Shrimp and Lobster sauce on rice

Swatow's number 111A. Shrimp and Lobster sauce on rice.

Today being my birthday and the only day of the week that I've managed to get work I still managed to stay out late. After leaving work around 7pm I ended up wandering around queen street seeing what there was to be seen. Went to see the 40 year old virgin at the Paramount. It's a rental. Eventually I ended up at Neutral. A bar just south of College on Augusta that happened to feature punk bands that night. As it was only 10:30 no one was on stage yet.

Deciding that I was hungry I went over to Darryl's to see if he wanted to grab some dinner. I ended up watching some of the new film entries for the porn fest this coming friday. One of them being the final edit of Origasmi, the film by Jill that I helped out on. Whaddya know? It turned out alright and it's even funny. Who knew?

Eventually Darryl and I found ourselves at Swatow. I ordered the Shrimp and lobster sauce on rice dish. If I had a favorite I suppose that would be one of them. Darryl paid for my birthday meal with three minutes to spare (before midnight). He went back to work on the festival and I headed back to Neutral to shoot the punk group "The Threat".

King's Cafe

King's Cafe (192 Augusta avenue)

Somewhere in Kensington market, at the King's Cafe to be presice, Al coordinated a pre-birthday dinner. My birthday is tomorrow but I'm working and really didn't know if I'd have time to actually do anything tomorrow. As a result Al decided to invite a few friends over to the King's Cafe (one of my favorite resturants) to celebrate.


Charlotte and Darryl do the birthday bop.

The food was great as usual and it was made complete with a really cheesy recorded version of "happy birthday" sung in Chinese by some happy women/girls. See above Darryl and Charlotte moving to the hap, hap, happy music.

The Jane Luk Cycle

Jane Luk cycles through the picture taking process.

Today I met up with Jane, a very talented actor/comedian/improv person. I had taken a bunch of pictures last week at the Bad Dog Improv Gala and needed to get the DVD of images to her.

While at Lick's (the local burger joint) I took some pictures. Below is my interpretation of the picture cycle.

Stages of picture taking...

1. what is that a camera? again?
2. Ah well might as well smile.
3. still smiling. hello? Are you going to shoot?
4. smiling is starting to hurt, are you still shooting?
5. can't control laughter.
6. continued from stage 5.
7. Getting under control.
8. Okay that's it. Stop shooting now.

The mouse that crossed the road

The mouse

Tonight I was on my way to a funeral when something on the ground caught my eye. It was a little mouse running out of a variety store. It ran right through traffic right in front of me and then attempted to get into the building across the street. Having the camera out I decided to follow it's progress while waiting for the streetcar. It was a bit humourous as it tried to jump into the hardware store by hopping up and down against the glass door. If the glass hadn't been there it would have made it in. It moved on to a drain pipe, then a corner of a door. No success. In ran back and forth up and down the street until it saw some pedestrians and ran back toward me crossing the street one more time.

The above picture was taken just before a car blocked my view. The driver completely unaware of the mouse's presence squished it while slowing down for a red light. I shot a picture of the aftermath and for some reason the car plates. It wasn't pretty. At least the mouse went swiftly.

The funeral I attended was for the father of one of my dad's friends. As I really didn't know him well, since I was a kid at the time, I do recall some watching the television with him while visiting their home. As with the mouse you really never know how much time one has on this planet. The important thing is to remember the person and all the good memories they've given you.

Joe Sinkiewiez. Born June 16, 1921. Died September 22, 2005

mouse born:?? Died September 25, 2005 19:03

I will miss them both.

Know when to fold em.

Jill Rosenberg with "Joe" the origami lead in "Origasmi"

Since Wednesday of last week, between sleeping and getting my virus ridden computer back to normal I've been helping out Jill. She's been working on her short, "Origasmi", for this friday's hard liquor and porn film festival. We've been working out of a basement in a room that belongs to the Toronto Animated Image Society. Yes, the same overly sensitive small minds that banned my film at the naughty animation festival.

Despite their short comings they do provide a bunch of low tech equipment for making a short animated piece. It looks like most of the stuff should be in a garage somewhere collecting dust. There's a multiplane station for drawings as well as an assortment of used light tables and computers. There's even an Amiga 500, 2000, and 3000 that seem to be neglected in the corner.

It seems that I haven't really animated anything in the last year. Actually 11 months ago was the last time I shot a film, to be specific "Macho Baby!". I'll have to shoot something again for myself one of these days. I just need an idea.

for more info on Darryl's film fest click here

My life flashes through my hard drive

The Gaelicum.A virus finally gets booted off my computers.

