online chats

Had lunch with Amanda yesterday at the Hospital For Sick Children (where she's working). Bryan and Craig came over last night for dinner (we ordered in Thai food) and to watch Enterprise. Many thanks to Allison for letting us know that Enterprise was on last night and not tonight! Apparently its schedule was temporarily changed to make room for a Temptation Island special tonight.


Dropped by FilkHaven this morning early enough to chat a bit with some of the UK filkers (Hilary and Chris Croughton, Annie Walker, Mike Whitaker) and Terence from Singapore. Online chatrooms have always fascinated me.


I know some people don't like them, find them too chaotic, a waste of time. I find that it depends on your mood and purpose. When I ran Inkspot, we tended to have two types of online chats: (1) Work-related chats, and (2) Social chats. Work-related chats were related to the craft or business of writing in some way, had a definite theme (building characters, for example, or a Q/A session with a particular author), and were usually moderated. Social chats were exactly that...people getting together to just chat about anything.





One of the criticisms I've heard about online chats is that they're a sad replacement for meeting together in person. I have to agree. But they're better than not being able to meet at all...it would take a great deal of effort and money to arrange a get-together with the people I chatted with this morning, for example, whereas opening a chat program for a few minutes was relatively effortless.


I also find that online chatting, though not as getting together face to face, has certain advantages over e-mail. The main advantage is that you're able to have more of a back-and-forth regular conversation than e-mail because of the immediacy of the environment. You can get answers to your questions much more quickly. And it's good for keeping in touch with people who don't e-mail that much (or that quickly :)).


On Sept. 11th, filkers began gathering in the Filkhaven room for a virtual headcount and to exchange news about other filkers, and for mutual comfort. Seanan, Batya, and Merav sang a song about this in a one-shot at OVFF which was really beautiful.


For me, the main disadvantage is that unless you're in a one:one chat with no other people present, or a moderated chat with a specific theme, you don't really get into involved discussions on one topic. You can hold private discussions within a public chatroom (using private messaging), but it's not quite the same as having a really good ongoing e-mail correspondence. Also online chats can be addictive...time passes pretty quickly when I'm in a chatroom, which is why I usually set a strict time limit for myself.





I'd be interested in hearing opinions from those of you who purposely attend or don't attend online chats. Please post in Blatherchat, thanks.


Blatherpics:


- My friend Andrew took this picture as we drove along the coast in California, on the way back from Monterey.


- One of the highlights of my visit with the Bohnhoffs was finding out that Maya was as obsessed with office supplies as I was, especially pens.


- You can even get flu shots at California grocery stores! :-)


Today's Poll: (Courtesy Terence Chua)

Have you ever worked as a temp?

grocery store thrills

I'm posting tonight instead of tomorrow even though it's actually a Tuesday, November 6th Blathering as an experiment because tomorrow's a novel-writing day, and I plan to get an early start instead of Blathering first, and plan to spend some solid time OFFLINE in the morning. Hope this change in schedule doesn't explode any of your brains. Hope the lack of morning online time doesn't explode mine.


So Shane's girlfriend gave me permission to reprint her letter here. Subject line was: "Cute Weta Guy".

Dear Debbie,


He is cute, isn't he?! He's been cute for the last seven years or so!


Not that I want to dash Rosie's romantic hopes or aspirations to

get close to someone actually involved with LOTR, BUT HE'S MINE!


No, it's a great strip and we've really been enjoying it! The Cute

Weta Guy is getting a bit of a hard time at work and I'm giving him

a hard time about his legions of female admirers, but he's thrilled

with the attention all the same!


Anyway keep up the good work... we'll be off to the "wrap" party

tonight...


Cute Weta Guy's Main Squeeze


Jill

Jill (who happens to be an atmospheric scientist with a Ph.D.) and I have actually been e-mailing back and forth a bit...she's very nice and isn't at all annoyed that I've been turning Shane into one of my comic character's main romantic interests. Apparently Shane's been undergoing a lot of friendly ribbing at work as a result of my comic strip.


In fact, Jill delivered an anonymous bunch of flowers to Weta Digital yesterday. They were addressed to the "Cute Weta Guy", and Jill convinced the receptionist to send an e-mail to all employees at Weta asking for the mysterious "Cute Weta Guy" to come and collect his flowers from "Rosie". :-)


HA! HA! I love this.


