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Below are the 18 most recent journal entries recorded in Optimus Prime's LiveJournal:

    Friday, June 27th, 2008
    12:23 am
    a list.
    The Big Read's Top 100 Books - of which, they figure the average adult has read six.

    What I've read, bolded.

    1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
    2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
    3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
    4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
    5 To Kill a Mockingbird
    6 The Bible
    7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
    8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
    9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman     (Really? Top ten? Ooookay.)
    10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
    11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
    12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles
    13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
    14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
    15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
    16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
    17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
    18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
    19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
    20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
    21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
    22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
    23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
    24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
    25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
    26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
    27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
    28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck (Well, I'm reading it now, so I say it counts.)
    29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
    30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
    31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
    32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
    33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
    34 Emma - Jane Austen
    35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
    36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
    37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
    38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres (...SERIOUSLY?)
    39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
    40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
    41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
    42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
    43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
    44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
    45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
    46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
    47 Far From The Madding Crowd
    48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
    49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
    50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
    51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
    52 Dune - Frank Herbert (and I regret it)
    53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
    54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
    55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
    56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
    57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
    58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
    59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
    60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
    61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
    62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
    63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
    64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
    65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
    66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
    67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
    68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding (shut up.)
    69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
    70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
    71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
    72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
    73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
    74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
    75 Ulysses - James Joyce
    76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
    77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
    78 Germinal - Emile Zola
    79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
    80 Possession - AS Byatt
    81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
    82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
    83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
    84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
    85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
    86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
    87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
    88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom (WHAT THE FUCK, BIG READ. WHAT. THE. FUCK.)
    89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
    90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
    91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
    92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
    93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
    94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
    95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
    96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
    97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
    98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare     (this is a weird list. Is Hamlet not one of the Complete Works of Shakespeare now?)
    99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
    100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo
    Monday, June 16th, 2008
    1:19 pm
    WTF
    From comments at my site:

    Are you the same Chris Bird that was accused of distributing oxycotton is Toronto a couple of years ago? I was investigating you on the internet and there is a Chris Bird from Toronto, coincidentally an athlete who was accused of such and even admitted doing so under oath.

    He's "investigating" me?

    I smell FreeDominion. The combination of selfrighteousness and basic stupidity ("how could there be two Chris Birds in a city of six million people?") is memorable.
    Thursday, May 1st, 2008
    1:49 pm
    The toughest thing in the world, vol. 12
    Writing someone who is smarter than you - not just raw intelligence (that's actually pretty easy, it just takes time), but eloquence, insight, brilliance. These are incredibly difficult to write. Everything you put out just sounds trite.

    Back to the grind.
    Wednesday, April 23rd, 2008
    2:57 pm
    The discussion with Hostpapa
    THEM: So what type of site is it?
    ME: It's a personal blog.
    THEM: A personal blog with that much traffic?
    ME: Yes.
    THEM: We thought you were having people download movies off you or something all of a sudden. What happened?
    ME: I got linked by Fark, Boingboing, Joystiq, Defamer, Kotaku, Metafilter, and Digg, among others.
    THEM: Wow. Well, we can lift the suspension if you can do something about the links.
    ME: Uh, I'm a freelance writer. Getting traffic is the point of the blog: it gets me writing jobs and increases my profile. If I was a business, would you seriously tell me to just serve less customers?
    THEM: No, we wouldn't. You're right. We'll figure out if we need to change your billing structure later, but we'll lift the suspension immediately.
    ME: Thanks.
    8:28 am
    uh huh
    Suspension -> "over 200 people were trying to view the site at once and it was creating too high a server load."

    Discussion upcoming.
    Tuesday, April 22nd, 2008
    10:28 pm
    crap
    Suspended. Do not know reason why yet; am guessing it has to do with the support tickets I sent for significant site downtime. (The support TOS says "too many and we will ask you to pay extra or suspend you," although two support tickets - the first sent to them period - seems like a bit triggerhappy to me, but whatever).
    Tuesday, April 1st, 2008
    10:06 pm
    new cellamaphone
    Which has the same number as previously, but the old phone when it went smashy pretty much made the SIM card nonrecoverable, so I need phone numbers, people. Comments are screened, so give me your digits - I am eagerly looking forward to assigning mp3 ringtones here...
    Saturday, March 8th, 2008
    8:09 pm
    Okay, what mobile services in Canada offer world phones? I know Rogers and Fido do. Is that it, or do Bell/Telus/Virgin offer them as well?
    Thursday, February 28th, 2008
    12:23 am
    Okay, if I wanted to soak in a hot tub without actually owning a hot tub or having access (of which I am aware) to a hot tub, how does one go about doing that, exactly?

