So in a follow up to the cottage entry where I experienced more than my usual share of injury, I’ve finally made some progress with my right big toenail, in that it has finally been extracted.

See, the injury happened mostly on the right hand side of the nail, there was still living connected nailbed on the left side, and I was worried what would happen if it healed like that, where it would form a sort of giant hangnail where the dead nail was connected to the right with fresh nail and to the left with old nail. So I resolved to try to get the whole thing to disconnect so it could heal completely without complication.

So after a couple of weeks of playing with it, the last bit that was hooked down the side came free, to some discomfort, and rather a lot of bleeding. I washed the nail and put it back on, to guide the growth of new nail, and to protect it a bit, but the thing does still weep nasty fluid, but it should be okay.

I have pictures (I would have put pictures of the actual cottage trip up, but I screwed that up to, another time perhaps).

Shot 1, the toe at rest with nail, grossness factor 0.2, just looks like a dead nail
Shot 2, the toenail being pulled out, grossness factor 0.6, but can’t see anything yet
Shot 3, the damaged nailbed, grossness factor 0.9, icky, viewer/sana’a discretion advised
Shot 4, the nail alone in hand, grossness factor 0.7, just the nail, mostly clean

I’m going to a cottage in a couple weeks time, I wonder which bits will fall off me next

I used to think “no one is going to hotlink off me, my stuff is so esoteric, no need to think about it” but somehow people find my stuff and then hotlink the hell out of it. Myspace is quite bad for that, 13 year old girls posing as 18 year olds and 40 year old guys posing as 13 year olds post lots of stuff, ripping off other sites. As long as the drain is minimal, I don’t mind so much, but for me, if I want to share something, I’ll upload a copy of it, since hotlinking is mean.

Finally tracked down this one guy who was hurting me a bit, by linking one of my damn movies from the junk directory. I wasn’t sure where it was coming from exactly since the referal page never had it, but I kept getting reports from this referer that it was being linked.

I finally found it, on a sub page, and I never spotted it before since it’s a bunch of pictures, and a bunch were broken. So I viewed the source and searched for my domain. The guy freakin linked an mpg in an IMG tag, so it was always broken, but it still touched my server for the bandwidth.

I changed the name of the file (it was the locker animation I had done for my brother’s business way back), it was called fulllocker.mpg, now it’s full_locker.mpg. I decided to see if I could do something else with that, cause now I get 404 errors reported from this hotlink, so I decided to fill it in with an image file, renamed to fulllocker.mpg. Fun stuff.

The obligatory links:
What he wanted, the movie file (for fun)
What he gets, the image file (renamed back to gif for this post so you don’t need to mess with the browser settings, but referenced in an IMG tag this works fine as .mpg extension)

I haven’t had much going on lately, at least that I feel I should be blogging.. er, journalling…. er, not-journalling about. But recently I’ve made a couple little 3d animations for my brother for wedding video’s he’s been editing. I don’t know what some of these people expect, I mean, he’s like no time to do any real editing, basically take the sometimes massive amounts of footage, crop out the crap (5 minutes on either side of “I do”) and get it on DVD, that is, if he expects to make a positive dollar per hour amount on anything.

But he’ll get someone who says “Oh, I want butterflys flying past the screen during the ceremony” or something. Not usually much he could do about that, but he turned to me wondering if I could whip something up quick. Linked here is the result, which in it’s true form was large, but crappy, but intended to be scaled down and not promenant, so it worked out well for that. The other item is a matchbox using the actual textures scanned from the one they wanted included in their re-nuptuals (in some form or another, how that translated to 3d animations I’m not sure)

In any case, here are my half-efforts, which I put here since I’m running low on topics at late.
Butterfly (DivX)
Matchbox (DivX)

I don’t like weddings myself… *sigh*… always a bridesmaid, never a bride.

I just returned from an entirely too short a weekend up at a cottage near Georgian Bay. It belongs to a guy named John who I know through another friend. Spent Friday night, Saturday and Sunday until nightfall up there. It was really a nice area, got to do some fun things I had never done before, and as Curtis wasn’t there, somehow fate deemed me to be the recipient of all the injuries. I’ll likely blog about the cottage trip in a more positive way once Alicia sends me all the photo’s she took and I can put together a storyboard entry. However, right now, I’ll deal with the injuries.

So a pre-existing one that has been exacerbated is on my left foot. I have some painful blisters and open sores relating to something I haven’t quite worked out, but appears to be mild athletes foot (amusing since I am no athlete). Anyway, walking around in sandles really opened them up and caused some bleeding.

