Your Friendly Neighborhood Job Bank

I received a letter last week saying that there was something wrong with my social insurance card. Apparently my mother's maiden name was entered wrong and didn't match. I've had this card and number for over thirty years and I'm being informed of this now?!? Just to double check I decided to call up my mother and ask her. As it turns out her last name may have been entered wrong all those years ago. When my grandfather came to Canada they mistyped the family name, he changed it back later. So the name attached to my card might not be the name it was changed back to. No problem I'll go over to the canada office, figure out what's going on and let them know where the mistake might have been made.

Once there, a pleasent person behind the counter told me to take a seat and that the wait would be about 40 minutes. She told me while I was waiting I could fill out a SIN application form just in case I had to anyway and save time later. Since I had nothing better to do that's what I did. About 47 minutes and 23 seconds later (yes I timed this), my name was called over some loud speaker. It instructed me to go to desk three.

The numbers hanging from the ceiling of the drabby office were clearly marked. Unfortunetly the desks under them weren't. Looking down from the huge "3" sign I looked toward a thin pencil pusher of a woman who seemed like the whole office environment had sucked the life out of her. Her greying hair matched the amount of suckage that I guessed had happened to her over the years, months, who knows maybe even just days of working in that soul sucking office. Just looking around at the grey, fluorescent, dimly lit surroundings made me shudder and think happy thoughts that I was not working in a place as crappy as this one.

Not a split second after I sat down she burted "You didn't call in your hours!". At first I was confused. She took me off guard. I had filled in my SIN application form but she was referring to something else. Ah yes... My employmment insurance forms... I told her that I got this letter in the mail telling me to correct the SIN number. I told her I thought I had to do that first as it seemed like the SIN number problem would be more of a big deal. As I didn't want anyone else to get my EI or worse, have the EI go into a black hole where no one collectedit. There wasn't any order specified in the mail as to what to do first, hence my decision to fix my SIN number. She then blurted "You come here to get a new SIN card. You call to enter your hours. Why didn't you enter your hours?!?".

I then made the mistake of asking her what name they had on file for my SIN card. "I can't tell you that but it doesn't matter, you're going to fill out this form and submit it." Obviously she had a very large cucumber up the ass and anything I did or say from that moment on would just make her more irritable and my life more miserable. "Is it ____ (the first name) before the government typo during immigration?" I tried to ask nicely. "I can't answer that. You will take this form and fill it out", she replied. She walked across to another desk and stuffed my other forms into a file folder. When she returned to her desk I informed her of a typo on the address they had on my form. The address was correct on the envelope to get the form sent to me but on the form itself there was a small spelling mistake. She swifty went to the other desk, rummaged through the folder, read the document, then stuffed it back in. All done in an exagrated "My time is too precious for this crap" movement. "I'll fix it." she snapped, then motioned with her eyes and head tilt to leave out the way I came in at the same time calling some other poor slob to desk three.

Although I didn't expect a sunny reception. Let's face it government offices aren't exactly fun, fun, fun, party places. I wasn't expecting the ice queen either. I was tempted to go back and get her name but figured that my forms in her hands were better off without me having that knowledge. Part of me felt sorry for her and anyone else that worked in that environment and another part of me wanted to slap her silly. At the very least make her life miserable for thirty seconds by talking to her supervisor. Who knows. Maybe she was just having a bad day.

Brainwashing resurfacing

A pack of candy that tastes very artificial. One wonders if these were snuck into the country bypassing health and food safety regulations.

For some reason, I'm not sure why. It could be the cough syrup I'm taking or maybe just calling up Darryl (and him mentioning the chirpa chirpa song), but all day I've been haunted with old commercial tunes and songs from my childhood. The brainwashing of the 70s has, all of the sudden, risen from the deep dark layers of my psyche and penetrated my awakened consciousness. So in the goodness of sharing here are some of the diddys... at least the parts I remember.

The world looks mighty good to me,
Cause tootsie rolls are all I see
Whatever it is I think I see,
Becomes a tootsie roll to me.

Hershey is...
That something special no matter where you are.
Anytime you want delicious chocolate,
There's no need to go looking very far.
Hershey is the great American chocolate bar

When you eat your smarties do you eat the red ones last...
do you suck them very slowly or crunch them really fast.
Eat the candy coated chocolate but tell me when I ask,
When you eat your smarties do you eat the red ones last.

Some times you feel like a nut.
Sometimes you don't.
Almond Joy's got nuts.
Mounds don't....


Hey Mister Owl. How many licks does it take to get to the center of a tootsie pop.
{lick} one. {lick} two. {crunch} three. Three.


And here's one that only certain brain washed canadians will get...

Come lift your voice and lend your harmony and we can sing this song together,
From the east and west join the melody that's strong...
Oh Canada... you're just one song...

It's a diddy that came from a board game that we got from the government in around grade one (when I was a kid). The board game was about the size of a 12 inch record cover but thicker. I think it was blue with a green parrot on it. It contained the board game, a comic book of some sort, and a floppy plastic record (something that you may have seen in a MAD magazine), maybe some french english papers of some sort. I seem to remember the characters in the comicbook flying around Canada in a vehicle made out of a bathtub.

Okay I know this sounds pretty crazy but I am sick after all. Maybe it's just part of some vivid dream in my sickened state.

Running into a brick wall

I woke up friday morning not being able to speak. Sore throat, coughing up gunk, and a headache to boot. I've confined myself to home and bed, watching the occasional Star Trek episode while I eat chicken noodle soup.

Today, Saturday, is pretty much the same. I've been constantly tired, and my throat situation has gotten worse. It's time like this when I wonder why I never picked up sign language. Probably because no one else would get it. It feels like a finger is poking me in the eye. Will go back to sleep as reading this monitor is making my brain hurt.

Grandfather

My maternal grandparents on December 29, 2004. We had our Christmas dinner that night.

Today I got some work on a TV show called "Tilt" as a playback operator. Just after stage one of my job description (see previous post), I got a call from my Dad saying that his father in-law had passed away last night at the hospital.

I've never been that close to my grandfather. For as long as I've known him he's never spoken english. I think part of it was to force me to learn chinese. The most chinese I know is from eating dim sum and watching movies, so not a lot.

For most of my life my grandfather lived out near Timmins, ON. So I never got to see him that much. When we did go to visit I remember going on blueberry picking trips that would last for hours. We'd bring home multiple baskets of the berries and bake a bunch of pies.

