Obligatory survey thing-y.

1. What did you do in 2010 that you'd never done before?
Umm... program in Flash?

2. Did anyone close to you die?
Thankfully, no.

3. What places did you visit?
Markham, ON.

4. What would you like to have in 2011 that you lacked in 2010?
Sanity.

5. What dates from 2010 will remain etched upon your memory, and why?
'Dates' is a funny word, here. I don't think I'll forgot the day I passed out on the subway anytime soon, but fucked if I knew what the date was that day. Similarly, I'll never forgot the moment Petrie broke his leg, but I don't know when that was.

6. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Landing my current job and doing well at it.

7. What was your biggest failure?
Mishandling of stress.

8. Did you suffer illness or injury?
Face planted onto the floor of my subway car due to passing out. Had my appendix removed. Fuck, man.

9. What was the best thing you bought?
My two new monitors.

10. Whose behaviour merited celebration?
Everyone's but mine.

11. Whose behaviour made you appalled and depressed?
Mostly my own.

12. Where did most of your money go?
Cost of living and ordering delivery too often due to being too busy/stressed to grocery shop and cook. Oh, and vet bills. So many vet bills.

13. What did you get really, really, really excited about?
FanEXPO and my new job.

14. What songs will always remind you of 2010?
Richard Laviolette

15. Compared to this time last year, are you:
a) happier or sadder? Tough one... happier, but not by a lot
b) thinner or fatter? Much fatter
c) richer or poorer? Poorer, as always

16. What do you wish you'd done more of?
Quality time with Kelly, hobby software development, reading, playing video games

17. What do you wish you'd done less of?
Stressing, watching TV

18. What was your favourite TV program?
The Big Bang Theory. I'm assuming this is intended to mean *new* TV program

19. Do you hate anyone now that you didn't hate this time last year?
Well that's kinda negative, isn't it?

20.What was the best book you read?
The Scott Pilgrim series. Loads of fun

21. What was your greatest musical discovery?
Well, it wasn't a discovery, but I finally got around to getting some Richard Laviolette records and then proceeded to obsessively listen to them over and over and over and over again.

22. What did you want and get?
A job that I love.

23. What did you want and not get?
Less stress, more happiness.

24. What was your favourite film of this year?
Well, here is the illustrious list of films we saw from the year 2010

The Lovely Bones
Leap Year
When in Rome
Avatar
Valentine's Day
Alice in Wonderland
She's Out of My League
The Runaways
Chloe
Sex and the City 2
Twilight: Eclipse
Hot Tub Time Machine
Shutter Island
Inception
Scott Pilgrim
The Switch
Going the Distance
Iron Man 2
Easy A
Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

It's tough to pick a fav. The top 5 (not in order) would probably be

Inception, Scott Pilgrim, Going the Distance, Easy A, Chloe

Scott Pilgrim & Inception are probably the two I'd pick between for favourite

25. What did you do on your birthday, and how old were you?
I turned the big 3-0. Kelly spoiled the shit out of me with piles of badass gifts. On the big day we went to brunch at this fancy place with G&D and it was a wicked time.

26.What one thing would have made your year immeasurably more satisfying?
Larges sums of money. More hours in each day would have helped, too.

27. How would you describe your personal fashion concept in 2009?
Getting better.

28. What kept you sane?
Kelly. The cats. Friends. New job.

29. Which celebrity/public figure did you fancy the most?
Nathan Fillion

30. What political issue stirred you the most?
Rob Ford :-(

31. Who did you miss?
Kelly and I both started to miss home and our family late in 2010.

32. Who was the best new person you met?
Rad co-workers

33. Tell us a valuable life lesson you learned in 2010?
Life has a tendancy to pick fights. Fight back.

34. Quote a song lyric that sums up your year:
"The never ending pursuit of happiness is hell, but it ain't gonna find itself."

