Dullness Continues

A quiet day of starting on a script for the kid’s comic (y’know, the one for the Singapore kid’s magazine, it’s still got a few installments left to it before completion), playing me some Rogue Galaxy and walking a block down to the nearby Dentist’s office to ask for an appointment on a looooooooong overdue check up.

However, I did actually manage to look at and add a bit to the stalled children’s novel yesterday, so I’m feeling mildly pleased about that.

The Last Week Without

Today was spent almost entirely in the neighborhood, doing errands like handling banking matters, a little bit more shopping for the Wife and the usual supply runs for groceries and cat necessities.

However, at least one bit of good news finally surfaced. A call to the movers to check on the status of The Rest Of Our Stuff finally yielded some good news. According to them, our stuff made it through the Vancouver port and had been riding the rails for the last day or so, with an estimated arrival in Toronto of tonight or tomorrow morning. Unfortunately that doesn’t mean we get it right away. The stuff still has to be transported to a warehouse desginated for our movers, and it has to get an okay from Canada Customs. This can take anywhere from a day to three, so the best estimate we have at this point is that if absolutely nothing goes wrong, we could actually have our stuff sitting in our new home by as early as Friday. However, the world not being a perfect place, it’s probably more realistic to assume that it’ll arrive on Monday or Tuesday.

Still, all of this translates into just one thing for me…

BEWARE, MEGADETH AND YOUR SATANIC SONG, HANGER 18, I’M COMING FOR YOU ONCE MORE…

More Dullness

Just a shopping day for the Wife and many girly things like purses, scarves and cosmetics were picked up while I looked on, baffled and lost at the complexity of a Girl’s World. Especially when it came to cosmetics…

Canadian Sunday

Went shopping down on Bloor Street where all the happenin’ college kids hang out. Had bacon sandwich with bacon straight outta’ the new microwave. Played games. Still do not have stuff. Actually resorted to playing an old Playstation Magazine DVD demo with Guitar Hero 2 preview on it, but since there was no guitar to play it with, the machine auto-played the songs perfectly and I had to content myself with that.

Must… Get… Guitar Hero… Back…

More Appliances

It took nearly the entire day, but we are now officially with microwave oven. It would have gone faster if the microwaves on sale in the department stores we checked out were a) actually present and available for purchase and b) if they were available at ANOTHER outlet, the staff could have actually checked to ask, rather than have us being driven around by the Old Friend physically checking one outlet after another.

Nevertheless, a microwave has indeed been acquired, meaning it is now possible to actually indulge in the grossest possible form of human consumption; a Hungry Man TV dinner. An entire pound of food. Good God…

Good Luck & Noisy Technology

Today the Wife observed that regardless of our station or success in life, we’re probably going to forever be packrats and scavengers.

The morning began with a courier delivering more cabling, the last of the Wife’s orders from one particular tech company that had chosen to deliver everything seperately. This consisted of a 75 foot and 25 foot pair of ethernet cables. We decided “To hell with it, we’re going back on the wire.” After a week of reliably losing wireless connection at critical moments like sending e-mail, writing blog posts (which would promptly get eaten during the ensuing connection drop) or internet transactions it became pretty clear that either as a result of other wireless connections or too much cell phone activity, a wireless connection in this part of town Just Doesn’t Work. So the morning was spent running cable up doorframes, through holes in the wall that previous tenants had knocked through into other rooms and behold, our computers are now once again reliably connected and should only drop their connection when the service provider does.

We were also going to go shopping for a microwave. More to the point, the Old Friend was going to buy us a microwave oven as a belated wedding present, but it got kind of late by the time she was available so it’s been pushed back to tomorrow. Failing at that, we decided to do a little grocery shopping down on Bloor and figured we’d walk it. However, while walking down the street towards Bloor, we chanced upon some perfectly good tables lying out on the street, waiting to be picked up by the garbage fleet later in the evening. Since we had also just gotten a fairly hefty, 60 pound laser printer that we suddenly realized we’d need to put on something, the table seemed perfect. We poked, prodded, noticed the owners of the house staring at us from the window, and I went over to ask about us making off with the table since it was obvious they didn’t want it. The lady of the house had already opened the door before I could ring the bell and told us it was perfectly okay to scavenge the table, so I dragged it back home.