I'm not sure why he died. He went into the hospital for something a few days ago. I'm waiting on a call from my dad to see just what happened.

Kojak

Between Monday to Wednesday I've managed to get some work on Kojak, the new TV show being shot starring Ving Rhames. My job being a playback operator. What is a playback operator? What is playback?

When you're watching TV and the character on the show uses the computer or watches television chances are the email program or hacking software or tv show the character is watching is all something that was premade or recorded before the film camera starts shooting.

Computer playback comprises of computer animation that is premade by an artist (known as a playback artist or motion graphics designer). TV playback is usually footage shot earlier or taped and then played back.

So my job, a playback operator, does the following...
1. install monitors, computers and/or video playback gear.
2. getting animation or footage
3. playing back footage while filming (and coordinating with the camera department to make sure the displays work witht the 24 frame cameras)
4. dismantling wiring.

Wiring up the monitors usually means running cables (both video and sometimes power) over long lengths of the set. A playback operator is usually off set somewhere with the playback gear to mainly be out of people's way on set, and because of noise from most of the gear is located away from set to make the sound guy happy. Usually the farther away the playback gear is located the happier the sound guy is.

For Kojak, I ran on average 150 feet of cable per monitor to a central hub, our control room. Because wires get in the way and look messy about half the cables had to be run up the sides of the set (about 15 feet or so), across a grid of set support pipes (see above picture) and back down to the control room.

Wiring is like being a kid on monkey bars, only you're higher up, you're dragging cable, and if you fall you'll destroy an expensive set while injuring yourself. There usually is a lot of faith going up on those pipes and hoping they all hold. The thing that goes my mind is "Did I eat a lot today?". Some sets have secured planks that you can walk around on. It makes cabling faster but probably costs the production more money to have them so maybe that's why they don't use them. Scissor lifts can also be available to help wiring, although I have never used one, also a money related thing I guess. Also depending on the set you may not be able to get a scissor lift in and around easily.

In the picture above you'll notice ceiling tiles under my feet. If I were to use a scissor lift I'd have to remove the tiles and put them back all the way along the set that the cables run.

Yea! Job!

Put in a fifteen hour day today. Got home at 2:15 am. Tired. More to come.

Our friend Dan

Dan Lee taken at the Sony Store Boxing Day 2003 next to his PIXAR creations.

I'll admit this picture is kinda blurry. But in a way that's how I remember Dan. I've only met him a couple of times. The highlight was that he would try to make me spend money cause you only live once. "It's not like you're taking it with you." he would say to me. Not like I needed more of an arm bending I'm bad enough as it is. But for the years of 2002 and 2003 on boxing day, Dan, William and I would go do the shopping thing for gadgets. For some reason his egging me on would make me determined not to buy things (unless you count a scooby doo DVD - it was the last one, I was weak). It even got to a point where he was trying to get me to buy a macintosh at half price. And I still said "no thanks".

To those of you that don't know Dan. He was one of those nice people who were genuine and very down to earth. We were friends instantly. Sci-fi, animation, and tiny gadgets were our bond. You would know him from his work at Pixar. He designed the characters for "Finding Nemo".

I found out that Dan died last Saturday (January 15th). He had been fighting lung cancer for the last few years. He was a non-smoker. I will miss him and his egging.

Leuty Lifeguard Station

Today was a balmy -11 degrees(celsius). I decided to go the the Leuty Lifeguard station down by the beach to take pictures of that plant with all the ice on it. (see previous post). I wanted to see the ice formation again and maybe take it from a different angle. When I got there the plant was covered in about 6 feet of ice. An ice bridge was made enclosing the small inlet. The picture above was taken looking towards the station about 10 feet from water level.

If you look closely between the first and second posts, there's a hole in the ice. This is where a kid fell though only minutes before this photo was taken. Luckily the Mom was there on the pier and grabbed the kid. The kid was soaked waist down.

About 2 minutes after this picture was taken, a couple started walking toward the pier. The guy was telling the girl that some kid just fell through the ice. As soon as he said that, the women fell through the ice. Luckily being so close to the pier she caught herself and only fell in to her knees.

I spent the next few minutes wandering around the station warning people that there was thin ice. Some tourists were walking around and I was trying to tell them to be careful. English was not native tongue. I don't think they understood me until the foot of one of the guys went through the ice. They were exteremely cautious after that and backed off up to the boardwalk very slowly. It was pretty funny seeing them test the ground under them knowing they were on sand by that point. I guess they thought the boardwalk was right next to the water.

Time Indoors

Corn pancakes with pineapple and some fruit-like punch.

I decided to stay indoors. Did some cleaning, cooking, baking. I'm going through all the leftover food in my refrigerator, hence the odd ball concoction of the pancakes. They tasted like buck wheat pancakes. Flavourless buck wheat pancakes. I didn't have that much pineapple.

I was going to go out for a walk but the snow is way too deep. When I opened my apartment door there was 40cm of snow. I think the house is aerodynamically built to put snow right at my back door. The rest of the driveway was maybe about 20cm or so deep. It took me about 45 minutes to shovel. After that I went over to the No Frills food place to get some bread.

Beach Blizzard

Here is the life guard station taken at about 7:45am. Just after sunrise. It's hard to see because I had to expose for a half second but I'm standing in a blizzard. A very cold blizzard.


Here is the reverse angle. I was worried the camera might fall over with the high winds. I'm actually struggling to stand up straight. Kind of reminds me of that Sasquatch photo only with snow.

I left a bit earlier than I thought this morning which was just as well. There was so much snow on the trail that I couldn't see the pavement from the grass. It's a good thing I went to the beaches yesterday. The water in front of the life guard station was covered with snow. Did not want to repeat the wet foot incident of a few days ago.

By the time I got down to the life guard station it was about 6:15. The temperature was just about as cold as it was yesterday -16 or so (not including the wind chill). The water was choppy. The snow was everywhere. I put my camera in a ziploc bag to keep snow from getting on it but the winds managed to get snow in from under the bag!

At one point I dropped by UV filter. As luck would have it I was near a shelter, I think it used to be a boat house. Now it's just a roof with some park benches under it. I dusted off the lens and then tried putting lens cleaner on it to wipe it with a cloth. The cleaner froze as soon as it hit the glass. Luckily the lens is pretty old anyway and has a replacement.

