Cross (Mr. Show, Arrested Development) exploring China.  My favourite point of the video is when he's trying to buy bootleg DVDs of his shows and his travelling companion claims that Cross was in Scary Movie 3, to which Cross indignantly replied "Scary Movie 2".

Hey Vancouver, win a free trip to the movies

Fellow Metroblogging Vancouver author Rebecca, known far-and-wide as Miss 604, is having a contest on her personal blog for free movie tickets for Get Smart and The Love Guru [m604]. Since I'm 1/1 on Miss 604 contests I figure I'll enter this one, because I'm for sure going to be going to see Get Smart, and Love Guru is a flick that I'd see for free but probably wouldn't pay for more Austin Powers style humour.

Personally I'm hoping to win Get Smart tickets.  As for you, well you'd better not enter, because that'll just make my own victory that much harder.  However you could enter, but if you win you do have to buy my book [jks].  For reals, it's one of the contest rules. 

It's the circle of life my friend.  You get a free movie.  I sell my book and Rebecca gets a better Technorati rank.  Everyone wins!  Well everyone except for people who haven't bought my book, they lose a little bit of potential joy every day.

The cellular conundrum

It's been awhile since I've gotten a new cell phone. I used to get a new phone ever few months so that I always was using a phone that we sold and because in Kelowna my rent was low enough that I could afford to be a little cash mad.  The last phone I got was the iPhone [jks], and I thought it was my perfect phone.  Oh it is, and apart from the fact that I've broken it and repair is going to cost $200 and if I do use it I'll be fired since Rogers is being trying to drive unlocked iPhones off their network.

So under threat of unemployment I'm needing a new phone, and hark there's a new iPhone and a few other options coming out soon.  After loving my first generation iPhone that I bought at the Apple Store in Seattle it would seem a no brainier that I'd get the new iPhone.  It's faster, has the ability to add third part applications and has a lot of new stuff.  It's a better phone and since I loved the iPhone why wouldn't I get it?

The one thing I didn't love about it was the lack of a physical keyboard.  I got as quick at typing on the phone as I think I'll ever manage to get but at the end of the day I did like my BlackBerry better for that.  I could touch type on the BlackBerry much faster than I could on the iPhone.  For blogging on the go that's a big deal.

So which phones am I looking at?  The rundown and my options after the jump.

Don't buy an iPhone buy my book

the end of the...

A collection of th...

By Jeffery Simpson

Book Preview

So you've got a lot of money laying around your place. Maybe you won a beauty contest, or maybe you passed Go a few times and collected your $200 stipend. I don't care how you've got that money burning a hole in your pocket, I just want you to know that you can spend it by buying my book.  That's right, my book.

Granted it's self-published from the online vanity press Blurb, but it's an actual book.  It's hardcover and bound, collecting my published newspaper writings from 1996-2006 that have appeared in the Phoenix, The Kelowna Daily Courier and eVent! magazine.  You also get some pretty awesome photographs, and a dust cover.  That's right, a real dust cover.

It's a sizeable book, with 168 pages of content.  I'm so confident that this book will be the greatest thing you've ever spent your money on that you can even see a preview of the book here [blb].

Okay, now I know what you're going to say.  You're going to say, "Jeff this is amazing, however your book is more expensive than this new Stephen King novel at Chapters.  Why is that?"

See the thing about these so called "professional" authors is that when they sell books they sell upwards of one hundred at a time to bookstore chains.  With that kind of volume they get discounts in printing, so they can keep their costs down.  Plus it's well known that Stephen King lives in the van that hit him years ago, so he's hardly got any overhead.

This is a book I made two years ago for a Christmas gift to my parents, that now I'm offering for sale via Blurb.

iPhone in Canada: now with extra Jar Jar Binks

I was working at the Paramount Theatre in Kelowna when the first Star Wars prequel came out.  Everyone knew the movie was going to be big, and the question really was just how big was it going to be.  It had been decades since the original movies first came out, and it was expected that Lucas' return to a land far far away was going to blow everything out of the water.

The demands from Fox and Lucasfilm placed on individual theatres was ridiculous.  For example typically with advertising merchandise once the movie leaves the theatre all of the posters, buttons and what have you are up for grabs.  With Ep1 Lucasfilm wanted physical proof that all advertising materials had been destroyed.  The word was any theatre that failed to provide proof would risk not getting the film.