Things like this seem to happen with alarming regularity when ever we move to a new apartment. At the first apartment in Singapore that we ever moved to, one of the neighbors in our building had thrown away a large, solid, perfectly good shelf, and I made off with it, using it to store my DVDs and PS2 games.

After that we had dinner at a pizza joint that had recently opened up just 3-4 doors down from us and was promptly amazed to find that the pizza in question was the best pizza I’d had in 11 years, and that the last time I enjoyed a pizza this good was in… Canada. In the 90′s. I couldn’t believe it when I realized that in the 10 years I’d been in Singapore, supposed food capital of the world, with World Class dishes, I had never, ever, even in the most expensive pizza places in Holland Village (the hip, bohemian part of Singapore that’s driven out all the bohemians who can no longer afford to live there) enjoyed a pizza that tasted this damn good.

The day ended with the wife accidently cutting her leg with a paper cutter (don’t ask) and the laser printer being lifted to its new home and being tested out. Two things were abundantly clear upon trying that sucker out. It is a NOISY son of a bitch, creaking and whirring and probably making everyone else in the house wonder what the hell kind of train we were driving in our living room, and it’s power hungry. Printing pictures and documents out on this thing results in super clear, super vibrant images that look magazine quality. But when this happens, the lights in the living room actually flicker and dim as the printer chugs away at its duties. I’m curious, and yet at the same time afraid, of finding out exactly what the power consumption demands of this thing are…

Hopefully tomorrow we will finally have a microwave. And possibly even a vacuum cleaner. And we STILL DON’T HAVE OUR STUFF FROM SINGAPORE. Man, this is starting to get annoying…

More Stuff In The Mail

I’m quickly beginning to realize that internet and credit card access pretty much connects you to whatever toys you’re into, without necessitating you having to live in a big city with access to all the amenities provided by metropolia on that scale. To whit; despite the fact that Suspect Video and Beguiling are just a few blocks away, the winter weather still makes a leisurely stroll down to these areas unappealing at best.

However, thanks to Amazon and other mail order services, it’s all pretty much irrelevant. There’s no particular drama for me, though the Wife continues to be thwarted in her attempts to get her scanner. Today, her laser printer arrived–a big ol’ thing weighing in at 60 pounds–despite the fact that she ordered that much later, so I suspect if a few more days goes by and the scanner doesn’t turn up, she’s going to bite the bullet and order it again, hoping this time it’ll actually survive the trip.

On my end, I was messing with my new toys, the first things I’ve ever ordered with my very own credit card. The big one was a movie I’ve been meaning to watch for the last few years since the Wife first mentioned it. It’s a precursor to the Japanese horror ambassadors like The Ring and Juon, and this one was called Kairo, which–surprise, surprise–got recently remade into an American horror film called Pulse. The story (and in particular the continuity, with people suddenly appearing in different clothes for no apparent reason and no perceptible jump in time) was disjointed, but on eof the things that seriously creeped me out about this movie was a serious use of dark and camera movement to creep you out. There were no long haired ghosts crawling around in this one, and none of the typical jump scares or gore as typified by American horror. Instead, the film relied on causing excruciating amounts of tension by letting you see shadows and things moving here and there, but rarely letting you actually see anything. Basically the director relied on the truism “It’s what you DON’T see that scares” to in order to achieve his goal, and it worked.

I now also have the Southpark movie (something else that was, you guessed it, illegal in Singapore!) and will be viewing it shortly. It’s terribly appropriate to be watching this film now, considering its plot. My only opportunity to watch it in Singapore, years ago, was aborted by the fact that it was on an extremely bad pirate copy burned to CD, and the disc jammed up about a half hour into the movie, so this will be a much more pleasant viewing experience.