Even with the thermal pants I was cold. My hands were both frozen and I resorted to running back and forth from the shelter just to keep warm. By the end my tripod was a metal icicle. The legs wouldn't collapse. I had to chip away the ice that built up in the few minutes I was out there.

I am now at home where I think I will stay until I see sunlight. Hot chocolate is a very nice thing right now.

Real Early Saturday Morning

The picture above was taken last night while I was on the beaches just before the sun went down. It was a cloudless day for the most part and the sun gave off an odd yellow cast that I've never caught on film before.

4:00am, geez my clock is messed up. I just woke up. Went to sleep at midnight. It seemed to be a normal time for a person to go to sleep. I've pretty much wasted the last week working on a production for free instead of finding real work. I'll have to map out my strategy for finding work this week.

Since today is saturday I will make a list over the course of the day on how to tackle monday. In the meantime I'm going to go into my picture database and continue cataloging my images. Later on at about 6:15am I'll go down to the beach and get set up for sunrise, which occurs at 7:45am today. This time I'll bring my thermal pants and wear extra socks.

Friday, One Week until rent is due

I woke up this morning to log into the various job banks. It seems that unless you're an accountant or a programmer, finding creative work really isn't listed. I found the Canada Job bank the most useless database for jobs. You can create up to three profiles so you can get email directly to you when a job is posted. Only if your job title doesn't exist you can't do anything, you can't even add new categories. I suppose I could be considered a media technician. That was the closest match.

I still haven't heard back from the production office. The last message was "We'll get back to you". Being friday night, my hopes are pretty much diminished that we'll get work there. (We = Darryl, Kiri, and myself). I can add the work I've done already to the pile of freebies.

To keep busy I made myself walk out to the beach. Despite Kiri telling me it was cold outside I still didn't wear my thermal snow board pants. Bad. Very bad. Although I was careful not to get wet this time, and it wasn't too windy, the cold was pretty harsh. I took a picture of the cheapo thermometer. It read -16ish (Celsius).

I felt like I was on some polar expedition with all my gear. Today I carried my dual camera mount so I could take stereo pictures, along with my usual other stuff (tripod, batteries, and of course the two cameras). The dual mount was like carrying a large frozen metal bar... actually it was a frozen metal bar. As soon as I took the dual mount out of my bag it just sucked all warmth from my hand. I was wearing mitts. They didn't seem to help.

I stayed out for about three hours and would have stayed longer to take more sunset pictures, there was a nice yellow glow to everything today, but my right hand was frozen. I'll have to invest in those little heater bags that you put in your gloves next time. It got to the point where I couldn't tell if I was pressing the shutter button with my index finger so I ended up using my pinky knuckle (the corner of my hand).

Eventually the cold crept into my shoes and froze my toes. It was about that time that I decided to take me and my stump of a hand back home.

In the picture above you can get an idea of how cold it was outside. This little shrub of some kind has been collecting moisture for a while now I would suppose and can be seen as all that ice.

Quest for Tacos II

What was that saying? "A watched pot never boils"? While continuing to install software on the "loner" computer (see previous post), I decided to attempt a tortilla chip recipe I found on the web. The hard drive which I had to reformat would take about 45 minutes. Plenty of time to start this chip thing.

The first step was to mix the ingredients and make little round balls which would then be flattened and heated in a skillet (see picture above). That went pretty smoothly. I used a cookie cutter to get that perfect circle. Then on to the second step... the frying stage.

My first specimen looked like a miss vickie's potato chip in that was very brown from being deep fried. The only difference appearance wise was that it was about half a centimeter thick. Surprisingly, it actually tasted okay. I decided I would fry a number of chips at once. Five actually, as I didn't have that much oil and was cooking them in my wok.

Once the corn tortillas were in the oil frying away I went to check on the computer. Windows was at the stage where it asks you for all those drivers for all the added hardware. Swapping CDs in and out and rebooting a couple of times I forgot I was frying...

Until, that is, I noticed my kitchen was hidden by all the smoke. First thing that entered my brain was "Crap! All that stuff is going to be sucked into the computers!". This is why I scored a 56 on that nerd test. The second thing that entered my head was that it was 3:00am and the smoke might waft upstairs and alert one of my neighbours.

I opened all my windows (there's two of them) and because I live in a basement apartment I opened the only door into my apartment going outside. There's not much in the way of ventilation in my kitchen. There's no fan exhaust over the stove and my stove is located halfway in a hallway that goes to my other room where the window has been taped shut with plastic wrap to help insulate during the winter. So no air flow. The smoke cloud just lingered. A mental picture of my fan sitting in Darryls office not being used came to mind.

Using my cutting board, I waved the bad air out. It didn't take long before the apartment became very cold and the wok was still producing smoke. Sort of reminded me of the Challenger blowing up. Smoke was spewing a plenty. The open portals didn't have much effect. Luckily I shovelled the drive way last night. There was still a large mound of snow just outside my apartment door. A mound of snow that I used to put the wok in to cool off and air out. I kept looking to see if fire engines would should up or if someone may have noticed and poked their head out the window.

The wind dispersed the thick grey smog pretty quickly. Once the oil cooled I got an empty can from my recycling bin and drained the wok into it. The can was put into the freezer where it can be left, then thrown away later as a solid.

The five chips were burnt beyond recognition. They looked like flat black pieces of charcoal that were dripping with lighter fluid. I drained one with a paper towel and cut it open just to make sure. Yep, it was a goner. Blackened throughout.

I am very tempted to just go to Taco Bell and buy a taco or even purchase some El Paso taco shells. But it wouldn't be the same would it?

In stereo where available

Since I have all this spare time on my hands. I've just finished checking the job boards and am still waiting on the production office to get back to me. I believe they are looking up another offer. In the meantime, while I wait, I've decided to start up another blog. One that deals with my stereoscopic hobby of photography.

It's located at me3d.blogspot.com.

How Nerdy Are You?

While cooking up a TVP casserole... It's an experiment! I was doing a bit of blogging and stumbled across the I Geek Therefore I am site. In the RHS column there's a little graphic that allows you to see how much of a nerd you are. I figured I'd score lower than the blog guy, but no.

Try it out for yourself.

Night of the Living Dead

Gads! It's about 2am. After doing all the beach walking around, I got home and fell asleep, the logic being I would wake up early to reinstall my "loaner" computer so I could use it on the job the next day. Only I went to sleep around 8pm.

