Optimus Prime

question

Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:25:21 GMT

Is this acceptable? Initially this schmuck was direct-leeching the images off my server. Now she's removed attribution because she's deemed me pissy for complaining.

It's really very minor in the scheme of things, but I was brought up in days of Ye Olde Internet that bandwidth leeching was rude, you know?

down again down again jiggity-jig

Tue, 21 Oct 2008 21:40:33 GMT

Hostpapa -> over, as the link today from BoingBoing (and Cory Doctorow adding me to his RSS, woot) flooded Hostpapa and basically shut them down entirely.

So now it's a rush to find a new (Canadian-based, that is not negotiable) hosting provider and transfer the whole shebang there. as soon as possible.

me on the radio again

Wed, 17 Sep 2008 14:16:25 GMT

Going to be on Q on the CBC Thursday, from 12:30-1 or so, talking about the new teevee season. Those not getting CBC in their areas should be able to get it on Sirius (channel 137) if you have the satellite radio.

HALTON!

Tue, 05 Aug 2008 08:39:16 GMT

Does anybody want to go see Stephane Dion's townhall in Halton on the 20th? My curiosity is piqued, and I'd like the chance to ask him about potential plans for supplementing his carbon tax proposals with energy infrastructure spending.

Yes, I'm a policy nerd. Why?

for those interested

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 20:46:23 GMT

FALL 08
Criminal Procedure
Evidence
Climate Change Law
Freedom of Expression and the Law

WINTER 09
Taxation Law
Taxation As An Instrument Of Social And Economic Policy

ALL YEAR
Innocence Project (which includes taking Forensics and the Law as an ungraded pass/fail course in winter)

Right now, that's 30 credits (per year should be 30-34). I'll probably end up adding credits in winter term later on depending on whether I get accepted into the international climate change moot in Copenhagen (as part of the Climate Change Law course) or not. If I get into the moot, that's an additional 3 credits. If not, I'll probably take either Business Associations or International Criminal Law as an additional course for 4 credits.

a list.

Fri, 27 Jun 2008 04:29:21 GMT

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

WTF

Mon, 16 Jun 2008 17:22:10 GMT

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.

The toughest thing in the world, vol. 12

Thu, 01 May 2008 17:51:30 GMT

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.

The discussion with Hostpapa

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 19:00:30 GMT

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.

uh huh

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 12:32:18 GMT

Suspension -> "over 200 people were trying to view the site at once and it was creating too high a server load."

Discussion upcoming.

crap

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 02:30:37 GMT

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).

new cellamaphone

Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:07:49 GMT

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...

Sun, 09 Mar 2008 01:10:08 GMT

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?

Thu, 28 Feb 2008 05:28:14 GMT

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.

"I love it when a plan comes together"

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 07:17:58 GMT

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.

blast from the past

Tue, 18 Dec 2007 16:38:50 GMT

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.

advance warning

Wed, 28 Nov 2007 21:51:26 GMT

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.

Poop

Sat, 24 Nov 2007 05:55:06 GMT

I do believe my iPod just became a friedPod.

Oi! Peanut gallery!

Tue, 06 Nov 2007 20:36:15 GMT

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?

This is why people become Mac fanatics, you know

Wed, 24 Oct 2007 23:45:56 GMT

So, after a lot of help from 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?

Computer nerd question

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 02:48:27 GMT

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?

Not posted to mgk.com for obvious reasons

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 04:02:22 GMT

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.

ahem

Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:13:00 GMT

For those interested in such things, I would point out that mightygodking.com is up and running now.