The Comedy Club Experience

So, I went to a comedy club yesterday. I didn’t really know what to expect when I went in. Perhaps a few laughs, some guy standing in front of a wall telling jokes. Hopefully good jokes.
What I found was that some people will laugh at almost anything. The comic will make some general remark like, “you guys are a good crowd,” and people will start laughing. He’s not being sarcastic there, he’s trying to be polite. It’s not a joke. If I gave you a compliment, and you started laughing at me, I’d be wondering if I said something wrong.
I didn’t really find a lot of it all that funny. Much of the time, I was wondering why people were laughing. It was like they didn’t come to see something funny, they came to laugh. Seeing that was kind of like watching people go to a sports game to cheer instead of going to see the game. I don’t see people waving banners, jumping up and down yelling things like, “Whoo, awesome time out! Way to take a break.”
Reading this probably makes me sound like a whiny brat. Just pretend that you’re sitting in a comedy club and I’ve just been introduced as a traveling comedian. Add a bit of facial expression, some gestures and maybe that’ll change things a bit.

Another Strange dream

Most of the time, I dream in first person. Usually it’s a mix of familiar images in some sort of reasonable manner. This one started out kind of like that. I was don’t really recall much of the start. I was in a car, my dad was driving. We dropped off my sister somewhere. That’s about when I kind of ceased being me and started being eyes and ears on an unfolding scene. I remember a rather strange series of visuals. The first was going down a road. Quite natural since I remember being in a car. I don’t really any driving or seeing any car interior. I also remember many super metriod clips.
I could hear some voices and saw a truck pulling in front. I heard them talking about road rage and something about taunting people. That truck was randomly hitting the breaks, and swerving around. I don’t remember any engine noise, but I recall getting closer and closer to the truck. This continued for a while.
I don’t remember the transition, but the next visual I remember was traveling along some pavement. It was much too narrow to be a road, but it had a yellow stripe down the middle. This led to something similar to going down a quiet residential road. I saw a man step out of a car and go into a house. Everyone was gathered in one room where there was a mother, a young child and a teenaged child. The focus was on the teenaged child. It was clear that he hadn’t been home for a long time. I’m not sure if he was a run away, but the way he put it was that he decided to hang up his hat for a while.
It was a strange dream. I could see things going on, but I couldn’t interact with anyone or anything and had no sense of being there. It was kind of like watching a tv show. Afterwards, I was left with some sense that the teenaged son was metaphorically representing me.

Evaporative cooling

I’ve often mentioned that if I was going to settle here, I’d set up a cooling fountain because this is an arid climate and evaporative cooling should work rather well here. It seems that I’m going to be here for a while, so I’m going to look into making a smaller, more compact evaporative cooling device than a decorative fountain. I should get some sleep soon. I pulled my thermodynamics book out so that I can crunch a few numbers to help figure out how well this will work. I’m tired and I want to put together some sort of rough plan as well as pick up a good thermometer to try to measure actual performance.

Blog comes to life

I guess the spider must have come around yesterday. 12 hits in one day is a record for my blog. My last record was 3. Seven of those came from search engines using the following search terms:

gay calgary
price on copper in ottawa
“how to” build “3d printer”
“3d printer’
where to buy 3d glasses in ottawa
salvation army ottawa blog

with two people searching for gay calgary.

I’ve never really tried to do anything in the Calgary gay community. I’m not sure if I’ve really said anything meaningful on that topic. I have talked about a few queer issues, what happened at pride is the only Calgary specific thing that I talked about. The price of copper in ottawa was definately about my talk of the production cost of a penny and what those are made of. For the record, there’s very little copper in a penny. The bulk of all canadian coins are steel.

How to build a 3d printer and 3d printer hits, I might be able to be more helpful with that. I’ve been meaning to do a bit of experimentation to see what works. Thus far I haven’t really done anything useful though. Maybe I should go to the mall and gather parts for testing my printhead idea and see how it compares to the one the people in the bath project are using. There’s still a few details that need to be hashed out.

As for where to buy 3d glasses in ottawa, you got me. I don’t really know where would have something like that. My first instinct is to ask the people who supplied the 3d projector and media that you want the 3d glasses to use. If that doesn’t work, maybe try asking the museum of science and technology.