My "loaner" computer is a HP celeron PC that I purchased a few years ago pretty cheap. Since buying it, it has been nothing but headaches. Putting more memory into it was a pain in the ass. I had to remove the hard drives and floppy disk to get in there. The floppy drive never worked, the CD drive died and had to be replaced.

For doing your basic officey stuff, word processing, spreadsheet and internet type stuff the computer worked fine but because my demands on a typical computer have always been high this computer didn't last very long. Originally I bought it as a renderer when I was playing around with Animation Master. Eventually the computer was replaced.

This allowed me to lend out the computer or bring it to a production office and let it sit there for use when I needed it. As I haven't been doing freelance work in a while and the previous company I used to work for supplied computers it meant the HP was available to lend out to computerless souls.

In this case the victim was/is a massuse friend of mine. I would label her as normal. She's proficient enough to use the computer, save programs, know how to double click icons to start programs, and has a real non-computer life. She could go on without using a computer for probably weeks if not months. It surprised me too, knowing that there are still people out there.

She decided she didn't require the use of the computer anymore and gave it back. I started to backup whatever she had on it to CD and wipe the drive. Standard procedure. It took over 10 minutes to boot up. I was greeted by MSN and a whole lot of other crap running in the background. While I'm typing this post in the background I've got the recovery CDs running on the HP reformatting the drive and re-installing the basic software.

Wave, Hello!

After dropping off a monitor to the production office (I still do not know if I have a job there or not), I took the Queen streetcar home. While on the streetcar I was reading a book on photographic lighting. I was so engrossed that I missed my stop and found my self at the end of the line near the water treatment plant.

I decided to get out and walk along the beach. Why not it's only -15 degrees (C). I saw some interesting ice formations I thought I'd take a picture. I stood on the shore far enough away, judging by where water was going, and picked a place to shoot. That's when the freak large wave came in. I managed to avoid most of the water which would have been up to my knees easily but my feet didn't quite make it. I was soaked with ice water from the top of my socks down. My feet felt like they were on wet sponges. The water in my shoes eventually warmed up.

Of course this didn't stop me from staying out for another hour to take more pictures and walk home.

Upload This

Gak, It's 5:00am again. This time I didn't get up early. I haven't gone to sleep yet. The job that I've been trying to bid on for the last few days has got me uploading sample animations to the production office. I had to unbackup the files, recompress them into download friendly animations (this took about 4 hours). The resulting files came to just under 10 megs in total. The uploading takes about 10 minutes a megabyte due to the fact that I still use modem technology.

I uploaded them in two seperate emails. I figured the person I was sending them to wouldn't have enough space in his mailbox for all of it. Lucky thing. He didn't. The second half bounced back. I'll have to try again later today when I wake up. I have now put in about three and a half days of work, just trying to get the work. Three and a half days I could be using to do the actual work. ARG!!!

Cold Apartment, Hot Chocolate, Bathroom Tiles

It's 5:00am. My apartment is freezing. I'm actually just getting up as opposed to being up all night. I wasn't really physically active yesterday but I had a five hour meeting that went from 3pm to 5pm. It wiped me out. I went to sleep at 10:30pm (which is really early for me). As a result I woke up at 3:30am. Lingered in bed for about an hour and a half and eventually decided to get out of bed to work on some notes based on yesterdays meeting.

According to my cheapo thermometer it's about 18C (around 68F - the thermometer is not very accurate). To keep warm while working on the computer I've wrapped myself in a blanket and armed myself with a hot chocolate. The only things sticking out are my face and a hand for the mouse. I feel like a hamster (if a hamster were to use a mouse).

Is it just me or do other people think that bathroom tiles should be made of some other substance other than plastic or ceramics that can retain heat as well as be waterproof. I suppose that's what bathroom rugs are for. Only thing is when the rug gets wet you get swamp land. Maybe there's some kind of foam that works like a diaper. Sounds like a job for NASA.

Tips on Eating Vegetarian

Trying to eat better? Trying to date a vegetarian (there are some very attractive vegetarians out there)? Trying to be nicer to animals? Can't afford meat on your low fixed income budget? Want to cut the intake on fatty foods? Well whatever your reason eating vegetarian food is much like eating "regular" food. Don't worry I'm not going to go into all the "propaganda" stuff like saving animals, avoiding steriods, blah... blah, blah... blah, blah...Plants, BTW can have altered DNA as well... like the wheat that requires specific fertilizer. What's with that? The following are pointers for all those interested and are based on my personal experience...

1. It helps to have friends that are vegetarian (ie. Al and Tracy). As when you go to eat any other foods good company is always a plus. While choosing your food, if you're undecided, you can ask what they recommend. Going with a group of people will also allow you to order a larger number of dishes than if you were to go alone, allowing you more variety. Yes you can share dishes.

2. Have an open mind. A lot of people may complain because there's no meat. So what? Chocolate eclairs don't have pork in them (not the ones I eat anyway). Think of eating vegetarian food as just some other kind of food. Don't think it's bad just because it's vegetarian. Some you may like, some you may not. Seems normal enough.

3. Go to a "good" place. As specified earlier, not all vegetarian food has to taste good. Some can be bland, some can be pretty terrible, or too spicey, but like any food it can be good, even great.

4. Don't give up after one go. The first place may actually have been crap. Try a bunch of different places. If at some point you think you've exhausted the different resturants and food types, pat yourself on the back. At least you've tried something new.

For more info and perhaps a bit more propaganda oriented you can go to the Toronto Vegetarian Association.

You can pick your friends... why did you pick these?

The nice thing you can count on with friends... real friends, is that they don't hold back when you do something hair-brained, odd, or in this case boring. The comments from the peanut gallery are fresh and plenty of it. If they're really good friends they'll know when and how to deliver those comments. From blazing speeds of multiple bombardments to the individual one handed verbal slap in the face. The true friends know just how thick to lay it on, depending on your situation, without crossing the line of being a complete bastard who you never want anything to do with again. It's good to have these people help put things in perspective.

When I started telling the friends about the blog I'd get comments like, "...and I thought my life was boring", "now you don't even have to see him in real life.", "If you really want to get inside his head read his blog", "That's ten minutes I'll never get back". It's comments like these that help make this blog better and possibly more interesting.

That's one of the great things about blogs. They don't have to rely on ratings or even an audience to be posted. Just some individual with a bit of time and the gift of blabbing into an open space. That's why I can continue to keep writing and posting what I want despite the barage of comments, knowing that if they're reading this blog then it's interesting enough.

