First of all, Saturday was a family barbeque, which was great, a full day of some productivity at home, then family, a huge delicious salmon, homemade bread (thanks dad!), cheese, etc. Great all around.

Then came Sunday.

So we had arranged a climbing day in Squamish. I've been hankering to get out on the rock again even if it's just to see that I'm way too old and fat to be out on the rock again, and my buddy Lawrence was up for it, so we and some other friends arranged to head up early Sunday morning. I had all my gear ready (got it out of storage the night before, spent some time going through everything and smelling it to see if I could smell the rock again), and people were all about ready to go and meetup with Lawrence in Abbotsford to get on the road. As we were out on the driveway someone pointed to a cat and said something like "what's wrong with her?".

Closer examination showed that Munchkin's whole backend was black. Not dirty, like she'd fallen in a mud puddle, but she had somehow gotten her whole back end into either paint, or tar, or the goop they use in asphalt. Her back legs, tail, and belly were covered in a black tacky goop that made it hard for her to walk, and was covered in dust and bits of plants that she'd picked up walking around. It also was splattered on various bits of her, including mouth and tongue (from trying to lick it off no doubt).

So there goes the day. Andrea saw pretty quickly that it wasn't something we could just hose off, so we cancelled the day with everyone, and set to work figuring out what to do next. Of course being 6:30am on a Sunday the vet wasn't open, but the answering machine pointed us to a Langley 24 hour clinic, who suggested we bring her in in case she'd injested any, as well as to get it off. Better them than us I say.

OK, so pack the cat into a carrier and head off. Heading up to the highway on ramp about 20 minutes in my car started making a funny noise. You can see where this is headed right? A bit farther down the road it stopped making the funny noise. OK, can't be that bad, I'll keep on going and deal with it later. A bit farther down the road it made a "schwack" type noise and I figured it was time to pull over.

Toll of the car was a belt had come off. Not bad right? Except there was another belt connected to another pulley that had also come off. And then the pulley at the bottom of the engine that that connected to was moving in a way that even a non-mechanic like myself could see a pulley attached to an engine wasn't supposed to do.

*sigh*

So 30 minutes latery my mother-in-law showed up and too Andrea and the cat off to the vet, while I went with the tow truck and car in the other direction to leave it at the dealership. Course, the on-ramp is far enough away that it cost me money to tow the car there. And as I found out today, it's not a cheap fix. Not "oh my god have to buy a new car" expensive, but a fair hit. Plus the other stuff that needs to be done to it as well, and at this point, I'm in for a penny in for a pound you know?

So a while later cat and wife returned, with the poor kitten very unimpressed and extremely silly looking in the carrier, with her hind end, tail, legs, belly, all shaved down. And we still need to bath her to work at getting the rest of the tar crap off.

That trip to the vet was costly too, not only the after hours call out fees, but the multiple baths they gave, vet consulting fee, etc. Luckily she wasn't showing any "sick" signs of having eaten any of the stuff, so other than being completely emberassed and silly looking, she's all ok.

Something about the experience (or maybe the cone of shame) has turned her into a bit of a lap cat though.... she's spent the night on the bed with us, and a lot of time beside me and Andrea on the couch, something she'll only do once and a while. Maybe in my "cat ownership by alan" book I'll put a chapter on dunking your cat into tar or paint to get her to spend more time with you.... :)

So obviously the gods don't want me out on the rock again, so I'll probably not tempt fate by leaving the house on the weekend anymore. The way that it's going I'll be completely broke if I venture out the front door again!

It's a relatively simple bug, easy to reproduce, and while not a huge important bug, it's annoying and I'd say at least one out of ten people with dual monitors has probably come across it at some point. Yet it's sat mostly ignored in the GNOME bug database, as have most of my other reported bugs.

Ah well, I guess there's a chance that it will be fixed now, should someone step up and actually fix the code that is.

First of all, I hate ads, I use ad-blockers whenever possible, pointedly don't look at billboards when possible, and so on. I'm also an Apple Fanboy, but I don't think that matters here.

Yes, people are right about ads as a "feature" being stupid and while I'm sure that there are some that will be more interactive and interesting, but I think this will wear off as quickly as those full page flash ads where the webpage would jiggle or crumble or whatever it was that had their 15 minutes a year or two ago.

However, look at it this way:

• It doesn't add any ads to your mobile apps.
  
  This is just an ad network that app developers can use, so chances are if you have an app with no ads in it, that'll stay the same.


• It'll make the current ads less annoying.
  
