noattentionspan

{to the tune of the Canadian National Anthem… duh!}

Go Canada! Our hockey teams are gold!
True patriot love for players young and old

Our curling skips with eyes of blue
Whose rocks hook down the sheet

Luge, sleigh or skate, Oh crap we’re fast
We simply can’t be beat

Ski or board we fly
Bumps or jumps and air

Go Canada we’ll beat anyone anywhere
Go Canada we’ll beat anyone anywhere

—–

My contribution to the fun

SW

Over the past while I’ve been paying more attention to the blog stats, mostly because I’ve been blogging more. Daily almost even.

A few things have jumped up and amused me.

1. I don’t know how, but some folks find and read the weirdest posts I’ve put up. Re-reading them myself almost always makes me smile as I remember what was going on in my world when I wrote them. A couple of them are even funny.
– I don’t like Christmas
– Easter Ham… How Christian’s give Jews the finger
– People still play D&D
– Things about Starbucks speak.
– We have friends with kids
– People annoy me

2. People search for the weirdest fucking things and still wind up at my blog.
– 14 and fucking This one scared the shit out of me until I figured out which post it found.
– Wetsuit sex. Favourite. Ever. Search term. This went to my Osoyoos Half Iron race report where I describe the start of the swim with wetsuit sex. I know what “I” was talking about… what the hell were the others searching for?
– HP LaserJet 1020 Debian Etch Mac OS X. I posted a HOWTO for this after I’d had to do it myself a half a dozen times and had to relearn it each time. This generates a lot of hits and I hope the instructions have saved people the amount of work it took me to do it, ug.

3. Numbers are neat. Average visitors per day, average clicks per visitor, number of people referred by facebook (clearly the notes section of facebook is key to my readers who also have attention span or memory problems and can’t remember the url).
– Highest ever single day: October 25, 2009 (228)
– Single most searched for term: James Cunningham Seawall Race (97)
– Lowest readership day in the last two months: October 23, 2009 (1). Shaw had an outage.
– Most viewed page: James Cunningham Seawall Race Report (255)
– Total spam trapped by Akismet: 34,900!
– Highest ever spam month: May 2007 (4551)
– Total comments: 188
– Highest referrer: Facebook.com (136) (although a lot more come from the individual notes up on facebook and not the site itself)
– Most clicked on link from my blog: Kelowna.com for time adjustment (11)

4. Comments. Who leaves those? Well, no one really. Ray does (thank you Ray). The occasional random stranger does (thank you random strangers). But for the most part people I know who read the blog just talk to me about it the next day in person.

All and all, I’ve been amused. And I was amused making this post.

Now I’m going to be late!

S

The Shadow knows….

Lately at night I’ve been plugging my Sansa Clip mp3 player up to my light stand (it has speakers) and listening to old time radio shows.

I am constantly surprised by just how many people do this and listen to them. There are a number of websites to get them from (OTR is a great place to start) and a lot of people trade them around (legally, of course).

Chatting with folks at the office I have found a few others who spend their evenings listening to the Adventures of Buck Rogers, X-minus 1, The
Shadow, Richard Diamond, The Saint and many more.

I’ve moved into the mid 50s myself with X-minus 1 which should take me through the next week or so

Damned cool.

S

I think of myself as a relatively hale and hearty man. I’ve had my share of bumps and bruises (and some other peoples’ shares as well), but on the whole I’m in generally fit shape.

Recently I’ve started playing a bit of golf. Well, to be honest I’ve started playing a bit of pitch and putt, but it’s close enough.

Right away I noticed that I was getting some pain in my right arm, to the outside. Just like Tennis elbow on the backhand. I ignored it, of course, and kept playing, but it wasn’t going away and every time I played it became just that little bit worse. Soon it was bothering me even when I wasn’t playing and I was having trouble gripping things.

Clearly this called for a trip to the doctor. And so I went.

Sitting in with the doctor I explained the pain, how it happened, where it was. He reached over, checked my arm and proceeded to fix the problem.

Now I know not to grip my club as firmly through contact with the ball, it’s sending pains up my arm. I also need to adjust my stance just a touch to allow for the corrected swing.

Lateral epicondylitis is the term for the type of pain. Rest, ice, elevation and compression are the ways to deal with it effectively. That I found on the internet.

The doctor though showed me how to fix my swing.

Priceless.

S

Taking a break from all your worries, sure would help a lot.

There should be a website “cheers.com” and when you login the first thing it does is announce your name to the general chat “Norm!” or whatever.

That would make you feel welcome.

You could even have different social (for net geeks like me) areas for different types of folks.

A Cliff Clavin trivia area, a Norm drinking spot, a Frasier self help area and a Sammy pick up joint. hell there are worse ideas on the net.

S

This week is Bike To Work Week (note the capitals) as sponsored by the VACC.

This morning I was able to trip down Royal Oak hill at 74.2km/h (slow for a reason) with my very own police escort. How, you may wonder, did I manage that?

Before I heard how much I’m not allowed to do I booked a team at work for the Bike To Work Week event. Of course about 2 days later I heard that I’m not allowed to run, bike or even swim without a pull buoy.

