Hergest Ridge

At last, my new dinning room is complete! Wish I had a before and after pic, but all I have is the new one. All of this – table, chairs, place mats and chair pads – for under a hundred bucks. How sweet is that?

I’m looking at taking some classes at the University of Winnipeg this fall. I started out thinking about graphics, design, and journalism, but have expanded my considerations to include creative writing courses.

I can waddle my way through basic to moderate graphics and design, but am looking at getting more formal education to ease my process along. So much of my current process is trial and error, I’m often left in tears from frustration. Graphics courses alone won’t help that much with design directly, but I’m aware that there are some graphic design rules that could improve my overall design. Besides, how cool would it be to draw your own little creatures, icons, and worlds?

With journalism, we’re talking a rather large undertaking, which I’m fine with. I’m not looking at jumping industries with my work, just improving my process and the end results. The journalism classes would help with the Internet Marketing aspect, I think.

Creative writing – the new kid on the thought block – came into my consideration with the increased amount of writing I’m doing as of late. Again, I’d like to discover some tricks of the trade, and things to avoid. One of my upcoming entries already has about six hours invested into it. Research and finding sources were a large part, but the entry is not yet complete and already longer than anything else I have published here.

I have some time to think about the concept of further education, and for doing more research on it, but I expect that sometime around fall I’ll be attending classes. 12 years of public school and awaiting the end, and now I’m eager to pay for more education. George Bernard Shaw was right when he said ‘The folly of youth is wasted on the young’. If only I could see today, that which I’ll see 10 years from now…

Jumping the classes train-of-thought, I picked up a 5 disc boxed set released in honour of Mozart’s 250th birth anniversary. I’m on the second listen of the second disc, but instantly recognised the melody of the fifth track: Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. Yup, history tells us that at the age of four or five, Mozart wrote a piece which is known as “Andante in C for Keyboard”, and today is most recognised as the melody to the nursery rhyme. Makes all I’ve done so far feel like really not enough, but I digress.

Monday night I went to bed around 23:00. That is I fell asleep at about 22:30, and woke up again minutes after 23:00 to turn off the lights and officially call it a day. I was awake by 7:00, and watched cartoons in bed for an hour before getting up. I even had terrific dreams – the average individual would find my regular dreams quite disturbing – despite the fact that the last thing I saw was CBC’s news coverage of the Virgina Tech massacre, “… the worst campus shooting in American history”.

With the warmer weather, I’ve decided to start jogging again. This is the perfect time for jogging, when the bugs aren’t yet out, and the weather is still cool.

First time around my body screamed ‘Bloody Murder’ fifty paces into the jog, but I managed to overpower the desperate desire to collapse and never ever move another muscle again. By day three – today -, the experience feels a bit less like suicide. Lets see how long I can keep this up before my feet get too sore to continue (No, I am not pushing myself too hard. The bad feet are strictly a result of two years at a metal plant without proper shoes. Yes, I could use better shoes for jogging, and that’ll be taken care of in the next few days.).

I’ve started on ‘my book’ a few days ago. Got a bit discouraged after re-reading the first few pages, but I think I do have something there to work with (read: so far I didn’t scrap anything). I jump around with my ideas a bit too much, and I have the impression that to those outside of the experience, it all will be too chaotic. I’m thinking of fleshing out what I currently have, and putting in some good, hopefully ‘poetic’ bridges. To me, the whole text so far sounds very utility like. I need to learn to play with words a bit more!

The kitchen table is 100% complete, a feat I am proud of. I picked up the table Thursday night. By Sunday night, I’ve gone through exchanging a broken piece, assembling everything, purchasing and painting a coat of stain on the chairs, two on the table, and cleaning up after everything.

Like most guys, I tend to start a project and abandon it when it reaches about 80% completion. Not this time. Nope. Even had to get a new screwdriver to finish the job – special trip to the Dollar Store was made, and a $3 purchase was made. Isn’t that some sort of false advertising?!? Anyway, the whole ‘completing a project’ feels so good, I’m thinking of making it a habit. No tripping over, or working around unfinished details for seven and a half months before finally tossing in the towel and completing the damn job. What a brilliant concept!

Next up is taming the balcony. Cleaning out the flower pots, chiseling six months of grime off of the outdoor furniture, vacuuming the bits and pieces of god knows what (there are a lot of god knows whats that floated down to the floor from god knows where). Lets see if I can get all that done with the momentum I’ve achieved with the kitchen table…

I caught myself typing “If I ever have kids” earlier day. A few years ago I would have said “When I have kids”. I pondered for a minute what this may mean and came to the very quick conclusion that through knowing a bit more about life, I am less sure of many things.

