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This morning in the shower I gave some serious thought to setting my mother up with a computer.

While clearly the more pressing issue is why I woke up stoned out of my gourd and what this means for my plan to be a smug middle-aged straight edger, I find myself giving the idea more than just the passing recoil it warrants.

Don’t get me wrong – my mom on the internet would be a terrible, terrible thing. This is the woman who, when told she should use Craigslist to find an apartment, called me up to ask if I knew Craig and if I could ask him if he had an apartment to rent. I once tried to give my mom my email address so she could pass it along to someone, and it .. did not work. Giving my mother a computer could only be an impossible exercise in frustration and potentially bring about the apocalypse. She would break the entire internet. Viruses would escape the computer and start infecting the stove and washing machine. The entire country of Nigeria would name a holiday in her honour. Chris Hansen would show up on her doorstep and she’d be all over Dateline all because she clicked on the dancing bunny. It would be bad. Very, very bad.

And yet .. it would be a challenge. I could choose to lay the gauntlet down and heed the call to arms. If I could successfully get my mother on the internet and using email, it would be my greatest triumph and seal my place in history as an epic mastermind of brilliance. Many of you have met my mother and understand exactly why I turned out the way I did, and you know just how difficult an undertaking this would be. I think I could do it. I really do.

Whether I SHOULD do it is obviously another matter altogether. I have the hardware, and I’d be able to get internet hooked up at her place for free. Do I have the patience? If I took a long hard look at myself in the mirror, do I really think I’d be able to pull this off without strangling her? Is my life really so dull that I need a challenge of this magnitude, in this format? All good questions.

I should sleep on this, and perhaps look into rehab for my brand new drug problem.

Gillian is a superstar who worked some magic and lo – my archives are back online. Thank you, Gillian! You are awesome!

While I’m embarrassed that someone might have actually read through my early updates, I’m delighted to have them all in one place again. I hadn’t realized how often I refer back to older posts to jog my memory until I couldn’t – just last week I was wondering when it would be time to have Lemon neutered, and wanted to see when we had Hobble done so’s I could eyeball a timeframe (7 months). Without my archives, my memory is nowhere near as legendary as previously reported. I love you, old internet words. Never go offline again.

While I know where it was coming from, how exactly are you supposed to respond to someone reminiscing about “when you were all hot and stuff”? Talk about a backhanded compliment, and also ouch.

I am easily distracted and scattered today.

Ed and I forgot to have our belated anniversary dinner this weekend.

Corazzo sent me some crazy superhero gloves and a t-shirt. I think I will go fight some crime.

This post appears to be post 1138. The nerd in me rejoices!

• Mr. Clean disinfecting wipes do not taste good
• The only time to not be alarmed when a creepy old man with missing and/or horrible teeth leers at you and asks if there are perogies in the basement is when you’re standing outside a Ukrainian Hall, because he really is asking if there are perogies in the basement and not trying to pick you up for some gummin’
• There is no shortcut!
• Any day in which you end up on the wrong side of the tracks twice cannot possibly be a bad one
• Next time, get the brie-and-strawberry-filled French toast because the omelette, which was quite delicious in its own right, does not compare to the glory of strawberries when they’re served on a layer of fancy French cheese
• I heart Gillian

Social Media, the chicken-shit way:

Walk around an event with my Squee-PC out and wait for people to talk to me because I’m too shy to talk to them.

Hey, whatever works!

Update: So far, it’s worked 5 times in about 10 minutes.

Another update: Okay, it worked about a dozen times in total.

So, I’ve been trying to integrate myself somewhat into the Vancouver blogging community, which seems to also be the Vancouver Social Media community. I don’t really see myself as much of a social media person, but I came to a startling realization tonight:

I spent a good part of tonight in a room jam-packed to the brim with other people, walking around with my SqueePC out so I could check email, Twitter, my blog, and Flickr all at the same time. If that isn’t social media, I really don’t know what is – while I’m still working on the whole “social” aspect of things, I certainly have the “media” down to an almost obsessive neon T.

So, yeah. I made me laugh at myself.

