So it seems I have’t posted in a while. No real reason for why I haven’t, apart from my usual… I don’t know what. I haven’t maintained any kind of online journal with any sort of regularity since before I left for university, really. Sure, I went on a few posting kicks in first and second year, but I’m fairly my posting rate dropped off some time in OAC.

I’m just never sure what to talk about, you know? Part of it might be because I had to disable commenting on here some time ago because I was getting spammed; now I have no way of knowing who’s reading this thing. Also, the fact that I can’t add the syndicated version to LiveJournal, since I don’t have a paid account, severely inhibits my distribution, I think. Anne has suggested a few times, most recently tonight (or was it last night?), that I should start publishing on my LiveJournal account again. I might. I’m not sure. It was hard keeping my attention on this site while I was using LiveJournal, and at least by thinking about this platform every once in a while I can keep my hackish tendencies at least somewhat active.

I’m thinking about doing a visual redesign around here. Maybe cleaning up some of the other pages. I just came up with a cool-looking wordmark for myself last night that could be easily worked into a design for this page. This is just feeling a little dated to me, you know?

Work’s picking up, in terms of my enjoyment of it. Not sure why, really; I’ve just noticed that seem to have developed a deeper interest in everything. I’m much less, “fuck it, it’s five o’clock; I’m going home”, and much more interested in doing a good job. Maybe it’s because I feel like I’m contributing something real to the work environment and not just occupying a seat and doing this mindless gruntwork that my titular job entails. I learned a lot while I was working at the Hell Desk, more than anything about how to manage a network and a wider system. And I feel like I’m learning, since having arrived at my job now, how to implement those principles. It’s slow, and it’s hard, because it really involves disrupting the status quo, and from a position where not many people expect, or want, to see such a disruption, but I do feel like I’m making progress. My interim manager was giving me kudos for it, and sort of commiserating with me whenever I complained about how I’d love to rewrite a lot of the software we use (and I could, and I could do it pretty damn quickly, too), so I think that has kind of helped me too. And now my real manager’s back from her maternity leave, so I feel like I should really get playing my “A” game (nothing to do with my “O”-face. You know: Oh! Oh! Oh!) and that seems to have really helped. For the last few weeks, when I’ve been at home, I’ve caught myself thinking, “God, I should really be doing that thing for work”, when I almost never did before.

Maybe I’m just growing up, or something.

God, that’s a scary prospect, isn’t it?

I’ve never embedded a movie in a blog before. Hell, I don’ think I’ve even embedded a picture in my blog since I moved over to this platform.

Anyway, this is alarmingly true.. albeit sans the baseball bat. There’s another one by the same animator that deserves watching too.

According to an article in Today's Globe, sounds over a certain decibel level can “noticably” increase a sleeping person’s blood pressure. The decibel level in question? 35 dB. The lead researcher, a Doctor Lard Jarup, of the Imperial College London, admits that “thirty-five decibels [is] not very loud at all.”

Dr Jarup’s quite right. 35 dB isn’t very loud. In fact, 35 dB is pretty damn quiet. 35 dB is softer than your television; it’s softer than the person talking at a normal volume one metre away from you. Granted, it’s perceived as significantly louder than calm breathing (which is all you’d probably be exposed to while asleep), but.. it’s still quieter than almost everything you hear all day.

This isn’t exactly surprising. When you hear a noise significantly louder than the current ambient noise level, your blood pressure goes up. That just makes sense.

What I also wonder is where the subject’s blood pressure went, when exposed to normal daytime-type noise levels, in comparison to where their blood pressure sits during the day. Maybe the body thinks, “oh, it’s noisy like daytime,” and increases its blood pressure as a result of classical conditioning.

Oh no, the body’s doing exactly what it can be expected to do! Everybody freak out, wear earplugs at night, sonically insulate your homes! Aieeeeeeee!

I hate bad science.

Subject chosen purely because I’m writing this update from my work BlackBerry, on the way to Kingston for the weekend. I’m such a nerd.

Actually, I’m not entirely certain what I can say apart from that. Obviously, I’m not dead. Work’s very much the same as always. Oh, yeah, I have a callback for an audition this coming Monday and I’m thinking about joining a “wind orchestra” as a percussionist… Planning amusing things in my online Star Trek RPG, to which I’ve been woefully neglectful. I can’t absolutely say “the usual”, but… it doesn’t feel spectacularly out-of-the-ordinary, either.

Ahh well, we shall see, eh? Maybe I could work on updating this thing more often. That’df certainly be a change! -laughs-

Seems I haven’t posted on here in a while.. d’oops! I feel kind of like a jerk about that.

On the other hand, there isn’t really all that much to report, I don’t think. My day to day life continues much as it has, with very little change. Work continues to stress me out. I’ve been dropped into a different division than the one that I’d previously been in, and I have a whopping nine days to learn how to control what products are available on the old and new versions of the website, using entirely different sets of software. And, just to make things interesting, I’m taking update requests from someone who’s notorious for giving poor instructions and being a total micromanager.

