Category: Miscellaneous

Tonight is the last episode of this season’s Canadian Idol. The favorite to win is named Kalan Porter and happens to be from my hometown of Medicine Hat. My mom was his kindergarten teacher and has been known to try and take credit as one of the first people in his life to teach him how to sing. Good work Mom – how come I’m not famous? She has been really getting into the show even calling in multiple votes for Kalan. My new roommate also from Medicine Hat says that the city has Canadian Idol fever and that on the nights of the show the phone lines are all blocked up because everyone in town is voting. He adds dryly, “I hope nobody has an emergency on Wednesday nights because they’re not getting a dial-tone.”

Seeing as tonight is the night we’ll be finding out the results from yesterday’s final vote, CTV is holding a party at The Arena in Medicine Hat where the hometown crowd will be watching via the big screen as well they will be broadcasted across the country going nuts when Kalan wins. You can bet that my Mom will be there along with 4000 other idol worshipping Hatters. I’ll be watching.

I am at the University preparing for school tomorrow. As well I have been asked to speak to the new students entering New Media. In honor of it being a new year and being a new media student, I revamped the U of L New Media Student Rep Blog. Check it out.

All is good in roommate land. Although, yesterday I caught my roommate trying to cook chicken in the oven – without a pan. I guess he thought it would be like a little barbecue in the house. Luckily, Anna and I, saw him and suggested a pan before a fire ensued.

Today my newest roommate moved in, meanwhile I moved a bunch of old furniture out. I now have an old dresser, a table, some clothes, and a couple of beds that are sitting in the back yard waiting for a garage sale, or a trip to the Salvation Army.

My other roommate is cooking us all a big dinner which I can smell through the air. She is making us a special spinach and feta penne. My stomach is growling; I can’t wait.

I went to the University today for a New Media faculty meeting. I am the New Media Representative and so I sit it on the meetings and let the rest of the students know what’s going on in the Faculty.

Although it was a long meeting, I did appreciate learning a few things. I found out that they are considering buying 51 licenses for Maya – maybe Maya Complete or maybe Maya Unlimited. (Apparently Maya Unlimited is more complete than the former – sheesh.) They decided that if they do go ahead and get the Maya licenses, which it looks like they will, that they will not be dropping their 3D Studio Max software.

They also showed me a list of the software available to the students this semester, and it looks like among other things they’ve upgraded to the CS versions of Photoshop and Illustrator, Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5, and the Macromedia MX 2004 package.

I think it’s going to be a good semester for me.

MAYORBOB of Plastic.com fame has decided to stop posting at least for awhile and go into deep lurker mode.

The community responds; here’s to MAYORBOB.

I was having some trouble at first, but now I have two monitors setup on my computer. If you don’t have a video card that supports two monitors, (ie. has two places to plug them in) then the first thing you need to do in order to get them working is to install a second video card. Originally I was using an onboard NVIDIA GeForce4 MX 440 video chipset. I installed a Cirrus Logic 5446 Compatible Graphics Adapter but couldn’t get it to work. I searched the net but didn’t have much luck finding the answer. It turns out the key to getting both monitors working is to change the BIOS / CMOS settings to look for your video card first, instead of just using the onboard video. It took me a couple of trys to find the setting that I needed.

I now have two monitors working and it’s great. It’s particularly handy to do New Media work having one monitor for tutorials and another to follow along with.

I hope this explanation of what I did helps someone else who is trying to do the same thing.

My sister Jackie and her husband Glen delivered a baby boy today. Congratulations guys.

The University of Lethbridge New Media Movie Making Camp for July 2004 is done. I’m now an unemployed movie maker instructor / lifeguard. Actually I’m technically employed as a lifeguard but I’m not on the working schedule at present.

The camp itself was, in my opinion, a great success. I’ve become a better teacher and I believe the program will grow as word spreads about how fun it is to make your own movies. I wish I had the storage space and bandwidth required to show some of my favorite parts on this blog, but you’ll just have to take my word for it when I say that for kids averaging between 11 and 13 they made some mighty fine movies.

