as early repayment
maybe don’t blow your disgusting smoke in my face
as I walk by
jealous
remembering how much I used to love to smoke

Outside

Kitchen & Dining Room

Kitchen

Raised Bedroom

Bedroom Inside

Living Room

Bathroom

Kitchen & Bedroom

Note: Someone just brought to my attention that this looks very close to a new technology just announced by Toronto based mobile payment company Zoompass. Things are heating up!

Check it out:

This weekend I went to a concert, saw three movies, bought a Nikon D60 digital SLR camera and visited my parents. Here’s a bit about each event:

The Movies

On Friday night Alison and I watched I Heart Huckabees. Alison owns it and has seen it many times before but this was my first time seeing it and I loved it. Jason Schwartzman has reportedly been in Toronto for months hanging out and I keep hoping I’ll run into him on my way to lunch one day.

On Saturday night we went over to Scott’s condo and watched Forgetting Sarah Marshall which I thought might suck but turned out to be one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in a long time.

On Sunday afternoon Alison and I went to see District 9 with my Dad. It wasn’t anything special but going to the movies on Sunday morning is always the best, there’s hardly anyone there and you pay the matinee price!

The Concert

On Friday night Alison and I went to an art gallery opening on Bloor near Lansdowne because my friend Matt’s band/solo project was performing. Matt used to play drums in a punk rock band in high school and bass when I played drums with Ryan Masters. He has been doing his solo stuff under the name of MANT for a few years and I was really pleased with his live performance. Check out his music.

The Camera

Alison and I have been thinking about getting a DSLR camera for a while now. We both kinda like taking pictures and we thought photography might be a fun hobby that would give us a reason to go places we’ve never been. After much encouragement from my Dad who just bought his first DSLR we bought a Nikon D60, the same camera my Dad just bought. Here are some pictures I took while trying the camera out. It’s a little overwhelming to try to figure out everything the camera can do so these are just point and shoot and even then I think they look amazing. I will be reading the manual and lots of tutorials in the near future.

Alison

Hummingbird

Dad

Mom

View From My Apartment Window

Oh Yeah….

I’ve also been practicing bass like crazy for a show I’m playing with The Good Soldiers this Thursday, my finger tips are raw and blistered. Thanks for reading… just like 2007 right?

What We Know About Dinosaurs

Whenever I visit the Royal Ontario Museum (ROM) I’m amazed at their vast collection of humongous dinosaur skeletons. I think, this huge thing died and it’s bones were fully preserved until a ROM expedition decided to dig it up, clean it up and set it up for me to see. Amazing! They know how it lived, what it ate, how much it ate… they know everything, it’s amazing.

My amazement lasts the exact amount of time it takes me to look down to read the plaque about whatever dinosaur I’m currently standing in awe of. The plaque tells me only 3 of the bones are real, the rest is made of plaster, the rest is made up. The truth is they rarely find full dinosaurs, they find a leg bone here a vertebrae there and try to match it up using everything they have learned in University. Everything we know about dinosaurs is just the most plausible guess of thousands of extremely intelligent paleontologists.

When Humans Become Dinosaurs

Look around, imagine how much of this stuff will be around a million years after humans cease to exist. They’ll find my perfectly preserved arm bone, your perfectly preserved knee cap, a foot print and an old water well. Based on that they’ll make their best guess as to what humans were all about. If your knee cap shows that you have very strong leg muscles they’ll assume all humans did. If the foot prints show the person walked with a limp they’ll assume all humans did….. Even if they find an entire town preserved perfectly they’ll still only know a tiny bit about a tiny part of one culture in one area of the world.

There’s no real point to this post, it’s just another thing I think about often. I still enjoy looking at dinosaurs in museums and watching dinosaur based shows on tv. I guess it speaks to the diversity of humans and the vast differences in all of us. Imagine if you are the perfectly preserved skeleton they find and base all of their assumptions on? That might be kinda cool….

For the past few years I have been thinking a lot about six word stories. I am not very good at writing and I didn’t pay much attention in high school English class but I love the idea of telling an entire story in six words.

What Is A Six Word Story?

Hemingway once wrote a story in just six words and is said to have called it his best work:

For sale: baby shoes, never worn.

It tells an entire story in just six words and it blows my mind. I have seen many attempts but most miss the point entirely. Take McGill University for example: McGill – Think Big In Six Little Words, a bunch of six word statements and not one story. Or this user generated site, Six Word Stories, not bad but still miles away from Hemingway.

Could it be that the first ever six word story was the best; unbeatable? Wired magazine got a bunch of notable authors together to try to top it with decent results but again most are not stories: Wired 14.11: Very Short Stories.

The Best I Could Do

Here’s the best I could ever come up with, it’s more of a chapter than a story, it doesn’t start or end well. What did he stop trying? What was the accident? I vow to keep trying…. in my head… when I am trying to clear my mind.

He stopped trying after the accident.

Think about it and post one if you come up with something, I’m really into six word stories.

A Seal In Fisherman’s Wharf – Victoria, B.C. – June 19, 2009 from Totally Stupid on Vimeo.

While visiting Victoria, B.C. we went to Fisherman’s Wharf to buy a few crabs for dinner. There’s a seal that hangs out looking cute and begging for fish so I filmed it with my Flip Mino HD. Then I did the logical thing and recorded myself drumming, added crazy effects and made it the soundtrack; sweet?

We got sweet new computer monitors at work and after getting bored of the weak default screen saver that comes with Windows Vista we remembered Dream Aquarium. Dream Aquarium turns your computer monitor into an insanely life-like aquarium every time you get up to pee or turn around to chat about something inappropriate with your co-workers.

You have a bunch of options to add fish, delete fish, feed the fish, speed up and slow down the tank, move the bubbles, set different tanks and even choose an image of your own for the tank background. You can even switch the tank to wireframe mode so you can see the entire tank without it’s skin, check it out.

Here are my fish eating.

You can add a crab to your tank and set it’s mood. The crab can hate fish or just dislike fish. Mine hates fish and tries to grab them when they get near.

Dream Aquarium is an excellent way to spend $20, 20% of the profit goes to environmental charities, and it’s made by a fellow Torontonian. It’s crazy how life-like it is, download the demo and check it out.