Category: Life

Though I haven’t updated this site in a week, I’ve been hard at work on a few others:

• www.thompsonwatch.com
• www.cfsckingrocks.com

School is also starting up soon (Thursday), and I’m still working full time. Lots of things need to be organised for the upcoming school year.

Tonight, after a meeting, I walked around downtown. Ended up nearby a concert that my university had set up for Frosh Week. So I decided to take some footage of the band. The group itself it was “Les Cowboys Fringants”. To note that this type of music [skaa… French Skaa… Canadian French Skaa…Canadian Quebecquer French Skaa…] isn’t for everyone.

Quick Snippet of Cowboy Frigant Concert #1 (~5.5MB)
Quick Snippet of Cowboy Frigant Concert #2 (~7.5MB)

Our family went out to see “March of the Penguins” today. We payed $45CDN – $30 for the tickets (there were 3 of us), and $16 for a bag of popcorn and three drinks.

Well, the movie was swell. It’s a 1.5 hour documentary on the life of a penguin tribe in the Antarctic. Was it worth the $45? Nah – not really. Don’t get me wrong – it was a good movie. Just not the $45. (Overall Rating: 7.9/10).

But what I found interesting, is that before the movie I was treated to 5 minutes worth of television ads. I clocked it with my watch. Five. Whole. Minutes. That doesn’t even count the advertisements for up-and-coming new movies.

Here I am, we payed $45… certainly we deserve to get an ad-free experience? I mean, do they really need the extra money that these advertisements can generate?

I remember a time (few years ago) when such ads for Mazda, Coke, Pepsi did not exist. You got in, watched the trailers for new films, and got to the movies. Films were cheaper too, at $6 a person. So what has changed? Why suddenly are we paying much more than the increase due to inflation? And so insulted by feeding us ads like that?

Soon – mark my words – movies will cost $15 per person, and will be interrupted by ads throughout the movie. Like television today. Mark my words.

No wonder piracy is increasing. Spending money to watch ads – really.

The MPAA has often been citing examples of commercial piracy to back up their lawmaking crusades against intellectual property theft. Its destroyed the concept of “fair use” and “commercial appeal” in the process.

So it was to my surprise when I saw a chart that showed that North America wasn’t this big-evil hub of commercial piracy, as one would expect it to be listening to the ramblings of the MPAA.

I’ve connected to 17 different Battlefield 2 servers. I’ve been kicked out 17 times within 30 seconds of play due to “lost connection”. That figure is not an exaggeration, and I’ve yet to succesfully find a playable server. Spending an hour just to connect to a game is not my idea of fun, and my ISP is to blame for this one. The router has been reset to factory conditions (with the ports forwarded to the right spots and everything) so that eliminates that.

This is really, really, really, REALLY starting to irritate me.

Update: Of course, it took multiple retries just to put this post on the net. DNS errors everytime. I… want… to… kill…

Update: This is now server 24 that has let me play for 2 minutes before promptly kicking me out due to connection problems. I wanted to go to Google to search to see if I was the only one – but Rogers resolving Google was just too much to ask. So of course – that didn’t work.

Life is full of idealistic views; and realistic views.

Childhood is consumed by idealism, shielded we are from the real. We are taught things such as “It isn’t the end that matters, its the journey to that end.”

High School, through both a growth in maturity and beaurocracy, exposes one to the realistic side of things. Innocence is lost that way. This is where we realise that the journey really never mattered, at least according to many, but rather it was the end. It didn’t matter that you studied for a test for 10 hours straight… what mattered was your mark. It didn’t matter that someone could boost their marks %40 by simply using a Powerpoint presentation, regardless of content. I took much advantage of this, revelling in its hypocracy.

What I realise now is that… though the journey never mattered to them, it matters to me. Going into this third year of university, I will no longer aim for the marks. No. I aim for the life in between these exams. Live it up!

I will live up to this. I won’t allow myself to have a forgettable existence like I’ve led the last 2 years…