Friends and their Characteristics

Ever read "The Catcher in the Rye"? I did a long time ago and for some reason only remember one character... Ackley. He used to (if memory recalls) go through the main characters stuff, drawers, shelves, picking up things, examining them, putting them back. I have a friend much like this. To a newly introduced person this could seem unsettling. Who is this? Why is he going through your stuff? Does he not have manners, respect things, what's going on are some of the questions that may be asked.

For this individual, the person has a pretty active mind. They're the person that fidgets during movies, seems to be in another place while having conversations, the hamster wheel in the brain is always turning. Aloof.

To keep this person from driving you crazy here are some things you can do... give them stuff to do while you're not around to entertain... (ie. have them talk to someone else in the room or even on the phone). Put stuff out that they are allowed to fiddle with... Lego tends to work very well, as do hole punchers, just have a baggy ready for all the confetti.

Long Day - sub dude

From about noon till about 1:45am, with time out to eat and take a 15 minute walk in the rain to get milk, I spent the day in front of my computer reading a script and making a visual effects/playback breakdown. The script is 106 pages and in there, there's 216 visual effects and playback sequences. I wrote about six and a half pages of notes and will finish up the rest tomorrow morning.

Because the script deals with submarines, I also did some research on Russian subs, American subs, and even the victoria class Canadian submarines. For some reason, with the exception of the recent tragedy (a man dying in Canadian sub a few months ago), I've never been able to imagine Canada with more than a set of tug boats. Perhaps it's because I live in the central part of Canada and do not see "big ships" or the military vessels every day.

As an interesting note, I found that getting information on subs that were stationed anywhere but the US was really easy. Another little piece of trivia is that most submarines can only go as deep as 400 m. Some of the newer ones can go to 600 m (like the Russian Akula class). So if you see a movie or TV show where the sub is 2 km or more down, chances are some writer didn't do his homework. Then again maybe 400 - 600 m is the depth a sub can safely dive.

Which brings me to the question "Why is it that submarine movies always have..."

1. the sub diving to and past crush depths where things (like rivets) start popping out of the walls, pipes break, glass gauges smash and everyone has to wonder if the ship will hold together.

2. someone always dies in the room that was sealed because of the leak (where the rivets were).

3. There's always someone else that has to lock the door on the previous guy (see 2). Also the guy locking the door usually breaks down in tears while watching his friend get drowned through the little window in the door or at the very least touches the glass window in the door with his hand.

4. something wrong with the oxygen (or lack of).

5. a scene where everyone has to be quiet so the enemy sub or destroyer will float by without detecting them.

6. There are no women in submarines that are not just passengers (with the exception of "Up Periscope"). In "Hunt for Red October" there's only one woman in the whole movie, Caroline Ryan, played by Gates McFadden.

7. submarines with dim lighting (with the exception of "the Spy who Loved Me" - I seem to recall the shower scene being well lit).

I thought my eyes were red after that ordeal (the work on the script not the shower scene) so I went to the mirror to look. That's when I got the idea to shoot my eyeball. The things I do for you guys. The on camera flash was too far away from the lens so I took my external flash and held it up to my eye next to the camera lens. Eighty-eight pictures later... volia! (see picture above). Although it's too bad the flash is so apparent in the shot. It would be nice to get that small Nikon ring flash....

Bird or Tribble?

National Geographic's Bird field guide (by Rulon E. Simmons) states that a bird in the winter is easier to sneak up on and take pictures of because they are fluffed up and don't take to flight right away. I can state for the record that this is true. The bird in this picture doesn't even look like it's got a head. If you look closely though you can see it (you may have to enlarge the picture by clicking on it to get a better view).

This picture was taken last saturday at Nathan Phillips Square at the peace flame parkette. I did a lot of following up on different jobs today so no pictures. However one day I'll have to shoot the job bank at Pape and Danforth as it's pretty dismal.

The Spork - Utensil of the GODS

Gads, It's after 6am and I can't get to sleep. I know I'll shoot my spork. That didn't come out right... The geek related utensil was first introduced to me when Kentucky Fried Chicken was not known as KFC. Then somehow once the name changed the spork disappeared and I haven't seen one since... that is until now...

I was looking for christmas gifts a few weeks ago and stumbled across this (see above) spork. Only it's not made of cheap plastic like it's KFC predecessors, it's made of titanium!

The company that makes it is "snow peak" and I'd suppose it's for camping since it's so light. No longer do you have to think about eatting soup like a meal with a spoon or fork. Use a spork! For more trivial knowledge (probably more than you'd really want to know) about this unique eating utensil try going to spork.org.

As a side note a fife (fork knife) also exists. They sell them in Hamstead, London, England along with your crepe. Mmmm crepes...

Quest for Tacos

WARNING - some of this may seem obvious to people

Driven by hunger (yet again) I decided I would try to make Tacos. Not knowing much about mexican cooking I went to the WWW to do some research. I have confirmed that taco shells are the same substance that make up nachos and corn tortillas. The biggest discovery I made is a LOT of recipes on the web for making corn tortillas contain corn tortillas. What the hell?

I also found out that masa harina is corn flour... I think. (masa harina = flour lump) Times like this where I should have an espanol dictionary. maiz = corn I think so I need something that resembles masa harina de maiz. My french and spanish are pretty crap but luckily as a kid I was brain washed by watching sesame street. Who would have known. It's like figuring out School House Rocks actually taught me stuff without me knowing!

I also stumbled across an interesting online store called mexgrocer which I will have to check out in detail later.

I am now baking chicken. Plan B.

Corn Bread: Breakfast of Champions

I woke up this morning freezing. The apartment was cold. My feet felt like ice. Since I was hungry I decided to bake something. I had a Louis Jordan tune stuck in my head for some reason and decided to make corn bread. I found the recipe on Epicurious. Actually there were a bunch of corn bread recipes. I picked the buttermilk version. After baking it, taking pictures (see above), and eating it, I decided I like the recipe in "the Joy of Cooking" more. My brain seems to recall it being sweeter for some reason.

Eye of the Needle

There are stories about passing through the eye of the needle. I think one of the stories had something to do with a camel trying to get to the other side of some doorway. The camel could only go through by itself. It could not carry any baggage and would have to dump everything to proceed through. People carry around a lot of baggage and things as well and perhaps in order to advance we have to let things go.