Being the perfect male, I’ve decided the following:

Running is bad, very bad.
Biking is bad and has the potential to be very bad.
Swimming is ok, swimming with flippers is bad, swimming without the pull buoy has the potential to be very bad.

I started, but put on hold, a couple of months of spinning, after all, that would be very bad.

But biking to work?

As long as I only do it for a week, and as long as I don’t stand on the pedals coming up Royal Oak, and as long as I take it easy at all times. That’s only bad, not very bad.

So, for the 3rd day this week I’ve biked into the office and back!

Each trip takes me from the house, over to Royal Oak and down from Oakland to DeerLake Parkway. 150m decent over 1km heading straight down, what a fucking blast!

Today was special. I hit Royal Oak at Grange and dropped into the far inside lane making sure I was safe from right merging traffic. I was clear so I kicked the gears into 24 and started to increase my cadence. That’s when the cop passed me

He was behind the car that was on my left but one lane over. He pulled up next to me and slid ahead, leaving everyone else behind. And everyone stayed behind, not just behind the cop, but also behind me.

For the entire hill the cop was 2 or 3 car lengths ahead of me, and all the cars were about 2 car lengths behind. No one was going to pace the cop above the speed limit or, heaven forbid pass him/her. So they all just stuck back.

In effect I had a police escort the entire way, just the cop and I alone on the road at 24+km/h above the speed limit falling down a hill. He hit his brakes, I feathered mine, he dropped forward ahead of me, I tucked a bit closer to my bars.

End result, I was slower than I had been the day before, and about 15km slower than I have done it in the past! But today the hill was mine and I owned it

Gotta love an escort.

S

Clearly I don’t make this statement lightly. I figure also that I wouldn’t be making this statement if I didn’t think most people would hear about it anyway.

Anyone else along for the ride, please keep your chuckles to yourself.

As per normal, I will attempt to bore people silly with background before getting to the stupid portion.

As many know I have a daughter from my previous married life. G is a wonderful girl that lived with us out in the city for 5 or 6 years and a couple of years ago moved out to the valley to live with her mother. This past year she turned 15 and started working at a well known fast food restaurant/slave labour camp. Of course her work life cut down the number of times she came out and trips became rather infrequent. Certainly down from the every second weekend thing we’d been doing for the many years she’d lived in the city and the first couple of years living in the valley.

G was out this past weekend and I decided that I’d drive her back out to the valley instead of putting her on the Greyhound which is the norm. I piled the other two daughters (one older, one younger) into the car and we adventured out to the boonies. After all I figured, we might as well get a swim and some bonding time in as well, what the heck.

Back up a couple of days though to Friday and my heading home from the office. My keys went into my jacket which I hung over some exercise gear in my computer room and promptly left my memory. Saturday when I needed a key I grabbed the spare from S’s key chain. I figured that I’d just left the keys at the office or that they were somewhere and would turn up, no biggy right?

Living in the city I have a detachable faceplate stereo and a club steering wheel lock. Of course, I rarely drive and when I do drive I tend to only go places that I know or that are well lit and with security and so I rarely use the club and only periodically take the deck face out.

Driving to the valley though… clearly that wasn’t going to do. I parked the car, took the deck face and put the club on the car.

What followed was a couple of hours of fun in the water; going down the slide, playing in the waves, hanging in the hot tub, doing underwater flips, practicing diving from the side. We came out and dried off, ready to pile into the car and head over to my friend Derek’s and show the girls his tattoo shop and generally chat for a while.

Anyone catch the problem before now? I didn’t until I sat in the car. No key for the club.

Fuck.

Derek was nice enough to pick us up, drop G off at her mother’s place, drive the rest of us out to the city, drive me back to my car, and, when I didn’t feel like driving home at night, put me up on the couch and eat pizza with me.

Of course we also installed WoW onto his computers and he’s now addicted so I doubt he’ll ever help me do anything again.

When I returned home on Monday I found out that the neighbourhood knows about my blunder, the youngest daughter, M, couldn’t wait to tell the crossing guard lady (a friend of the family) bright and early on Monday morning.

It will be years before I live this down.

S

This quote caught my attention while mainlining my daily Schlock fix:

As with any healthy relationship, the first thing the young couple must do is hide the body.

Out of context, you could start sooo many different stories with those words of wisdom.

The original comes from the “Insect Picture of the Day” website (yes, such a thing does exist, who the hell knew?).

The second day of the article is also nifty and has an even better picture.

This product has been recalled…

Why?

What they don’t tell you on the recall site is that when ingested, the chemical glue on the beads metabolizes into GHB.

These beads are going to be a hit in New Orleans next Mardi Gras.

And I quote:

A young boy in the U.S. state of Arkansas is believed to be the latest child to fall ill after ingesting a popular, Chinese-made toy containing a chemical that turns into a powerful “date rape” drug when eaten.

Ananova can always be counted on for weird ass news.

This article is just an example of that… but this one is weird. And it happened only a few hours down the road from here.

Cow falls 200ft on to van

A US couple had a miraculous escape when a cow fell off a 200ft cliff and landed on their minivan.

Really, you should read the whole article, it’s weird.

Now, HOW in the hell did they drive for a mile (1.6km) after it happened, that’s what I want to know.