(For those who have no idea what I'm talking about, please do check out my Waiting For Frodo comic!)


Some mindless October stats...


Hey, Jeff just told me that about 900 people read my main Blatherings page a day (what you're reading right now). Wow, that was somewhat of a surprise, considering how few of them do the online poll. He also said that over 120,000 pages from "Waiting For Frodo" were viewed last month (about 4,000 a day).


In October, the average user visited 3.6 pages per visit and spent 8.1 minutes on my site. I got an average of 1,464 unique visitors per day, 45,359 unique visitors in the month of October, 75 countries. Nearly 60% use Microsoft Internet Explorer 5.x. The most popular search phrase used to find my site was "waiting for frodo", followed by "ovff", followed by "dandelion".


But I digress...mustn't keep those 900 from reading about today's exciting main topic.....


GROCERY STORES!


Today's Blatherpics were all taken on my last day with Andrea, when we went to her local grocery store and did some food shopping. As I've mentioned before, I have a fascination with grocery stores in other countries. And why not? Your local grocery store may seem dull to you, but to me it's packed with all kinds of weird and interesting stuff that I can't find in mine. I love that.


For example...Cottage Butt! I can't think of any packaged food item in Ontario with the word "butt" featured so prominently on the label.





I thought the concept of dilled Brussel Sprouts was gross, so was horrified when Andrea actually BOUGHT A JAR AND TOOK IT HOME. When she put some out on a plate and brought it that night as we sipped hot chocolate (just the thing to go with dilled brussel sprouts, you know) and gabbed, I figured I'd maybe try one and spit it out, preferably not directly back on the plate. Before I knew it, however, I had hoovered down most of the contents of the plate, and Andrea was putting out more. YUM!!! Between the two of us, we finished off half a jar within the hour. Go figure.





The product below IS disgusting. MEAT STICKS FOR TODDLERS?!





Ditto for the stuff below, though I secretly admit I'm curious about trying it sometime. I want a can of this for my Gross Packaged Food Collection (which I plan to donate to Interfilk someday, unless I grow too fond of it myself).





Individually-wrapped corn isn't gross, it's just weird. :-)





And finally, I had to take a picture of this aisle sign just because it reminded me so much of the old Sesame Street "One Of These Things Does Not Belong" game. :-)





Ooo, that reminds me...I still haven't posted my grocery store pictures from when I visited Maya and Jeff out in California! Must do that soon....


Today's Poll: (Suggest a poll question)

If I came to visit you, would you actually -want- to take me to your local grocery store, or would your tendency be to keep me away from it? YES for taking me, NO for keeping me away.

con schedule

Update 12:58 pm: ACK!!!! Humble apologies to any of you who have sent me e-mail in the past little while and not received a reply. I've just discovered I've screwed up my e-mail filters, and any e-mail which didn't have my e-mail address in the main TO: field was filtered into my spam mailbox. This includes any e-mail which was cc:ed to me. I am going through my spam-box now...

---

Hey, I got a letter from Shane's girlfriend! (Shane is the cute Weta Digital guy who originally wrote to me about my Waiting For Frodo comic strip.) I've asked for permission to post her letter on my site, so stay tuned. Weta just had their wrap party, by the way. :-)


Went to East Side Mario's for lunch out in Scarborough yesterday with Jeff, Scott, Luisa and her sons Ronnie and Michael (do check out Ronnie's and Michael's cool Halowe'en costumes on Luisa's page). Scott had been up until 6 am working doing programming.


Checked out a Holiday Inn in the area after lunch...Jeff and Luisa are planning a LAN party for friends, and were considering booking a penthouse suite in the hotel for the event.





Went to my sister's place afterwards, where my dad made a yummy lamb dinner. Sara and Annie had gone to the "Journey to Middle Earth" exhibit at Casa Loma on Saturday and loved it, and had run into Allison and John.


Did some more work on my "Waiting For Frodo" song last night, and am hoping to get it finished by the time Allison, Jodi and I get together for our next practice. Unfortunately we had to cancel last week and this week's practice because Allison had school musical rehearsals (she and another teacher are organizing a production of "Joseph and the Technicoloured Dreamcoat").