By the second and third prequel nobody really worried about those conditions.  Lucasarts had lost its clout, at least where Star Wars was concerned, because despite the strong box office numbers it Ep1 turned out to be just another movie. 

Over at Metroblogging Vancouver I've got an FAQ about the iPhone's upcoming arrival in Canada [mbv].  What struck me is that Rogers and Apple are being as controlling as Lucasfilm and Fox were over that wonderful piece of Jar Jar Binks film footage.  Anyone who helps a customer with a grey market iPhone (an unlocked iPhone from out of country) will be fired on the spot with no severance.  This includes existing Rogers customers with American iPhones whose money everyone has been fine taking up until now. 

Apart from the questionable legality of firing someone with no severance for helping out a customer they sold a service to a month ago, it would be interesting to see if anyone believed that was just cause, it's the sort of inane controlling attitude that brought us midi-chlorians [wp].

The sad thing is the iPhone is good, really good and Rogers and Apple have no reason to treat it like Jar Jar Binks shows up halfway through to crap on it.

Your childhood explodes on YouTube

Hey remember cartoons, you know the ones you used to watch on Saturday mornings? Well anyone with a childhood that ran in the '80s and '90s will probably remember at least a few of the cartoons in the show above. It's called Cartoon All-Stars To The Rescue and it was an anti-drug show made using characters from a few of the most popular cartoons at the time. It's weirdly creepy to watch our friends from the 100 Acre Woods hang with the Smurfs, the Muppet Babies, Alf and Michelangelo of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. The fact that it's an anti-drug cartoon for children makes it even weirder.

Possibly the weirdest moment is when Simon from the Chipmunks describes to both Alvin and Theodore and the audience what marijuana is.

I'm blogging as Pierre Trudeau

Am I the only one who finds it weird that there was a new James Bond novel published in May written by novelist Sebastian Faulks writing as James Bond creator Ian Fleming? There's something really wrong about that, isn't there?

Not wrong in continuing to write novels about James Bond. As a comic reader I have to accept that often characters live well beyond the point where their creators stop writing them. Spider-Man will outlive Stan Lee and it's been decades since Lee has had a direct hand in the character's fate anyway. But nobody is writing Spider-Man comics as Stan Lee, and nobody is drawing them as Steve Ditko. If Dan Slot writes an issue of Amazing Spider-Man it's Dan Slot writing it, not Dan Slot pretending to be Stan Lee.

Using a pseudonym isn't anything new, especially in the world of fiction. Steven King for example is rather famous for writing a number of books as other people, and while it's kind of odd it's nothing really controversial. What's odd is publishing a book about a character made famous by someone whose dead, and writing as that someone. Ian Felming is dead, he died a long time ago and I don't quite see what the point is pretending otherwise.

Unless the entire thing is some sort of meta-fiction exercise in which case it's just annoying.

For the rest of the week maybe I'll start blogging as dead people. Today I'll be posting as Pierre Trudeau, tomorrow Anthony Hopkins. Wait, what? Oh... Hopkins is still alive, so much for that idea.

The Apple TV arrives

  Project 365. Day 8. 
  Originally uploaded by Glenn Wolsey.

It took awhile for the Apple TV to really find it's niche.  Of course being obsessed with everything Apple I got it the first month it was out, but most people held off since it's purpose was not clearly evident. 

I liked it because it let me play all of my music from my iTunes on my living room stereo, and gave me a nice on screen interface to use so I was not constantly having to fiddle with my iPod.  Eventually I started watching television shows and video Podcasts on it as well, but music was still my main use.

When Apple updated the Apple TV to let users (in the US) rent movies I rented a few with the credit that I had on my American iTunes account.  It was fast and easy, much better than waiting a week for Zip.ca or walking down to the local Blockbuster.  But managing credit from a foreign account was not great, and so I've stopped renting them.

Now that movies can be rented in Canada things seem to be picking up for the Apple TV.  Issac phoned me yesterday asking about mine, since he's thinking of getting one.  Sean Tamaki text messaged me asking questions about them, though since he works at the new Apple Store in Vancouver I'd figure he'd be the pro, and Neal just called trying to decide to buy one.

Could the second half of 2008 be the (half) year of the Apple TV, the way that the second half of 2007 was the (half) year of the iPhone?