And the IGN assignment is tentatively on. I’ll have to see about more details and nail down deadlines and the exact scope of the job, but I told “I’m interested” and they said, “Great,” so I guess it’s on.

Semi-Work Day

Things were kind of, sort of done, although no real actual writing was accomplished. A bit of shopping, an interesting prospect of continuing work on an existing project (heck, at least that’ll pay the rent…) but most intriguing of all, an offer of a freelance job. From IGN–#1 gaming geek site–of all companies. Of course, I’m going to say yes. After reading these guys for years, it’ll be nice to actually add them to my resume. And who knows… If they like the work, maybe they’ll give me more. I only pray future work (should it happen) doesn’t entail E3. I’ve had quite enough of that, thank you very much…

Also, the Wife now has a silk screen for making T-Shirts. For people that absitively, posolutely gotta’ have limited editions or collector’s editions, this means that I’ll be wearing T-shirts you will never, ever see anywhere else. The Wife is also spending most mornings by the window, mumbling “Mail truck… mail truck…” in anticipation of a Really Big Ass Scanner that should have gotten here by now, and somehow ended up being beaten to the punch by knitted sweaters that were mailed from the same place on the same day. I guess even the postal service doesn’t want to hold onto knitted goods any longer than they have to, but maybe they’re scanning shots of their bottoms at drunken office parties, much as photocopiers have done in days of yore.

And on a less happy note, I’ve just realized that it’s been well over a month since I had a serious sit down, thrash session with Guitar Hero 2, since The Rest Of Our Stuff is still not here. It amazes me just how much I miss that damn game.

The First HD(ish) Game

Although we actually have a few games capable of being displayed at the lowest possible settings for High Definition (that being 480p) none of those games are actually HERE, since they were packed away along the The Rest Of The Stuff on the boat from Singapore to North America. At this point, we still don’t even know if that boat has actually touched down on Canadian shores.

But in the meantime, thanks to the miracle of Ebay, we now have a PS2 version of an oldie, but a goodie, the sublime–and severely underrated–Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time. The part that kills me is that we actually only paid a total of $10 for it, and $7 of that was shipping and handling. But it’s a very, VERY fun game to play for people with some capable manual dexterity (the acrobatics involved in navigation and combat can be quite demanding) and a good sense of spatial relationships. A “reimagining” of the classic side-scrolling platformer put out by Jordan Mechner back in the 80′s when the Atari, Commodre 64 and Apple II computers ruled the PC front, this new version has some striking (for a last generation console anyway) graphics, and some of the most fun, and fiendishly clever “puzzle solving” seen in a console game. Like Ico, the majority of the problem solving here comes from being in large, complexly constructed rooms and buildings, and trying to figure out how to get from Point A to Point B when there are cliffs, gaps, columns, pillars, booby traps and other assorted obstacles making a straightforward walk impossible. This is another one of those games I would highly reccomend for two or more people as observers can often have just as much fun as the player, and often, the observers will notice or see opportunities that the player–usually too focused on gameplay–may miss. It’s an old game, very difficult to find in stores, but there are still copies floating around online and I highly reccommend acquiring it. I used to own a copy, but that was on the Xbox, and since I don’t have that ugly black clunker sitting around anymore, this PS2 version serves just as well, and gives me an excuse to play it again.

Now if only Guitar Hero 2, God of War, SSX 3 and Shadow of the Colossus would arrive so that I can finally see what those suckers look like in 480 progressive widescreen…

The Dark Side Of The Force

So after decades of going without, I finally got my first ever credit card today, having been rejected when I applied for a student credit card back in university days. As far as I know, I’m the only student to have ever been assured that I would be guaranteed a student credit card, only to get rejected despite the fact that I had a reliable fulltime job at the time.

Nevertheless, now I have one.

Now, I have visited Amazon.

Now, I realize how truly evil these things are…

(Mental note to self: Remember to track down One Crazy Summer and complete your early Cusack collection.)