In my efforts to budget re: travelling, I've come up with a list of sf/filk conventions I plan to attend next year. I've blown most of my frequent flyer points this past year, so will be doing mostly local events.


--


(***)Feb 8-10, Toronto: Ad Astra


(***)April 5-7, Toronto: FilKOntario


June 21-23, greater NYC area: Contata (no web page available yet)


July 5-7, 2002, Toronto Trek (no web page available yet) -- tentative


(***)(PPP)Aug 2-4, California: Conchord (no web page available yet)

- We're Guests of Honor at this convention, woohoo! :-)


Nov 1-3, Ohio: Ohio Valley Filk Fest


--


The ones prefaced with (***) are conventions which all three Urban Tapestry members are able to attend; finances are more of an issue with us these days. Conventions prefaced with (PPP) are ones where we have confirmed programming, such as concerts, workshops, whatever.





Links:


New Waiting For Frodo strip (Title: "Monsters Inc")


The Sims Take on Al Qaeda


Author suing "Harry Potter" author having a hard time


Read Lord of the Rings in 5 Seconds (one page comic strip summary of the entire trilogy from the Swedish magazine "Codex")


Blatherpics:


- Luisa and me, yesterday.


- Scott.


- Scott with fake teeth and glasses, and me.


Today's Poll: (Suggest a poll question)

Do you know what a LAN party is?

monsters inc.

Graham Leathers on CBC radio this weekend!

From Graham on Blatherchat:



We just got word that our Madly Off in All Directions show will be broadcast this weekend on Saturday at 6:00 PM on CBC Radio 2, and Sunday on CBC Radio 1 at 1:00 PM. It is national so everyone in Canada, please tune in. It may also be broadcast on the internet, I am not sure about that, but check out http://www.cbc.ca for more on that. It was a real high water mark in my show biz carreer, and I hope I can share it with all of you.



Graham, by the way, is Bryan's (the guy in the photo at the top of this page) cousin.


Unfortunately I didn't see Gray's message in time yesterday, nor will be able to be near a radio at 1 pm today. Is anyone out there recording the show? I would be happy to pay for any postage/handling for a copy!

My Life In A Nutshell

I committed one of the cardinal L'User sins this morning. Worked for about half an hour on a new My Life In A Nutshell comic (Bill Sutton told me that it was about time I did a new one, after all :)), DIDN'T SAVE MY FILE, and then Painter crashed. I lost it allt like kicking myself in the head. But I didn't, because that would hurt me in ways losing a file couldn't possibly.


I confess I've been neglecting My Life In A Nutshell lately because I was getting tired of rehashing my brush with corporate life. It was fun therapy at first, but now I'd just like to put it behind me and get the comic caught up to my current life. So you can probably expect a bunch of Nutshell comics to speed me through the dying days of Inkspot in the next little while. Get added to the notify list if you want to receive notices when I post a new strip.

Monsters Inc.

Went out for dim sum with Brian, Parki, and Jeff yesterday afternoon. Hoovered down numerous pork buns, decided against trying chicken feet after all (no one else at the table was even remotely interested). I love compartmentalized food.


Met Scott at the Paramount for Monsters Inc. Mega-line-up of parents and kids. After we got our seats, a little blonde girl beside Scott took a liking to him and began babbling all sorts of little-girl stuff, obviously a flirtatious attempt to engage him in conversation. Pretty amusing to watch, actually, since Scott's a pretty imposing-looking guy (though he's a marshmallow inside, especially when it comes to kids (he'll probably kill me for divulging his secret like this, I'm sure)).


Surprise bonus for us in the movie preamble:


Harry Potter trailer - VERY COOL. Looks even better than it did in the last trailer. Can't wait!!


Star Wars trailer - A bit lame as a trailer, I thought (mostly consisted of not-that-interesting background music as a brief montage of clips from the movie flashed by. Still, exciting to see anything to do with Episode II at all, really.


"For The Birds" - A Pixar short animated film. REALLY funny. :-)


As for the movie Monsters Inc. itself, I LOVED it. Must see it again soon. I love the type of kids' movie which has a whole second level of meaning for adults. Unique storyline ideas, too, an unusual thing nowadays. I won't say anymore for fear of giving away spoilers.


Also have to say that movies like Monsters Inc., Shrek, and Toy Story sure do make the "Snow White - Beauty & the Beast"-type offerings from Disney proper look pretty lame. Speaking of Beauty & the Beast, looks like they're doing a big-screen rerelease, and a sequel to Peter Pan.