  Right now if you have ads in your apps and click on them, you get exited out of the app and it opens up the mobile browser to show you the ad. While this has gotten less annoying with the advent of iOS 4 and multi-tasking, so you don't have to "lose" your place in the app when it exits, us older iPhone owners still have that PITA factor if you accidentally mis-click. With iAds, the big deal about them is they stay in-app, so your app doesn't stop running when they play, or give you an interactive whatchamacallit or whatever. So if you click the ad for whatever reason, you just close it and you're still in your app.
  

Of course, that's my guessing as I have yet to see iAds show up in any of my apps. If instead iAds show up in apps that aren't supposed to have ads, and they're forced on users, show up full screen 3 times an hour and use the "we'll interrupt you so you remember to buy our crap" model, I retract everything I said above and will start looking much harder at Android, but I seriously doubt that Apple, a company that prides itself on user experience, will do that sort of a dick move.

I'm not saying that it's a good thing, just that it's really no worse than the current state of ads in mobile apps. I won't comment on the whole "locking google out" thing though, cause no one seems to be talking about that, and I don't know much about anti-compete law (unless I'm bitching about Microsoft of course).

This morning I even thought about wearing shorts but said to myself, "no, I'll be inside a cold office for 8 hours a day and only really have the opportunity to be outside for 1, there's no sense in freezing my legs all day for just not being too hot for that one lunch hour."

Oops.

As an extra bonus, my Drobo seems to be talking to the world again just fine. I'll plug it directly into my Mac when I get home tonight to run a disk check on it again to be sure, but I think maybe just having it's bits twiddled by the various disk utility software got it back up and going properly.

Sometimes as I'm finding, the problem is just me....

So after running the 4-5 hour test on each disk (and then some) and finding nothing wrong, I finally figured maybe it's just me and I'll reformat it and re-partition it. So I put all the disks back in the box and boot it back up (irony alert: now everything is there just dandy). Then I put my desktop computer back together (it was needed to attach the disks to it to run the utilities) and boot it backup. It boots to the Windows logo, and reboots. Reboots to the Windows logo and reboots. Reboots to the.. well, you get the picture.

Luckily the second time it reboots it gives me the option to go into the repair console, which is where it is now, with a little progress bar going slowly and sadly back and forth across the screen "searching for problems".

I actually ran it once already and I got tired and thought maybe I'll just try rebooting it and nope, that didn't work. So I'm back here, hoping that I don't have to run a disk utility on my desktop machine, which, before being opened to run disk checks on other disks, was running absolutely fine.

Some days I really want to just toss all this stuff in the trash and start over.

Hopefully soon it'll come back and tell me that it's found something wrong, fixed it, and I can now reboot back to my computer again.

This one is going to be even quicker though, no high fallutin' prattling on with them big reviewers words. Get your buddies, go out and have a pizza or burger and the local fast food joint, have a beer or two, then go see the movie.

That preview you've seen with the crazy stuff with the plane and the tank? It's all like that. Not the questionable CGI, but the pure unappolagetic fun of a crazy over the top movie that doesn't care about a thin plot or cardboard characters (even though the plot and characters are surprisingly good IMHO), but just wants you to sit down and hang on for a ride. The actors are good matches for their 80's TV originals, the plot is a combination of origin story and first adventure, and the shit blowing up is just fun. So go see it, you'll like it. Unless you're the sort of person who wants to go see Sex in the City 2, in that case you're probably not going to like this movie at all.

Well worth it, see it in the theatre for the full effect, two thumbs up.

The mechanics of the plot are the same, predictably so... even the end fight is pretty much the same. Still, not bad all things considered. The biggest plus for this movie was it felt like a travel video for China. Sweeping landscapes, colorful people and places, beautiful scenery, etc, all made me really want to go there with about $10k in camera gear and no deadlines. Saying it's like a travel video isn't a bad thing, it was still a movie of course, but they seemed to pay special attention to the cinematography to show just how beautiful the country is.

Sadly the biggest letdown for me was the acting from Jaden Smith, it had a few cringe-worthy, or at least almost cringe-worthy parts, and he only mostly managed to pull it off (says the guy with no acting experience ever). It really felt like maybe his parents were both big stars and wanted to create a movie to be a vehicle for him to rocket to stardom.

My vote, not required for the big screen, but if you've got the time, hey, why not, it's not that bad. Better yet if you've seen the "real" Karate Kid movie so you can catch the homages to the original (or you might call them "this worked last time, may as well do it this time as well").

Don't read more unless you want some major spoilers from a few random thoughts about the series finale...

Bryan: My god it just gets better and better, somewhere Walt Mossberg is choking himself with an apple mouse cord while listening to this to heighten his experience.

Now the big question is a) are there other Firefly nerds on the train who'd notice it and b) is it too far out of the norm to wear as a "normal" hat :)

Many thanks again for Elf for her great work and shipping things all the way from the other side of the continent to me!