This sounds like pretty heavy dialogue from a guy who just took a picture of a needle with a lego guy in the background. To be honest I just wanted to take a picture with my macro lens and post it. I can understand now why Nikon makes a speed light that's a small ring around the lens for the 990. This needle was taken at 2cm away from the lens. I couldn't get the flashes in close enough to put the highlights at a 45 degree angle so the needle had to be lit from the side. The Darryl Lego guy was put in the background to show the shallowdepth of field. The needle is 1.1 mm in width. The hole being approx 0.6 mm.

Sunday Cleaning

Today, sunday, being the day of rest, was spent cleaning the apartment. The usual stuff that normal people do. Dust, vacuum, sort through stuff, throw away stuff, etc, etc. Things tend to stay where they are for long periods of time in my apartment then tend to clutter. It's like someone just turns the transporter on full and beams crap into the apartment when I'm not looking. Cleaning and organizing is a big thing for me since I do both rarely and both at the same time once in a blue moon. Geez, I really must've been bored today. Aside from cleaning and organizing I went outside once. To get bread. Other than that I stayed in the whole day.

At about 7pm or so Darryl called saying that he punctured the front tire on his bicycle. He wanted to drop by and borrow my bike pump. I said "sure" with the condition he shows up and leaves before one am. I'm trying to go to sleep at a regular hour. For me, one to two am is good. I have to do a bunch of stuff tomorrow so I want to get up around 7:30 or 8:00.

Up until this point I hadn't even thought of food (another oddity for me) let alone eating. Since I was going to make food for me anyway I figured I'd make extra and I offer to have dinner ready by 11:30pm. I made some quick lemon chicken, some rice, and some steamed vegetables. Only I forgot about the vegetables. Whoops.

Darryl didn't make it to the apartment till about 12:25 and didn't leave till about 3am. You can see Darryl up there in the picture fixing the front of the inner tube by gluing a patch to it. Ack! It's quarter to four. Till the next log...

Employer RANT

A few of my friends were recently laid off as full time employees. They all worked at the same company. They were all not given any notice or severance pay. Unless you count Christmas vaction as severance. They were still not notified that they would be unemployed until the day they were let go. Is this legal?

This seems pretty crappy to me and makes me furious. Bad employer, bad.

Anyone reading this post please post a story about a good employer experience. That would make me feel a bit better knowing the world isn't being walmartified with employers and companys treating their employees as crap just to save a buck.

You know you're fat when...

D'oh!!!! Stupid chair.

The Eightysixers

After waking from a nap (yes another one) the visit to the local job bank left me pretty tired. That coupled with waking up at an alarming 10am! (yes yes 10am isn't that early but read past posts you'll understand why). I got up and started getting my gear ready for what was supposed to be a TFP photoshoot. I need to fatten my photo portfolio so just recently I've offered my photographic services (taking pictures and buring them to CD or printing them out) in exchange for me being able to use the same photos in my portfolio to get other (paid hopefully) work. No money is exchanged. The subject gets photos that would normally cost money and the photographer gets to fatten the old portfolio. It's a win win! Btw, TFP stands for Time For Prints.

It was still early 7:30pm-ish the group didn't go on until 10:30. I ended up going out to the local "Bejing House" for dinner with one of my friends (Marc). Who seemed amazed that I could live by working in the volatile industry I'm in (the film industry). It's true. When I'm working no one sees me. When I'm not working I seem to have way too much spare time on my hands and never enough money. It's a hard industry to get out of. You get used to making lots of money in a short period of time. I guess that's relative. I used to make more more in the eighties by programming that stuff called multimedia. Mind you every program I've written doesn't work on any of the current operating systems that are out there. It's almost like I never existed (work wise). At least with TV/Movies, you can pop a DVD in and force your friends to watch while saying "I worked on that or that's what I've done with my life when you haven't sen me for months on end.". Some people might even recognize a title. Then again maybe not.

Maybe that's why people still do art on canvas or even take photos with film. It's a tactile medium that does not rely on technology being updated to keep it going. That said I realize Microsoft and others have been scanning in art and other things and digitally storing the stuff. One hard drive crash and poof. All gone. At least with books and what not you have to have a really big disaster to destroy everything. With computers all you have to do is wait until the format goes obsolete and someone forgets or selectively excludes the data from being transferred to a newer format. Note: There are actual jobs that exist that entail a person to transfer stuff off old format media and put it on some kind of newer format.

Anyways... 10:30 - The Eightysixers... playing at a local place called Sneeky Dees. I am told they are not a punk band but part of the Dwayne experience (lol). Dwayne being one of the guitarists (second from the left). Some one should note that the web site states that they are a punk band. I wonder if they know this.

I spent the time they were on stage shooting various angles, using multiple flashes. When their set was completed we went outside to take a few pictures of them in the nearby alleyway. Some one said there should be a book on taking pictures of indie bands. There should always be a picture taken of said band in an alleyway. (see above) That would be chapter one. Chapter Two would involve a diner setting. Later on you could move up to shooting the band with bikini girls... unless it's a girl band, then you'd shoot the girl band naked but hiding partially behind strategically placed items.

After a few minutes of shooting and slushing around in the what was once snow I started packing the gear and the band huddled. Upon un-huddling they gave me a wad of cash saying thanks for showing up. I tried to explain to them that this was a TFP and money wasn't supposed to be traded. Dwayne shoved the money into the palm of my hand and said "Take it.". Being unemployed I resisted the urge to say "You're not supposed to pay me" and took the money. I decided on the streetcar ride home that I'd offer to shoot another gig if they wanted to do another one for free. Or at least when I got a better camera I'd offer to do a session for free. ah... one day.

Too bad all people aren't like this.

For more info on this great band, the Eightysixers, click here.

Some of my favorite Blogs

Perhaps I have a lot of free time on my hands or maybe I'm just curious as to how other people think. Maybe a bit of both. That said after getting home from the Job Bank (more on that in some other entry) I decided to log in and check out some of my favorite Blogs.

http://www.yummywakame.com/

daily brain goo - This site is great. It's insightful and charming and it's got a great link to how to train your cat how to use the toilet. I would like to get a cat solely for this purpose (as a test subject) to see if this really works. Unfortunetly, I'm allergic to cats so I did the next best thing and emailed all my cat friends to see if any of them pick up the ball. No one has replied as of yet (It's been a couple of days). From UFOs to banning US goods, there's a whole lot of good stuff to read and be amazed!

http://bittergirlbartender.blogspot.com/

This blog is funny and sad at the same time. Follow the (mis)adventures of a female bartender, laugh, cry, and laugh some more. The situations are sometimes horrific and unsettling but you can't help but read what happens next. You might even tip better and appreciate your local bartender a bit more.