In addition to the make-people-talk-to-me-via-tiny-computer method of interaction, I also recruited Gill for an experiment tonight – we deposited our Moo cards on various tables at the event. I’m thinking about suggesting this for the next big nerd shindig, but almost everyone I know has Moo cards or some variation of – and doesn’t do much with them. I’m a hearty example of this, as I have three sets of business cards and at least two sets of Mini cards. Why do I have them? Well, in addition to being in love with seeing my name and photos in print, I got them so I could trade contact information with people. Here’s the catch, though – I’m almost pathologically shy around people I don’t know; the very people I would want to be trading contact info with. As it stands right now, I give my Moo cards to people who already know me. That isn’t exactly the point, so I propose doing this:

To anyone who has Moo cards but routinely forgets to offer them up for trade and/or hand them out, period: start leaving them lying around. It’d be cool to have a table at these fancy social media events where people could just leave their Moo cards and pick up someone else’s – follow a URL, check out some photos, email a stranger. Obviously you’ve been in the same place as that person, so let’s take it one step further and maybe e-meet the people you didn’t get a chance to meet in person. That way, chickenshit people like me can still stay within the relative safety of our own social circles, but maybe get to check out a blog we hadn’t known existed.

Or maybe I’m the only one with this neurotic fear of meeting new people.

Anyway, I have Moo cards. I want to trade with people. Give me your Moo cards. I have no use for a hundred cards with my own contact information; I know who I am. Who are YOU?

If anyone got here because they picked up one of my cards at the BarCamp party, hello!

I will stop talking now. I think I absorbed a lot of Gill’s beer through osmosis and am drunk by association.

I figured everyone’s Friday afternoon could use a little tantrum dancing by Kevin Bacon.

.. sort of.

Last night I destroyed our living room in a frenzy of half-assed reorganization. I’m trying out Shan’s old desk and if I like the setup, will purchase it from her. The new desk is drastically different from my old one in that it is a giant table and my old desk was a ladder to the heavens. I have no shelves. I miss my shelves.

Or do I? My old desk has long since been a joke to my friends, because when the Big One hits I will undoubtedly meet my demise buried under an avalanche of toys:

The new-to-me desk is much bigger, meaning I don’t need to have a secondary table to house my other monitor and my MacBook. In fact, I can easily have all four computers up and running on my desk with ample room for a printer and other assorted necessities like cats, Diet Coke, iDevices, and more. So far, I like it. I might like it more when I have the rest of the living room dealt with – it’s kind of a disaster right now – but we’ll see.

I’m torn on the lack of shelving. On one hand, I clearly need space for my many, many toys. On the other hand .. well, it might be kind of nice to accidentally bump into my desk and NOT have the world fall down on my head. The walls of our living room are a really nice green, and with my new setup I can see it instead of a disorganized crap basket of hell. My original plan was to visit Ikea sometime this weekend and buy some shelving units, but now I’m waffling. At the moment I’m leaning towards getting some additional drawers, instead – surely my toys will be just as fun sitting inside a drawer as opposed to on my wall.

I wonder how long I’ll be able to keep my desk free of any extra tiny things. I give myself a week, tops.

I would like a magnetic white board, though.

Oh, the options!

Awww yeah.

TEAM NO BABIES

Better picture coming later, including one of the back!

I had another early morning web conference today. Knowing what to expect and unable to use the internet to pass the time, I brought in pencil crayons and made a picture:

This image depicts what I imagine I missed after I left the bar last night: Darren whipping out his penis and doing the helicopter, with a delighted Josh and frazzled Reilly taking drunken pictures. Two innocent passers-by are shocked and traumatized by the mesmerizing twirling doodle, and Darren is very pleased with himself. Note the details: lots and lots of beer, Darren’s trucker hat, Reilly’s enormous flash, and Josh’s drunken bubbles. Truly, I am less an artist as I am an artiste.

I don’t normally set up meetings, but since these two past Thursday meetings were my doing, I brought in breakfast. Last week I hit up Tim Hortons for donuts and muffins, but this week I was feeling lazy and damp so I stopped at Save-On to pick up some food. I ended up getting Pop Tarts and a fruit platter, which I figured would please both ends of the dietary spectrum. I was amused to note that by the end of the meeting, all three boxes of Pop Tarts were cleaned right out while not one person had touched the fruit platter. Heh! More for me, then.

I am absolutely in love with the Camera Bag app for the iPhone. It’s a little tool that allows you to take or load a picture, then apply one of five filters to it: Helga (a Holga-esq tool that features washed-out colours and nifty corners), 1974 (faded and orange), Lolo (Lomography – white border, bright colours), Cinema (dark and cropped), and 1962 (black and white newspaper-esq pictures). John writes a better review here, but I am so digging on this application – it’s well worth the $4.99. Here are some pictures I’ve taken:

Fun.