Another set of injuries happened on both feet, the top of my left foot, and the underside of the big toe on my right foot. Caused by sharp stones and zebra mussels while swimming after an inflated tube that had gotten away from Alicia. Very sharp cuts which are at least healing quickly since they were so cleanly sliced. However, more bleeding and pain occured.

Most painful was what happened to my big toe nail on my right foot. I had taken the SeaDoo out for a ride, got to 55mph on it, only the second time on it, and the first time I managed to go that fast. Never fell off, never had a close call… but on dismount I smashed my big toe on what I figure was a rock in the sand in the water. My toe bled profusely around the nail, and I beleive it turned black for a while. Right now it weeps fluid when I put pressure on it (like when walking), and it aching lightly. I don’t know if I’ll lose the nail. If I do, it will be the second time.

And the strangest injury I have is a bruise on my right arm on the underside. Not sure how I got it, and I think I first noticed it yesterday, so I figure whatever happened occured saturday morning or friday night. It’s looking quite evil. Laura suggested it could have been a spider bite, which did little to reassure me. Further, I looked up spider bite on google images, and I decided that I’d rather have it be a bruise.

The loathing part I think can be covered by my own feelings of myself when it comes to some things I noticed about me this weekend, but I’ll keep that to myself.

Again, it seems people (and as a consequence, google) is very interested in my photo that I did for a little contest (well, just people submitted, for fun, we weren’t going to win anything) to do an interesting alteration to a source image.

But people have linked (hot linked, thank you very much) to it so much (without citing the source) that it now appears on google.com and google.ca’s image search in the second position (it fluctuates, but at least on the first page of results) when performing an image search on the word ‘junk’, just becuase the image is in my junk directory

Anyway, here it is again, with the source image for comparaison:

Mouse over to see the source image (wait as it loads)

Here are the larger version of the two images:
photo1orig.jpg
photo1alter.jpg

Anyway, it’s fun blogging with recycled material.

This is a journey into an event that occured at my house back home two weeks ago, but I only recently got these pictures to tell it.

We had a huge pile of wood in the firepit waiting to be burned, it had been sitting around for years, that is, it was good and dry and probably would have gone up by itself before long. We get a burn permit, and intend to burn all that dead wood.

Bad things occured to someone during this fire, just seconds before it began. Here is the aftermath (you can click all these pictures for the gorey details):

Note that the usual bounds of the firepit are described by the bricks.

See if you can spot the alarming thing in this shot

The fire exinguisher was not always there,
the gas jug was originally right next to the pit, and has lost its deposit

The desolation of Smaug

The firestarter suffered a similar fate as the weeds

The poor fire starter here won’t be named, since using gasoline, without letting the vapours dissapate, on 2 year old bone dry wood, is perhaps not the best thing to do. 1st and 2nd degree burns later, they are doing fairly well. The pit has started to recover, but perhaps next time a couple balls of paper would do.

At least they remembered to stop, drop, and roll.

So it’s my birthday today… quarter of a century old.

Didn’t really do a lot… last weekend had Curtis and Alicia over, went to dinner, came back and I put on episode after episode of various shows they hated venomously.

She got me the full boxset of The Office, with an IOU for Mulberry, both britcoms. The first unknown to me but is fairly funny. The second one of my favorite series, and of course, well cancelled.

Curtis made me chocolate truffles that I’m sure took 5 years off my life, but it was worth it. (though I wish I could pick the 5, retroactively being dead through highschool would have been good with me)

And now I guess I’ll reflect on the life I was hoping to have at 25, which in general included less mass, more woman (note the singular) and generally having some sort of life plan.

None of that actually came to pass. I guess I’ll try again for 30.

I haven’t updated this thing recently. Work has been the ever-present-time-occupying-force. The stress level has to be in the heart-destruction level by now.

The only thing I have to report is having gone to Center Island with a few friends, running around playing many games with a volleyball, none of them actually being volleyball. I’m sunburnt on my face and a bit on my hands.

My mass is ever increasing.

I’ll update again once anything else happens in my life.

My hours fluctuate wildly depending on how disasterous things are going. One fun one yesterday was when I was going off memory (and it goes back months, but reinforced every month) about some bit of functionality, but something was up with it recently, and got dragged into an office where basically I was told I must be mistaken… for months… since I took over this project …. back in march. And this was revealed in front of my boss, my boss’ boss, and the dev leader for the project. One last ditch check run later that night showed that I was, in fact, correct. Lovely. Well, I’ve made enough apparent mistakes during this run that I doubt it vidicates me very much. There are already other problems being discovered and “why didn’t you see this?”