Anne and I are heading up to Kingston for Christmas to be with her family, so that’ll be a nice little break from the everyday, I think. The car rental’s more expensive that I’d have liked it to be, but I did wait till two weeks before the date to book, which meant the only National agency in the general neighbourhood is out at Pearson International, which automatically slaps on a $50-plus-tax surcharge—just because it’s from the airport. Hurray.

Christmas shopping’s been going easier than it usually does for me, though that’s probably by virtue of Anne’s presence. She’s much better at gift-giving than I am, so it’s made the whole process a hell of a lot easier.

Also, I’ve been paying more attention to my deviantART profile, and deviantART in general. It’s made me want to start publishing my photos (and taking them, of course) more often. I've got… probably thirtyish sets of prints floating around the apartment, some containing pictures I’m really happy with, that I've been meaning to publish. The interesting thing will be coming up with a good watermark, but I think I’ve got that about sorted. It needs a bit of refining, but right now it's something that can be easily written off as JPEG artifacting at first glance, but on close inspection (ie 800% magnification) you can currently faintly pick out the repeating “© 2007 Matthew Coe” in some areas. That, combined with the fact that, when publishing for my own purposes, I only ever publish in PNG, might make for an excellent little watermark. We’ll see, I suppose.

I accidentally electrocuted myself this afternoon. I was doing a bit of tidying-up and moving-around-of-things and noticed that I could have plugged things into the power bar in my bedroom better, so I decided to move things around. The first plug I grabbed was kind of sticky—it's the floor lamp, so it almost never gets unplugged— so I was really getting my fingers wrapped around it perpendicularly and hauling on it, when all of a sudden, this weird pain shoots most of the way up my arm and I'm frozen in place for.. no more than a quarter of a second, before I could let go. I'd accidentally bridged the hot prong (still clearly connected to power) from the floor lamp to the ground part of the cable TV jack on the power bar with my left hand. Ooops.

The thing is, I don't know what's funniest:

• That this happened the day after Anne and I finally got a chance to watch the latest episode of House, where the subplot involves characters deliberately electrocuting themselves (though, in that case, it was with a switchblade in the hot part of the plug and themselves for ground).
• That the power bar involved was the same model that was involved the last time I shocked myself accidentally (though, again, different circumstances—a wiring fault in the house had put 117V onto the cable TV cable and I kept touching the end of it).
• That, as soon as I realised what I'd done, the first words out of my mouth were, "Fuck, I did it again!"

I think it might be the last one.

How's that for happy timing? I was just on my way down to get a cup of coffee when my director comes back up from getting coffee for himself and couple of other folks on the floor, only to discover that one of his targets.. isn't in today.

And I'm standing right there.

I don't normally drink my coffee with milk and no sugar, but.. hey, free coffee. Can't complain about that.

In other news, work is going well and Anne and I will be heading up to Kingston for Thanksgiving this weekend. I'm excited.

That is all.

I'm such a whore for modern technology. I really am. I keep telling people, and I tell to tell myself, that "having x would be ridiculous. I don't want it. I don't want anything to do with it". And then, when I get provided with x for work reasons.. I'm all over it.

Late last week, The Powers That Be at work finally managed to get me a BlackBerry. Pretty much everyone who works for Rogers has a BlackBerry, and I have to admit, to a certain extent, it is fairly justified—it lets members of a team stay in contact with each other when they're not physically near each other. Somebody winds up having to stay home on a particular day, or is caught in traffic, they can use their Blackberry to let their co-workers know what's going on, and still be in touch, and be able to work.

Of course, the negative side of this is that you can be considered always available. Because of this BlackBerry, taking into consideration the fact that we're getting into a crunch time right now, my superiors could feasibly call or text my BlackBerry, telling me that I need to work. And if I'm somewhere where I can get Internet access, soon I'll be able to do just that; I'll be able to work from any place where there's an Internet connection. And that thought kind of bothers me—I don't really want to be accessible at all times.

On the plus side, my superiors generally seem pretty cool about not calling me in if they know I'm not available. One of them promised, voluntarily, not to ask anything of me on weekends, so that's a plus.

However.. I've been fiddling with the damn thing ever since. It came with a corded earpiece/mic combo that I've been using, at work, for any mobile calls I've had to make.. really, just because I can. I used to cancel my Aliant mobile service this morning, even though I could have just as easily held my Bell mobile up to my ear. Nope, I plugged in the headset and had my hands free the entire time. Just because I could.

I'm such a consumer whore, when you get down to it.

But Goddamnit, I like my toys!

I tore these out of your symbol and they turned into paper, but I wanna put them back, so...

—River Tam to Shepherd Book, Firefly, "Jaynestown"

I'm not sure why I like that line so much, but I do. Much like everything else River says in the series, there are many layers of subtext. I can feel one, just hiding beneath the surface, but I can't quite get at it.

P.S., go {rent|buy|steal} the Firefly DVDs.