    Serious answers only, plz, and no offers to come let me use yours because that would be kind of weird.
    Thursday, February 7th, 2008
    2:16 am
    "I love it when a plan comes together"
    So I have to write a massive research paper for my challenges in intellectual property class, and right now I'm looking at whether Siegel v. DC and its preceding case law has enough scope to fill 30+ pages, and I believe it just might.
    Tuesday, December 18th, 2007
    11:37 am
    blast from the past
    I don't know how many of the Ottawa crew will remember when Jorn Barger came up to Ottawa to freeload off Kia for a few months (this is severely old-school), but it remains good to know that he is still the same self-important dipshit he was back then.
    Wednesday, November 28th, 2007
    4:50 pm
    advance warning
    I'm not mentioning it on mgk.com until everything is confirmed, but it's about 99 percent sure right now that I'll be appearing on "Q" on CBC Radio this coming Tuesday afternoon to discuss Christmas specials, of all things.
    Saturday, November 24th, 2007
    12:54 am
    Poop
    I do believe my iPod just became a friedPod.
    Tuesday, November 6th, 2007
    2:56 pm
    Oi! Peanut gallery!
    My only class selection option in first year is the "perspective option" seminar. Having eliminated the options I don't particularly care about and the options which might be attracting were it not for their timeslot (listening to Professor Mandel rant about the Charter of Rights and Freedoms for three hours a week might be horrifically entertaining, but I'm not staying on campus till 10 PM Wednesday night), I'm left with three alternatives, all of them interesting. However, I also have the option to take any of these second year if I particularly need to do so.

    Globalization and the Law. Pros: Necessary to enter the International/Comparative/Transnational stream of law at Osgoode, which is really good for employment all around after school, especially if you want a job which involves a lot of travel. Cons: International law is vague. Hardcore students into ICT are quite possibly the most annoying international-(wo)men-of-business types. And I don't know if I want to restrict myself into the ICT stream just yet.

    Legal Values: Challenges In Intellectual Property. Pros: Well, obviously I already have an interest in IP law, given my personal history involving it and all. Plus, this is the only perspective option where your research paper can potentially win you a prize and be presented to the federal government. (I am unsure of who actually ends up reading it. Possibly nobody.) Cons: IP law doesn't just count as the interesting bits to me about copyright and trademark and fair use and the challenges of digital media, but also patent law, which is A) very intense and B) not interesting to me particularly, and I don't know how the course will divide up by area. Also, the course summary pretty much says "be forewarned, this is harder than average."

    Tax Law As An Instrument Of Social Policy. Pros: Has been recommended by upper year students who have said it is good. Useful if I want to work in policy creation or agitating for policy change, which is attractive to me. Cons: It's still tax law, at least peripherally, and tax law is dull dull DULL. Unlike other choices, no marks awarded for class participation (whereas in others, participation is twenty percent, and given my high involvement in class I'm good for the entirety of it.)

    Thoughts?
    Wednesday, October 24th, 2007
    7:44 pm
    This is why people become Mac fanatics, you know
    So, after a lot of help from [info]kinra, my PC is up and running.

    Mostly. See, I don't have sound. At all. I've installed multiple drivers (including the one on the install CD, of course, that was my first option) and every time it's the same - "no audio device present" in Control Panel.

    I've tried downloading and installing the audio driver the motherboard's onboard-audio is supposed to come with. Multiple times. I've installed all the other chip drivers as well. I've even tried installing the old prehistoric drivers that have worked on previous motherboards running onboard RealTek audio. No dice, across the board.

    Does anybody have any ideas? Or am I going to have to buy a goddamned sound card on top of everything else?
    Friday, October 19th, 2007
    10:24 pm
    Computer nerd question
    Okay, so I have two computers: a desktop PC and a Powerbook G4.

    (Recently, I took the G4 into the shop because the hard drive was failing and I wanted to swap in a new one while I could still clone the contents of the old drive over to the new, but that's not really relevant yet. But I am sharing.)