Metroblogging Vancouver: the Device To Root Out Evil, hockey songs and more

I might not be blogging that much here, but over at Metroblogging Vancouver I've got a few posts up that might be worth checking out. 

The first is about the above sculpture named the Device To Root Out Evil which has been in the park next to my parents' apartment for the past few years.  It was new in Vancouver when I first moved downtown, and I used to pass it daily when I'd take the Skytrain to Metrotown for work.  Thanks to complaints about it blocking the sea-view from local condo owners it's been dismantled and moved to Calgary where they apparently appreciate art more than we do in Vancouver.  To learn more about the pieces interesting history check out the Metroblogging post here [mbv].

Meanwhile the notion that the CBC might not use the same theme song for Hockey Night In Canada that it's used since the late '60s has completely freaked out the internet.  It's like some kind of mental meltdown [mbv]. 

Lastly there's a bit about the new Apple Store that just opened in Vancouver [mbv], a post about Krazy! the comic and animation exhibit at the Vancouver Art Gallery [mbv] and a review of the R.E.M. concert at Deer Lake Part [mbv].

Another post about a puppy

Just a quick post to note that Lydia and I went up to Whistler on our day off yesterday, but I'm still working on getting the photos and video to Flickr so I'm holding off blogging about it until I've got all that stuff online. What I do have online is some more pictures of my parents' new puppy Charlie. This time I give you a video of him investigating the camera.

Right, okay so it's not the sort of hard hitting content that you've come to expect from my blog. I suppose I could get a meth addiction to provide myself with some blog worthy content. Until that pans out however I've got not much to go on. At least until I get some time.

Three out of three agree, Fiamma burger is awesome

  Fiamma Burger 
  Originally uploaded by Jeffery Simpson.

After my post about the joy of Fiamma burger [jks] in Bellingham two of my co-workers have since gone and they've both enjoyed it greatly.  I've been trying to come up with an excuse to go to Bellingham so that I can have another one.  I think I'm going to go with a need to buy cheap but high quality groceries at Trader Joe's is excuse enough.  So with this weekend (yesterday and today) booked up with Granville Island and Whistler it seems like I'll have to wait until next Wednesday for the wonder that is Fiamma burger.

If anyone wants to lend me a few hundred thousand dollars we could set up a Fiamma burger chain in Vancouver.  We'd be rich, richer than astronauts.  You know I'm right.

Obama: the next President, I hope

  Senator Barack Obama 
  Originally uploaded by goodmosconi.

I am not American, I don't live in America and I don't vote in their elections.  However like the rest of the world whoever is living in the White House affects my life a great deal.  Canada has troops in Afghanistan because of George W. Bush, and we pay a lot more at the gas pumps because of George W. Bush. 

A change is needed, and last night Barack Obama became the Democratic nominee for President and the man that I'm hoping wins.  Jeff Weston, a high school friend whose living in Seattle for work, had been hoping that Hilary won and seems to really dislike Obama.  I'll admit to not knowing enough about their substantive policy differences, other than Clinton was for the invasion of Iraq, and Obama was not, but I'm glad that Barack one.

Crazy pastor aside, I'm sure we'll be finding out that he's a complicated and flawed man as the real race for the Presidency begins now, but he offers far more than anyone has in a long time.  Change might seem like the buzz word of the moment, as does hope but I think those both fit. 

Anyway he does have the very nice feature of not being George W. Bush.  And now with Clinton out of the race, we think, he's the most non-George W. Bush like person in the race, and so I'm hoping he's going to win.

I'm still alive and my parents got a new dog

I just wanted to say that I'm still alive, just in case you thought that I might have died at some point during the Emerald City Comic Convention.  Working two jobs seems to eat up quite a bit of my time, and I've not been able to post as much as I'd like.  I will be changing that in the near future, though how I'm not quite sure.

In the meanwhile my parents got a new dog, well my mother did.  It's a Havanese [wp] and it's name is Charlie, because it's the same colours of a dog that my mom had years ago.  Charlie, the first one, was a part of the family before I was and lived for around sixteen years.  Hopefully Charlie 2.0 will have as long of a life.  But damn, puppies sure are cute little things aren't they?

Soon, blogging.  Yes.  For now though enjoy the puppy picture.  I have more of them on my Flickr site if you're interested in looking.  The Flickr link is in the sidebar.