After the movie, Parki and Scott went home. Bryan came over for a couple of hours to do tech stuff with Jeff and watch part of Ralph Bakshi's "Lord of the Rings" with me. I was unable to watch the entire length of the latter, yuk. But I -was- inspired to start writing a Waiting For Frodo song for Urban Tapestry. The entire chorus popped into my head, so of course I had to write it down immediately. Working on the verses now...


Blatherpics:


- Bryan Fullerton on his cellphone during dim sum. Bryan runs Samurai Consulting, and also hosts all my personal websites plus OVFF web page. He also hosted my Inklings newsletter. Bryan is my TechnoHero.


- Brian Parkinson ("Parki") and Jeff


Today's Poll: (Courtesy Steve Brinich)

If you have an inkjet printer, do you refill the cartridges or just buy new ones ("no" if you don't have an inkjet)?

greek stew and aprons

Parki came over last night. Good to see him; we haven't gotten together since before I left for California. I made another Moosewood cookbook recipe: Greek Stew. No meat...just potatoes, green beans, tomatoes, onions, garlic, lemon juice, oregano, parsley, feta grated on top just before serving. Both Parki and Jeff liked it. Wow, two edible homecooked meals in a row...maybe this cooking thing isn't -quite- as scary as I thought, at least for basic stuff.


And to tell you the truth, I actually had fun cooking. (ssssh, don't tell anyone).


Really. It was sort of like making mudpies, except you were hoping to eat what you were creating. I'm not an elegant cook...I chop onions horribly inefficiently and cry while I do (it was only after I had finished that I vague remembered that periodically rinsing the knife under cold water would have helped), put in the lemon juice way too early, chopped the ends off the beans instead of de-stemming them by hand because I was too lazy, badly scraped one knuckle while grating the feta etc. But it seemed to end up okay in the end.


We watched a documentary about the history of Genesis (the band). Even though I'm not as much of a Genesis fan as Parki and Jeff, I did find it interesting. Still fell asleep on the couch near the end, though. After Parki left, Jeff played network Quake with friends (a Friday night habit). I dropped by the FilkHaven IRC to chat a bit, then crashed.





Did a whole bunch of work on my children's novel yesterday and this morning, which made me very happy. :-)


Practiced some pentatonic scale exercises that Jeff Bohnhoff taught me on guitar when I was out in California (thanks, Jeff!).


Going out today for dim sum with Jeff, Parki, Bryan, Scott, then we're off to see Monsters Inc.


The picture at the top of this page is of young Casey and Riley Kwinn. Beckett made their costumes, can you believe it? I was in California when she made the hoods. I've always considered sewing a flavour of true magic. I mean, think about it...someone who can sew will take a rather dull-looking piece of cloth and turn it into something you can actually WEAR, something FUNCTIONAL. My mom used to sew all the time. Most of our childhood clothes were handmade, though I didn't appreciate it at the time.


I used to hate sewing when I had to take Home Economics back in grade school. I hated HomeEc even more than I hated Phys. Ed. Except when we got to cook and eat things, that is. The appeal of the gentler arts of sewing, knitting, and crocheting totally escaped me. I remember spending a major part of a term having to sew an apron. An APRON. I mean geez, can you imagine any teacher assigning that sort of thing now? Only girls took HomeEc back then.


So while the boys got to do cool stuff like carve wood and make lamps, I was at the sewing machine. Or rather, picking out stitches because I had sewn a pocket on the wrong side of the fabric, or screwed up the hem somehow.


When I was finally finished, I got an A+ on my apron. I even remember my HomeEc teacher showing my apron to other teachers. When she gave it back to me, I took it home and then forgot about it...I definitely had no plans to actually -wear- the thing.


Anyway, watching Beckett at the sewing machine brought back a lot of HomeEc memories for me. But I also felt a twinge of envy. How cool it would be to be able to sew something that wasn't an apron and have it look GOOD. :-)





Blatherpics:


- Riley and Casey in Halloween costumes made by Beckett.


- Jodi and Rand at OVFF.


- Andrea and Nicholas.


Today's Poll: (Suggest a poll question)

As an adult, have you ever used a sewing machine?