    My PC was unpowered and in storage for about five or six weeks while I was in transit from old place to new place. It has a 1.8Ghz AMD Sempron processor, a low-end but decent ATI video card (AGP slot) and a gig of DDR 667 RAM, which has always been good enough for my purposes. I run Windows XP because Vista is a demon seed of shittiness.

    When we got net connectivity at my new place, I hooked up the computer, and OH MY GOD SLOW. Achingly, horribly, ka-chunk ka-chunk ka-chunk slow. I checked the XP control panel and for some reason, my CPU is only registering as a 1.0Ghz processor, and as you may or may not now, XP on a one-gig processor is not exactly what one would call optimal.

    I rebooted my computer and went into the motherboard CMOS menus and all that sort of thing, but nothing I do seems to push my processor back up to 1.8 like it is supposed to be.

    Any ideas here would be really helpful, because

    1.) my Sempron isn't a socket AM2 processor

    2.) thus, if I have to buy a new CPU, I also have to buy a new motherboard

    3.) I've been looking around and I can't find a socket AM2 processor with an AGP cardslot, so that means I also have to buy a new PCI video card

    and

    4.) these expenses would not be staggeringly high all told (about $350ish), but in the wake of my absolutely necessary repairs to the Powerbook (which is my "at school" computer), which will run me about $300, they become surprisingly unaffordable (especially after spending $1850 on wisdom teeth removal today), and the idea of a Paypal begging drive on mightygodking.com, while I suppose technically an option, nonetheless leaves me faintly queasy.

    Now, I can try to hold off till the end of November when bursaries are announced, and if I get a good-sized one, money becomes less of an issue, but about $3.5K of whatever bursary I get - assuming I get one that big - is already spoken for. So, not great.

    "Doing nothing" is not the greatest option, because I use my desktop for the following things:

    - Photoshop (extremely important for mgk.com, especially since I've started working on another full-issue comics parody and it is going SO SLOW)
    - The software I use for law school - Word, calendar software, etc.
    - Watching TV/movies, downloaded or on DVD (important, because my schedule keeps me at campus from dawn till well past dusk and that means I don't get to watch TV at home often, even though we now have free cable - plus with study time during the week, generally most of the TV I watch is Bittorrented and on weekends)
    - Compiling legal research (there is, unsurprisingly, a lot of this)
    - and, uh, Civilization IV. With both of the expansion packs. (Shut up, I study while the computer takes its long-ass turns!)

    And it sucks not being able to do these things with the competency I expect out of my system.

    So, advice on fixing it or anything else would be helpful. While I'm asking, incientally, what the hell are dual-core and core-duo processors, anyhow? Are they just, like, two processors slapped together like a sandwich? So a 1.6 "core duo" is a 3.2?
    Tuesday, September 18th, 2007
    11:52 pm
    Not posted to mgk.com for obvious reasons
    Teletoon (which is the Canadian version of The Cartoon Network, for those not in the know) invited me to pitch to them, due date timeframe of December.

    The bitch of it is that I can't do it now. I've got a animation concept and part of a show bible finished for it, but... I know the time requirements for putting together a successful animation pitch. I don't have a production team, I don't have visual character designs, and I don't have a thirty second to one minute demo clip.

    If they had invited me to pitch them back in July or even August, I probably could have done it - get the bulk of the legwork and gruntwork done before school started, and with the art team assembled just sit back, meet on weekends, and barely manage to get everything - the scripts, the full bible, all of it - done in addition to my classwork. But now? In all honesty, law school is kicking the shit out of me already, and although I'm not actually falling behind or anything, I'm at school eight to nine hours a day trying to make sure I study properly (because, let's be honest, I'm lazy if I don't force myself to knuckle down), and I'm commuting an hour away from everybody I would need to meet with to get shit done in the first place.

    You know, I understood going to law school involved making a choice to deprioritize my previous career goals, but FUCKING HELL it was not supposed to be this starkly ironic.

    UPDATE: After a few emails, I'm going ahead with it - they've offered me a graduated pitch process where they first approve the basic concept and story (a few pages) and then the more complete pitch in December if they want it.
    Tuesday, August 7th, 2007
    1:12 pm
    ahem
    For those interested in such things, I would point out that mightygodking.com is up and running now.
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