Day 6 - Say Cheese!

I didn't get much sleep last night. Probably from stuffing myself with food. Going to the dentist came with a restriction of not eating any food for eight hours prior to showing up at the office. I kept waking up, blogged a bit, trying to go to sleep, getting up... This continued until about 6am. I finally fell fast asleep around 8am and was waken up at 10:30 by my friend, Zee, who wanted to know if I wanted to meet him later in the evening for dinner. Since my appointment was at 1:30 I decided to get out of bed and make my way outside.

Ugh! There was snow everywhere. I trudged up to Kiri's place where I met her... I managed to rope her into going with me. If surgery was nessessary I was told to have a friend available to get me home (or at least push me into a cab to take me home). Since Kiri wasn't working until 4:30 and worked in the area of my specialists office she seemed the logic choice.

I waited in the bright white waiting room for about an hour. Why it is that all medical offices smell the same? Most of the time taken up by reading People magazine and noticing how some travel magazines have only 20 pictures of destinations and places and the rest of the magazine is filled with ads. By about 2:30 I was called into the office where I got two X-rays only to find they couldn't get the film far enough back into my mouth to take any pictures that were useful. A slightly fed up the assistant dressed in a blue smok, cheerfully walked me over to a large contraption hidden in the corner of the office (next to the coat rack). It was a full head scanner! Wowee! You put your head into a brace while bitting down on a plastic bit. An electronic arm whirrs around your head as it scans in your whole jaw. Very cool.

They then sat me down in other office where I sat for about another 40 minutes. During this time I manged to take a few (maybe 20 or 30) pictures of the jaw X-ray with my digital camera. The X-ray was a bit blurry so taking a non blurry photo was a bit of a challenge (see above).

Because my jaw has not been giving me any pain for the last two and a half weeks, I decided not to get my tooth extracted. It would have been $467. If I pulled all three remaining teeth they would have charged me somewhere around $960.00. Eeek. That is why you should always have a dental plan. The surgery would have taken about half an hour for all three. One of the side effects if the operation went sour would have been my nerve to my lip would have been severed and I would lose all feeling in my lip. Even though the dentist said it was a remote possiblity I thought of it like losing a limb and I wanted to get the heck out of there as quickly and as calmly as possible.

I did just that. Paid the $100.00 ($50 for the walk in and $50 for the X-ray), walked Kiri to the nearest food place (in this case MARS diner) and inhaled a chicken burger (sorry to all you vegetarian friends out there - if it makes you feel better most of it was breading and hardly any chicken). After walking her to the YMCA where she works, I walked down to Yonge street where I spent some time in a dollar store looking at all the valentine's day junk, then to a video game store that sold old super nintendo cartridges. After that I walked on down to Monster Records where I spent a good chunk of time talking to the owner, Roger. I interrupted a conversation he was having with some other "customer" about a script that said customer wrote. Roger looked kinda of bored. He told me the day at work had been a bit slow due to the blizzard mentioned on the radio that never showed.

Monster Records
664 Yonge street, Toronto, Ontario

I highly recommend going there if you're buying collectors toys, posters, used books, records, pins, buttons, CDs, DVDs, and even laserdiscs (from time to time). Tell em Derek sent you, then duck out of the way as Roger tries to slap you in the face. They have a model of the SHIELD ship hanging in the back from thier ceiling. It's from the tv movie where David Hasselhoff played Nick Fury (was in based on the Marvel comic - ed). I realize this is a obvious ad and I was kidding about the face slap.

Once the chatting started dying down I said "goodbye" and went over to the sushi garden resturant, met up with Zee, his wife Juley, and the oddball friend Colin. Zee and juley bought us dinner as a christmas present and probably to some degree felt sorry that I was out of work. What would I do without friends? Thanks guys... you're special indeed. :-> As for Colin... he "conveniently forgot" to go the bank machine and had only five bucks on him. I shouldn't really rib Colin as his girlfriend might be reading this... "Colin is an outstanding individual that has lent out his couch and apartment numerous times to people in need."

After going over to Colins, watching a bit of the Simpsons I made my way home where I am now posting this thing.

Day 5 - the hunt is on

So today was a bit odd. I wanted to wake up early to go to the employment office to look for work but instead found myself waking up at noon. I guess that's what happens when you go to sleep at 5am. I got an email saying my last cheque was ready so I took the transit to go pick it up. On my way there I decided to get my hair cut. I have found over the years that it's easier to find work if you don't look like a shrub. My hair doesn't get long. It tends to poof out like one of those play doh toys.

Once at work I backed up my stuff of "my" computer and disassembled the peripherals I brought to work over the last few months to take home. Stuff taken included a pair of speakers, a compact flash card reader, a serving bowl (which I used to use to heat up lunches in the microwave) made of glass with lid. Turns out that plastic is not good in mircowaves as it gives off dioxins. So I do not use any type of plastic (in microwaves) microwave proof or not.

Leaving a job is always a sad thing at least in part. Even if you hated aspects of the job there are always those people you leave behind that you miss. The friendly goofball, the workaholic, the "teacher", the "student", the attractive female.

Once home I started creating a list of things I have to do tomorrow. Job positions I'm going to apply to, mail I have to send (I still have a rebate thingy I have to send for my printer), places I have to go to. One of these places is the dental specialist. I have to get a wisdom tooth out (my lower left one). About three weeks ago I had shooting pain that lasted about three days. I'm not sure if my jaw just got used to it or if it went away. But anyhow I guess I'll find that out tomorrow. One of the things that kind of got to me was that the dentist told me to bring someone. I thought "Hey yeah, maybe they could take pictures of the whole thing.", then realized I'd be drugged up and they probably don't want me to be lounging around their front door step, gobbing all over myself, with my face stuffed with cotton. Oooh yes that's a pretty sight.

Today also marks the first day I'm using a bloggerbot to upload images. My first test image is me. It was taken around 2:30 with my Nikon 990 and an external SB-800 flash. It took me a while to get a shot that was in focus. I have found my camera doesn't like to focus on faces when you're less than a meter away. Someone told me that it's because the camera needs vertical lines to focus on. This seems to hold true. So I had to go into manual focus. Incidently my arm length is roughly 60 cm when holding the camera toward my face. Why Nikon stopped production on swival cameras I'll never know. Unless you have an SLR, a swival camera is the greatest thing since the Amiga (made defunct in 1993).