I never made any comments about the Salvation Army in Ottawa. However, I did make comments about a retailer, Target, which does not have a location in Ottawa, Ontario, and their interactions with the Salvation Army. They might do good work, but when people start getting polical. Maybe I didn’t quite bash traditional media enough when I wrote about the Salvation Army. Knowing the way they generate profit, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was just one screwball who yelled gay-wiccan conspiracy. If you simply don’t print any other statements, you can make it look like a prodominent view. If that screwball happens to be part of the salvation army, you can even make it sound like the general view of the organization. There’s a chance the truth could have been twisted. Religion and politics is a hazardous mix. You can use them as leverage for fundraising in charity, but using them to lash out in anger really makes you look bad.

Now that people see me, I wonder when they’ll start commenting… As in legitimate, non-spam comments.

Finished my first Space Empires Dark Nova game

Apparently I became too much of a threat in the game and everyone declared war on me at once. Of course, the AI overlooked that they were dependant on my trade to keep their economy going and they were unable to build anything new or properly maintain their ships. My cloaked ships hidden in their territory plagued their planets and it actually took a while to get the whole population rioting. I noticed a few things while I was attacking. They don’t use the more expensive cities that produce three times as much as the facilities do and they don’t upgrade their facilities. In this mod upgrading is more important because there is a huge difference between the early models and the later ones. It’s on the magnitude of a few times more production rather than less than half, which is still rather significant. I wasn’t even attacked once during the entire offensive. This really isn’t a good single player mod, but I suppose the multiplayer wouldn’t be too bad. There are still plenty of useless weapon mounts and stuff, but people can evaluate those themselves. Also, the gatling mounted plague is quite impressive. The game just marks the planet as infected and there isn’t really a measure of how infected the planet is. Of course, the AI just treats it as just another weapon and will dance around making multiple shots at a single planet when there’s two on the battle field, which really isn’t the mod’s fault, but a general AI thing. The AI will also let stationary planets take out moving ships that can easily slip into range to fire and out again before the planet has a chance to fire, which is nothing new.
Personally, I didn’t really like the cities. A planet with a capacity of 25 facilities takes at least 25 turns to fill. With the cities that take around 5 turns to build depending on which one, racial traits and space yards, you wind up with over 125 turns of production. It just takes too long.

Making a mountain out of nothing, the relentless pursuit of profit and special rights through contreversy

The inevidable has happened. As I was expecting when I first read the articl about the Ghanaian chiefs and the ritual on the grandstand, letters provoked counterletters and now we have a moutain where there wasn’t even a mole hill to start with. There’ve been some good letters. One of them sad that being religious isn’t about winning popularity contests, it’s about following beliefs. There’s a sentiment that I can agree with. There’s also this letter titled “All or nothing.” It questions whether people would have been receptive to a catholic mass on the grounds and suggests, “Perhaps all religions in this multicultural society should have been euqally represented at the grandstand. Or none of them.”
I have a somewhat different view of equality than the one expressed in that letter, I feel that the circumstances should be considered. Seeing that ritual was pretty much a once in a lifetime event. It’s not something you can find locally. We were also trying to entertain dignitaries. I don’t think we should give special consideration to a bunch of people whining that a religion with different views got to put on a song and dance and they didn’t get invited. These are two entirely different situations here. It’s not like we turned down the pope in the same breath.
Another question I’m curious about is if there would still be an issue if they just got up on stage, did their thing and left. I wasn’t there, but a lot of spritual rituals are just a song and dance. The natives are always doing things on the stampede grounds, it shows part of our heritage. Some of their stuff probably has a spiritual significance.
One of the thigns that bugs me a lot is that there still hasn’t been any mention of anyone requesting to perform a religious cerimony being declined. I just see a bunch of people assuming that since it didn’t happen, it must not be allowed. Of course, all this is because the newspaper managed to dig up one person who felt offended and got people to make fun of him. The only reason there’s contreversy here is because we’ve managed to produce some out of thin air.