After almost a week of trying to recover my photo drive, the 300 gig hard drive that houses almost half a million photos (see picture above), I have finally come to a point where things are back up and running. Sure there's still a few glitches in Windows. example: I don't remember having to use regedit to get windows to see large drives (hard drives over 128 Gigs) and for some reason Windows will not read all my DVD data disks. It did before the reinstall. But not now. How odd.

Luckily I didn't lose one picture. Knock on wood. I've got to finish backing up the stuff I've taken since May (of this year) still. It's interesting that it's always when something goes wonky you tell yourself "Gee, If I only backed that stuff up". This particular virus is pretty nasty in that it attaches itself to executable files then spreads to others both on your local drives and over the network. Thanks our friends at Grisoft you can download a free program to get rid of the nasty thing. The executables don't survive however. I lost Panavue 3, a free upgrade of software I downloaded recently.

A lot has happened in the last week. I'm not sure whether to fill in what's happened using past dates for entries or just skip it.

A worm ate my drive

Aaaaaaahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!

While working on this low budget show I managed to get infected with a virus that likes to attach itself to executables. Running some virus software to get rid of the virus deleted some files. One of which tells windows how to support larger than 128 gig hard drives. Once the file was gone Windows decided it would try to "fix" my fat table because all the files were "screwed" up. This resulted in me losing all my pictures I've taken since May 2005. I would have lost more files but I've been too lazy to delete the older ones from the other computers (thank goodness for that).

Needless to say. This last week I've been dealing with trying to rebuild the drive while trying to work on this low budget project.

Will be back and running soon.

If anyone knows how to reinstate the drive reading under windows 2000 service pack 4, roll up 1, let me know.

Jane's Birthday

Jane makes a birthday wish

Continuing the birthday tradition of cake, presents, and meeting up with people. Tonight a bunch of us were invited to Jane's birthday at a small restuarant call "Masa". Located west of the corner of Dundas and Bathurst. The resturant was extremely humid. Bad air circulation I guess. The food was good.

Nickle and Dime

For the last few days I've been trying to get work with a company that's known for being very "thrifty". We'll the call the company cheapCo. At the begining of the year I did some work doing a breakdown on a script , went to various meetings and thought I had work. CheapCo kept telling me to show up to followup meetings.

In the end CheapCo went with another company (we'll call Buddy). The thing that made me a little pissed off was that I didn't find out through CheapCo that I wasn't working. I found out through Buddy who in the end used my breakdown to do the work. Did I get paid for the breakdown? No. Unfortunately that's how our business works. We have to do a breakdown in order to figure out how much work is involved so we can give an accurate quote.

So why am I trying to get work from this company? To be honest, they have work to give, I'm not working on anything else, and strategically it helps a friend (at least it helps in his mind) who does work that relates to the work I do. He gets work, we get work and vice versa. It's a small gig and might last a week or so. So why not? I did a break down.

That was a big ass mistake. I got back comments like "What! you want how much?", "We can't afford that.", and my personal favorite "How about if you do it for 20% less and deliver it in half the time? Then in the end you'll be making more money by the hour." Perhaps if I padded the heck out of the quote it might have been a viable solution. But I didn't. Mental note for next time: Pad the quote. Especially for cheap bastards.

I understand the mentality of a manager type "We must get as much work as we can for a little money as possible.". There are those that are good at haggling over price. I'm not one of them. Going into a job I will determine the cost of doing the job based on a number of things.
1) how have my dealings with the company in the past been
2) how badly do I need work
3) difficulty (is this new stuff that needs researching or can I do the job blindfolded)
4) how badly do I want to work for them (the company hiring)
5) work load (number of hours required)

Usually if the first rule is not up to standards I make a decision incorporating rule two, unless of course the company is so repulsive then that superceeds everything else and I try to avoid them like the plague.

I'm fed up with dealing with compnaies like CheapCo. I told them I wasn't dropping my fees. It's not like my landlord charges less rent if I'm not at home. (That said my landlord is great). CheapCo said they'd get back to me.

Leona's Birthday

Leona with hindi movies on three DVDs.

Noon at the Wish resturant we had brunch and celebrated Leona's birthday. The weather was pretty nice and the venue was pretty good. They didn't rush us out and the food wasn't too bad. Surprisingly, there was meat food on the menu. Not bad since Tracy the vegetarian and active member of the toronto vegetarian society picked the restaurant.

Considering four of the seven that showed up were vegetarians ordering meat made me feel a bit guilty. but not guilty enough as I ordered the green eggs and ham (yes like the Dr. Suess food).