I tried going to sleep at midnight but woke up needing a glass of water. I'll have to buy a humidifier one of these days. Yikes it's after 3:30. Well got to go hit the hay. Tomorrow is a big day.

Day 4 - Happy New year! You're unemployed!

So today I found out officially that I'm unemployed. Yippee. I say that with great sarcasm. I got up at 8:00am which is very early for me. I sent an email to the office checking on when I'd be going back. I didn't get any calls over the holidays and figured I'd hear from someone by now. I can't say that being laid off is a surprise. When I last left my boss told me not to work over the christmas weeks and take time off. Usually he's a slave driver so I kinda knew something was up.

I went off to the not so local employment office. I deliberately went to an office not in my area. As the one that's located as Pape and Danforth is pretty grey and depressing. The people working there kind of remind me of zombies. Instead I went uptown to the cheerful, happy, employment office located at St. Clair and Yonge. I figured I could spend the morning filing through forms, then when done could take a walk on down yonge street and enjoy the fresh air. It was pretty nice out today. The sun was shining and it's wasn't very cold. Eventually I got to College street and became lazy so I took the street car home.

Once home I went to bed to take a nap, when my friend Darryl called. He was looking for porn music, or music for some porn movie he did that he was trying to sell to some local production. Darryl doesn't make real porn per se. It's more comedy than "insert tab A into slot B" kind of stuff. He has a festival about once a year. The last one had about 550 - 600 people show up. You can find out more by going to his web site at http://www.hardliquorandporn.com.

I have some music generator software that I didn't think would have any appropiate music, It's the Lego studios kit I bought a few years ago, but we were in a pinch. I generated 10 minutes of music that we never used. In the end he gave the production a version with no soundtrack. He figured he'd let them worry about it.

I ended up taking that two hour nap and woke up four hours later. I decided to sew up this little belt I have for my tripod. My tripod has a shoulder strap. It also has a very heavy swivel head. When you sling the tripod over your shoulder the tripod head pull the tripod so that it's upside down. To remedy this I bought a tiny click belt from Mountain Equipment co-op and placed it around the head and around the strap. This changes the center of gravity of the tripod and it stays put. Confused? The belt kept coming apart as the belt part slips out of the clicky plastic part a lot. My solution was to sew the belt to the clicky part. Which I never got around to until today.

The rest of my day went to cooking leftovers, eating and going through my photo database cataloging photos I've taken over this last year. You can see some of these photos on Darryl's site. They're the ones with a yellow cast to them.

Day 3

Today is Monday and being such the city, at least most of it, is still on vacation in lieu of saturday being News Years and all. I managed to wake up at 10:30am today. I promised a friend (Lisa) that I'd help her back up her computer today. Actually it's a laptop based on a pentium II with no USB ports. Originally I was going to use my trusty PCMCIA adapdter to copy everything onto a few compact flash cards. Her drive is only 2 gigabytes.

The problem is that the hard drive is pretty full and windows 95 is starting to crash more frequently. Upgrading her to 98 is possible but we don't have any of the original CDs that came with the laptop to get any of the IBM drivers. I'll have to check the web site. The solution ended up being a parallel port compact flash reader which I picked up for under $20.00. (Lisa if you're reading this I really don't want you paying for this). It works like a charm. I managed to back up about 200 megs. Mostly old email.

That was pretty much my day today. From 12 to 12, trying to read a PCMCIA card that wouldn't work to going off to a sale that I saw last week during boxing day, back to her place, then back to the store. Turns out one of the pins was bent in the first drive I picked up. Then back to her place. They should use compact flash as a floppy drive replacement (IMHO)

The first time I used a compact flash was for my now outdated Psion 5. What a great little PDA it is. You can program it, it has a keyboard and a touch screen, it multitasks, and takes two AA batteries, with a CR-2032 lithium watch battery as a backup (so you don't lose anything when changing the AAs). It's like a palm only bigger and geekier.

Day 2

Another quiet day. It's sunday the day after the "beginning" or Day 1 of 2005. I managed to wake up before 3 pm today. A really nasty habit I've gotten into. The sleeping in thing that is. I didn't really have much to do today so I spent most of the day cleaning the apartment and rolling loose change.

Over the past year and a bit I've dumping whatever pocket change I've had into a rubbermaid plastic tub located in the corner of my room. Since I didn't get any christmas gifts for me this year I thought I'd count the change and see how close I could get to getting a nikon d70. To my surprise I only require another 1,200 dollars plus tax, which in this city is another 15%.

Other things to keep me busy was laundry, moving Lego out of the living room, and drilling hole into a white translusent plastic bowl by hand (as I don't own a drill but have a tool and dye set). The drilling took about 45 minutes. The bowl, which I bought at a dollar store near my apartment, was made of soft plastic. The drill pit however was about as dull as a butter knife. It really does pay to buy good hardware when you can. The right tool for the right job and all that.

If you're reading this you're probably wondering what the hole in the bowl is for. Well maybe you're not. The hole in the bottom of the bowl is so I can shoot tiny items with my camera using diffused lighting. The bowl is placed upside down over the object and the camera lens goes through the hole. By adding a light or in this case a flash at the side of the bowl the inside becomes rather evenly lit. It's just another crazy experiment I wanted to try after seeing that they actually make "bowls" for photography only they're a few hundred dollars. Since I'm only doing this as an experiment I figured $1.15 wouldn't be too bad to invest.

I ended up seeing "the Incredibles" again with my friend Marc, who I still can't believe has not seen that movie until today. Must be an age thing. Getting older and don't care if you see a movie on opening night anymore. Or maybe we just have too much in our lives these days and seeing a movie is just time out of "the schedule"?

Gads it's past 2am. I'm going to force myself into going to sleep "earlier" tonight.

New Years Day

The first day of the new year is always an odd day. People are still sleeping from the night before and stores are generally closed. The streets are vacant and the internet is really fast which seems a bit abnormal to me. I didn't get out of bed until about 3pm today, only to be greeted by the grey cloud filled sky. Almost makes me want to go back to sleep.

I finally started to clean my Lego piles from out of my living room. There's been an assortment of pieces in specific piles since late october when I filmed a small film for a friends movie festival. I've been pretty bad at moving the stuff but figured being the new year and all I might as well start by doing something semi-productive.