Knowledge is like the laws of a society: if defined down to the last detail, it’s easily circumvented and serves no useful purpose. For law to be effective, it has to address a moral stance, not specific details that may or may not apply in unforeseen circumstances.

By the same virtue, knowledge needs to be broad and often ambiguous. The more details you throw into it, the less it will apply to real life situations you may encounter down the road. With excessive details it becomes brittle and proprietary.

The words I used today are not a sign of confusion, but a sign of understanding that life is mostly gray. When and if you think you figured something out, that’s when you’re about to be proven that it ain’t always so. You can know that you will never really know much of anything. It works and makes perfect sense as “Never say never” does.

Diving up from the depths of thought, I’m off to enjoy lunch at my brand new kitchen table. The thought of being more excited about a new piece of furniture than owning the latest video game is still – after all these years – taking a bit of getting used to. Frankly, I hope I never do.

If you’ve missed the Canes Commercial Awards, here are some of the best commercials from the latest Cannes Lions. I’m naming them descriptively, without spoilers.

Amazing – Alzheimers – Language – Trashing – Big Ad – Recrear – Winner – JumpIn’ – Fly – Oops! – Death – Toyota – Vodafone – Emperor – Underwater – Coke – Starburst – Puppy – Bunny Alien, Pulp Fiction, Shining, Exorcist, Titanic, Jaws, Star Wars – Bangkok Wheel, Twister, Robbery

There are a couple more I remember, but are hard to find online. Will do an update if I end up finding them.

The following are memorable past years winners, and other great adverts I found during my searches for this year’s list.

Food – Mirror – Heaven – VW Golf – Becel – Introduction

At last the Web Design and Internet Marketing entries have been moved out of SimpleBlog. You’ll now find them over at the main Bytech website, in the ‘DIY Website and Branding Tips’ section. Business and pleasure separated at last… well, at least when it comes to the blog categories.

Ibuprofen is disappearing from the medicine cabinet like ice on a hot summer day. I’m beginning to wonder if maybe I’m starting to get addicted to the stuff. Never was one for painkillers, but last few weeks I needed to concentrate on too many things to have aches slow me down. Time to start keeping a closer eye on the little red pill use, just to be on the safe side.

Thoughts and ideas for new skin designs – mainly WordPress ones – are floating around in my mind. I bought some credits on StockExpert and browsed their selection extensively, which got my creative juices flowing. Designing the skins is easy enough and fun; It’s the subsequent support and upgrades that are holding me back. Underlying software patches which in turn require skin updates are at par with dentist drills.

What are people thinking when they reply “But they’re good for you” in response to, say, “I don’t like red peppers”?

Browsing a blog or two, I opted to leave a comment on a couple Blogger powered journals. Google has always been at the forefront of usability and interface design, but someone was sleeping at the helm when the comment section testing was in progress. As if a pop-up wasn’t annoying enough, the little window ends up displaying seemingly random portions of the content, for which endless scrolling is the main cure. Unless I have some personal connection to the individual to whom the blog belongs, if powered by Blogger I will from now avoid the comments section entirely.

Modest Mouse has released a new album, “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank”. My sweetie picked up a copy for me the other day, a nice surprise. As soon as I opened the jewel case and laid eyes on the disc, I had a good feeling about the sound about to fill my apartment. The disc looks near identical to “Good News For People Who Love Bad News” – definitely one of my Modest Mouse favs.

If food needed pleasing you’d suck all the seasoning off! are the first lyrics of the CD. What an imagination and dexterity with language these guys have! The track is preceded and supported by drunken accordion sounds, which all beautifully paint the ship theme established by the album title. Accordion, fiddle, and rhythmic clapping, it’s all there and it’s a party!

Part of the official album promo is the visually rich single, Dashboard. You’ll catch it along with the video at YouTube. Rumour has it that the video cost a cool million to produce.

Within the first half a minute into the latest Modest Mouse release, you know that this ain’t a piece for the cloth-eared nincompoop. If Indie rock is your type of sound, you need to check out “We Were Dead Before the Ship Even Sank”.

Someday you will die somehow and some things gonna steal your carbon!
Here’s one to being alive until the ship’s hulls are full of water, and our numbers are up. Cheers!