A box of childhood

I just came back upstairs after going through a bunch of things in the basement. I’ve yet to repack it all, some of it brings back some pretty depressing memories. One of the many treasures I came across was a dollar. A single loonie that I keep tucked away in a special little box. It was given to me by an employee of the Calgary exhibition and stampede when I was little. There was this tend that I wanted to look inside of so I told my family and my brother and I went in. Once inside, my brother immediately turned around and went out again. I followed a few seconds later, but he had already disappeared. I looked around the outside to try to find him and then started running around. At first I went to places I thought they could be. Places that were near, anywhere they could be waiting for me. After that, I went on to things that they had mentioned they wanted to see and anywhere I thought they might have gone to. Couldn’t find them anywhere. After a while, I told someone I was lost and they took me to a waiting area where they kept track of lost kids. He gave me a dollar while we were chatting and then I waited for my parents to come pick me up. After that, my mom yelled at me for running off and told me about how stressful it was looking for me. She also told me that I shouldn’t be wasting her time like that and compared it to going to work. Her story is that every was outside waiting for me and I must have intentionally went the other way. It’s a load of crap.
She demanded that I give up $40 for the incident, $20 to her, $20 to my brother. I didn’t run off there, I was abandon. I couldn’t have been more than six years old at the time. My sister was born when I was seven, so she probably wouldn’t have been taking us around when she was pregnant and I don’t recall her being there. So, over 17 years later, I want the truth. So, flash forward, hanging on to the dollar and being able to hold it again, I finally learn that some things are more important than money. That memory is definately worth more than a dollar to me.
I also found my grade 6 class photo. I was a really depressed kid then. I had all this stuff holding me back. What really keeps me from going through with my dreams now? There’s a couple of things I want to do, but I don’t have a job yet, but there’s a lot of fine details that I can hash out now so that when I do get the money to start putting things together, I can start building right away.

Atwood’s Machine anyone?

My dad wants to lift a pressure washer up to the top of a strip mall. He says it’s quite heavy. Sounds easy enough to me. My first thought was to use a pully system. My second thought was to use an Atwood’s machine. Either one will be fine, but odds are we’re just going to brute force it up there. I really haven’t looked at the building in ages, I’m not sure how much of an overhang there is for rigging up lifting cranes and stuff. Could be another write up for my layoutless site, though something like that probably doesn’t need to be shared. I don’t see what there is to gain from explaining it again. There’re no big misconceptions to debunk or finer points that are usually missing. It’s fairly straight forward.

Well, letters are in

Many little things to say today.
There’s a couple letters in the paper about the article I mentioned earlier that basically say that guy doesn’t speak for christianity. There are none that actually support his views so I feel a little relieved right now.
Another thing is that I went to check out a little camera that I was thinking of using as a necklace. It’s a tad bulky so I didn’t get it. It also didn’t come with a lens cap. I’m always complaining about the quality of the camera I have now, so I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to get another point and shoot.
I also saw the movie Failure to Launch. I really don’t know what to say about it. Although there was one scene I saw that sticks out in my mind. The mother of the main character drops off some folded laundry on his bed. That goes a bit far.
Anyway, I’m tired and I want to win my latest Space Empires game. I thought I was going to do well, but I started in a corner and it just so happens that someone else who started in the middle and could expand in all directs has far more territory than I do and more planets. I am however making better use of the planets I have. Although I stuck a victory condition of first to a score of 5million and I think I can win this without attacking, I want to take him out. The opponent has more territory, more ships, and better technology than I do. I don’t have a military at this time and I’ll need to build one if I’m to attack. There’s currently a treaty and the AI plays to well, plays as if the game were to continue indefinately. They’ll treat my ships as allied defenses when I move them in. Most of them will probably be fortified though and when I attack, I’ll need to somehow get through their defenses. I’m kind of curious as to what gatling mounting the plague will do. Do I really need to hit a planet more than once? Will more of the population be infected if I hit it several times? It’s not one of my normal weapons. I’m thinking the best strategy is an economic attack, anger the population into rioting and disabling but not destroying the ships so that maintence still needs to be paid.

Space Empires IV mod Dark Nova V4.22

Lately, I’ve been playing a lot of Space Empires IV just to pass the time. I decided to try out the dark nova mod that is supposed to one of the better ones. It has a lot of neat interesting options. One of the ideas that I really liked is the gattling mounted weapons. Basically, a tenth the size, tenth the damage, tenth the supply use. If you’re up against something that’s hard to hit, you can fire a large number of shots at it and hit it with a few shots rather than shooting a few shots and missing all of them. Though because of the rounding, some weapons become more deadly, others become less deadily and some will let you shoot them without supplies. It’s an interesting little quirk. There are also some strange things that happen when you fire them at planets. After the cargo is oblitherated, the number of points of damage a planet can take is determined by its population. The population is counted on a different increment so all damage is rounded up to the nearest 200. This is a pretty major balance disrupter for the AI.
There’s also some features which I’m not sure work at all. This mod lets you do stuff like produce resources in space without remote mining. There’s orbital research facilities and components that have features that say they just generate resources. I built a couple of orbital research platforms and a few ships with components that are supposed to produce minerals and they don’t show in my accounting.
There’s also a few discrepencies in the description of some of the mounts and what they actually do. It’s a little surprising for such a late version mod.