“just stupid I guess”

So we had a nice little wildcat strike in Toronto’s transit system, and it caught me entirely by surprise, embarassingly enough. Wildcat apparently means I don’t know anything about it, get screwed over as none of the cabs will return my calls or my hails, and end up near death trying to get to work. I had lots of time to try to do something about it, I was up at 6, but I tossed and turned and watched episodes of things on my computer, since I was intending at showing up at 10am anyway. Silly me.

I went out at 9am, walking uncharacteristically to the next stop to avoid all the kids who get off there (and thus block all attempts at getting on at my usual stop). At first, I was like ‘it’s been 15 minutes, where the hell is the 34″… then I thought for a minute… “hmm, it’s been 16 minutes, where the hell is any bus at all?”
Then a passer by asked “Oh, is the strike over?” “What strike is that?” “TTC is on strike, but it was supposed to be resolved for the morning” “When the hell did this happen” “Earlier this morning….” “Damn.. thanks.”

And so I decided to go home to regroup, which is fairly easy when you are a single person. I walk in to find maintenance being done on my ceiling (which I had reported friday when I was home sick, and they came in several times over the course of a few hours to look at it, disrupting my attempts to block out the jackhammering on the balconies outside, whilst trying to recover) and go into my room to consult webpages. Ah, there we go, TTC, no service, thestar had things to say as well, strike on, not over yet, woe to you mere mortal. Joy.

So I pull out the phonebook and start phoning cab companies at random, since I never consider cabs a viable form of transportation (they fall off my radar usually), to get endless busy signals, which seemed about right. So I resolve to walk and try to flag down a cab, which proved fruitless and embarassing. So, in a final sigh of stupidity, decide to walk it.

Essentially, the walk is straight down Eglinton from Mt. Pleasant to Don Valley Parkway (There are more bits to either side, but for anonymity’s sake, I’ll use major roads). On the bus, it seems so plausible. And it might have been too, if not for the heat. 30 degrees, 42 humidex, not pleasant when standing still, but marching for the two hours required to get to work was somewhat more painful than I expected. I had only bought a single 710ml Powerade at a store at the start of my journal, and it is fortunate I did that much, as I’m sure I would have collapsed otherwise. However, buying two would have been better.

The problem with Eglinton once you get down to about the halfway point between Mt Pleasant and the DVP is that there just isn’t anything around, it’s just a pavement desert, no stores to buy drinks, not even shade for the most part. The heat was terrible, the slight inclines of the road unwelcome. I ran out of drink near Leslie, had to start taking more frequent breaks, my heart was racing dangerously, and it was hurting in my chest. I was getting more tired, dizzy, and wanting to collapse. I might find a little bit of shade behind a utility pole, and try to rest, but as soon as I trudged on, my heart would race again. Not to be melodramatic, but it felt like I was near death. Not sure what sunstroke is, but if I were to give a name to the feeling I was having at about the Leslie point, that would be it. What I experienced was more dehydration (which to me is ludricrous, I mean, I have my own hump) but maybe my dizziness, weakness and heart-speed would have been in the sunstroke category.

Finally made it to work, and collapsed a bit, it’s been hours, and I’m still recovering, my head still hurts and I’m a little dizzy. I’ve drunk rather a lot of liquid, and only hours later needed to use the washroom, to discover I not only looked like hell, but have sunburn on my face as well.

I’m not sympathetic with the drivers this time, or with TTC, or with anything at all. I mean, if only they had bantered about a strike for a bit before this, there might have been time to do something (which I guess was the point). They can’t screw the owners directly, but we can, only through being screwed ourselves. Which is how it is for public-facing services. We are merely the tools they weild, they risk backlash at themselves, but if they convince us that they were pressured into the position, then it’s hoped we will direct our anger at the owners themselves. In any case, we’re the ones who get dicked around with. I pay higher fares (or in this case, lose a day’s use of my Metropass) and I doubt any lasting change will come of this.

I mean, there are other actions, like the TTC apparently refusing to side with the drivers when they get kicked and spit on during fare disputes. Their job action? To not argue, basically the bus is free (sorta, some will still argue, the rest will just be really angry at you, or suggest you wait for another bus). I was with them on that, since it was against the TTC and not the fare-paying public.

I’m tempted on my next ride to pay my exact fare, and then kick and spit, well, not really, but it’s certainly going to be hard to go down to the station this week to fork over approx $100 for the June Metropass and feel I’m making a good move. I should just buy a car.