Tags: music | review

One of the many perks of my job is that we can listen to music whilst we work. A perk I believe a lot of jobs offer, but a perk none the less. So, anyway, I recently sucked down Tom Waits' entire discography and decided it would be epic to listen through it all chronologically while cranking out code. Trust me, it was good times. This was of particular interest to me because I certainly had not yet heard all of his catalogue and further, my fandom of Waits came about via mp3 downloads and not even album torrents. I'd, for the most part, not taken in his music via album. So, to take a walk through his catalogue in chronological order by album was an excellent opportunity, for sure.

So, how the fuck did it go, amirite?

Well, by far my favourite three albums were, in order:

1. Mule Variations (1999)

2. Blood Money (2002)

3. Alice (1992) (album released 2002)

Which seems to suggest an affinity for a certain era of Waits' career, not something I assumed was the case.

From there the list would continue as something like...

4. Orphans: Brawlers, Bawlers & Bastards (2006) - though this doesn't all together count, since it's mostly a compilation

5. Bone Machine (1992)

6. Rain Dogs (1985)

7. Frank's Wild Years (1987)

8. The Black Rider (1993)

9. Nighthawks at the Diner (1975)

10. Heartattack and Vine (1980)

11. Blue Valentine (1978)

12. Small Change (1976)

13. Closing Time (1973)

14. Real Gone (2004)

15. Swordfishtrombones (1983)

16. The Heart of Saturday Night (1974)

17. Foreign Affairs (1977)

18. Night on Earth (1992)

19. One from the Heart (1982)

So there you have it. I'm sure that list will undulate as time goes, as these things wont to do. But that's my ordering today. Maybe my next blog entry won't be a list! (yeah right)

Tags: blog | joomla | meta

You can finally feed your Google Reader and other such applications by clicking the RSS link on the left. woo!

I've also managed to get my 'who' page running as an article in Joomla (wasn't hard, once I started to figure the system out!). So the only thing left is to figure out how to render my left menu properly instead of hard-coded in my template.

Tags: blog | joomla | meta

*tap tap* this thing still on? Excellent!

Well, Blogger decided in all its wisdom that us proud and few FTP Users were a worthless bunch of losers not worth supporting. Whatev, guys!

So I set about finding a replacement that I could run right on my host, since I like to have some control over things. I knew I probably didn't want a straight blogging engine, because I eventually want to add on my own shit to this silly little Internet haven.

So, I did some reading and asked around. The first rec I got was for Drupal. Drupal seemed neat enough, but I got frustrated trying to turn it into a blog and moved on. In this case, as it turns out, the second time was the charm, as I tried out Joomla, next, and was fairly pleased with how easily it became a blog and provided reasonable usability for doing what I wanted to be able to do. Right now, this blog is humming along on Joomla, and is no longer having anything to do with those filthly bastards at Blogger. :-)

I was able to mostly get the Joomla version of my blog looking like the old version, but it's not quite identical. That's no big deal. Each post looks a little different. Tags are at the top (I'm betting over time I might learn how to change them to bottom where I prefer them) and there are three nifty icons on each post for printing/pdfing/emailing the post. Frankly, that's pretty wicked, imo. There are some other tiny cosmetic differences, too.

What did I use? Well, I'm running standard Joomla 1.5.15. I added the jComments plug-in, for a commenting system. And I added the jTags plug-in for tagging. I think I added some extended search page, too, but I can't remember what it was. Not that interesting, anyway.

I then screwed around with getting my custom template going. I've cheated, a little. I've hard-coded my menus instead of styling the Joomla generated menu. I'll make it a to-do to go to the auto-gen'd menu, since I think that's the truer way to go and is likely to be flexible at some point in the future. I also stayed with a hard-coded who page, which I also hope to figure out how to stlye a generated who page later on.

I do have to figure out how to link to RSS feeds for Joomla, as I know at least one person reads my blog via Google reader. I'm sure it's easy, just need to look it up.

With this task handled I have a couple of blogging projects  I intend on getting started. A previously mentioned movie project, and another one that I have to think about before I post anything about. The edge of your seat, you're on it, I'm sure.