I came into the University today to finish up some things and to meet with my boss for a little review of the job. I’m getting a pretty good feeling about my chances of doing it again next year. Also next year they will likely try to stretch it out for an additional one or two weeks.

In the meantime aside from hanging out at the University I’ve been putting out ads for a new roommate, trying to get my student loans application filled out, working out in the pool, running errands, and mostly waiting for Anna-Maria to be done work so we can go home. :)

I used to hate camping. It’s a secret from Anna-Maria and most of my family, but I don’t think it would come as a big surprise to those that have been with me on Scout Camp. I’ll try not to delve too deeply into the bad memories.

It’s not that Scout Camp is inherently bad. It’s not even that LDS Scout Camp is inherently bad. Which as you can guess is what I went too. But do I ever hate those bastards. Please don’t take offence if you are reading this and happen to be the one or two people from Scout camp that actually made it bearable. I’m hoping you know who you are.

The thing about Scout camp was that our troop had a very motley crew of people that I would never hang out with in real life. Nice guys – most of them, but so many of them just weirdoes or mental cases. They were either too different in their interests or too anxious to start a fight with us. It was especially bad after they split our ward. Which meant that most of the people I liked to hang out with were no longer in our troop. I sometimes snuck in to the other wards camps because ours sucked so badly.

Anyway having had enough of this tangent I’ll be getting to the point of this post.

I went camping with Anna-Maria on the weekend and we had such a good time. Trust me when I say that I was extremely skeptical (even though I kept my skepticism to myself).

I’ll try and keep it condensed. On Friday we left and arrived in Sparwood (we = Anna-Maria and Sophie the Dog). Saturday: after eggs and bacon for breakfast we went bridge jumping on a VERY HIGH bridge. I’m guessing approximately 5 or 6 meters 10 meters &8212; I didn’t realize it at the time but it was about twice as high as the 5 meter platform at the University. This bridge was HIGH! There were a wild bunch of guys there jumping off and one of them even did a backflip. There were signs that said, “No Jumping – No Diving” but we got into our wet suits and promptly ignored those signs.

I joked to Anna how we would probably still be here after those locals were gone and the RCMP showed up. I was half right. The RCMP showed up when Anna was dangling on the side of the bridge and the others had all dried off. She quickly scrambled onto the bridge but it was pretty obvious that the two of us dressed in our wet suits were up to no good. I thought for sure he was going to give us a hard time. Just then the wild backflipper guy climbed out on the edge of the bridge. I felt immediately relieved because it wasn’t Anna or I that would be getting into any trouble today. He smiled at the officer and leaped head under heals down towards the frigid water. I looked at the cop who just said to us, “Tell him that next time I want to see a double back-flip with a twist.” They laughed and the tension was broken. I guess he was cool with it (maybe because nobody was drinking? Or maybe because he really didn’t care. It wasn’t a dangerous place to jump and he probably wasn’t looking for a confrontation anyway.) Either way it made me have a lot more respect for him as a guy who can tell the difference between harmless fun and reckless self endangerment.

Later that night we had a game of Frisbee golf and then late night partying.

Sunday – We drove to Trail, BC to visit my cousin Don and his family. They just had a new baby girl last week.

Monday – Drove home, bought some fresh BC cherries, a peach, and four cobs of corn at a roadside shop. I can only describe how good they were with a sound that has no English word to represent it. (Think Homer Simpson drooling over donuts).

And when it was all over we were very happy to be back in a familiar bed.

In conclusion, camping isn’t that bad when you can shower in the morning, free fall into a cold deep river for at least 3 seconds, drive to the store for lunch and take off for relatives if those you are camping with are too boring or having marital problems or both. You can’t go wrong camping with Anna-Maria.

P.S. Camping with the Medicine Hat First Ward still would have sucked even with daily showers, but maybe not if I had had my Jeep and someone warm with whom to cuddle.