Hello one and all, I hope you’ve been keep­ing well! I’ve been pretty men­tally exhausted all week but I still man­aged to keep the con­tent rolling out. I’ve even man­aged to start a new book (already 160 pages in) and actu­ally do a bit of writ­ing (another chap­ter ‘done’) and gen­er­ally get­ting some tasks out of the way. It’s been a pro­duc­tive, but exhaust­ing week. So much trekking around, it’s insane.

High­lights of the week include:

I hate InfoPath:
I know the idea behind the pro­gram is sound, and I’m impressed with the level of inte­gra­tion that Microsoft has man­aged to achieve with Share­Point 2007 and InfoPath. What I don’t like is all the very, very moronic design choices they made with the InfoPath GUI, the bla­tant lim­i­ta­tions with the items therein (what pro­gram doesn’t allow tables to have id’s hon­estly) and the very depress­ing require­ment of absolute URL ref­er­ences for impor­tant items. Items such as data sources, links, val­i­da­tion servers etc. I also dis­like how trying to get a form from one server to another has way too many manual steps required. I shouldn’t have to upload the form, and then have to change the ref­er­ences in said form man­u­ally. There should be some sort of stream-​lined upload process for that.

The con­cept of the prod­uct is great, but the exe­cu­tion needs work. Much work. I can only cringe as I see more work with this prod­uct coming down the line. At least I got it done on time, against the wire I should add. I didn’t even care if I got praise or not for this one. I just wanted it done.

A Half-​missed Con­cert:
Richard got us some tick­ets to go see Spoon and The Ponys in Toronto. The tick­ets clearly stated that the show started at 10:15 pm. We whined because it was a late show and would be pathetic-​looking at work but what­ever. Suffer for the music and all that. We ended up get­ting there early so we decided to wander around Toronto’s harbor-​front. It’s really pretty in a weird sort of way, espe­cially at night. We found a whole wack of used book stores and had a look around. We both ended up buying copies of I am not myself these days: A Memoir. We made it back to the con­cert hall around 10 and walked in. We saw guys on stage set­ting things up, so we fig­ured “great, we made it just in time. We’re so cunning.”

The band came out on stage and played… and played… and played. Don’t get me wrong: I love con­certs and music, but an hour and a half set (with­out encores) is a little much. In any case they walked off stage and we waited for the next band to come out. Then the first band came out and played an encore. Richard and I were both rather con­fused by this taboo behav­ior but fig­ured “it’s an indie show, they can do what­ever the hell they want.” They fin­ished up their three-​song encore and walked off stage. Then they came on again. Now I’m get­ting annoyed. The lead singer had basi­cally been mas­tur­bat­ing with his guitar all night to the crowd and after nearly two hours I was get­ting sick of them. They fin­ished their second three-​song encore and walked off stage, this time saying they were done. Hurray!

Then the house­lights came on, and every­one started leav­ing. Both Richard and myself were now suf­fer­ing from a com­plete mind­fuck, and it hon­estly took us like 4 min­utes to real­ize we missed the first band com­pletely. Appar­ently the time changed when they moved venues (orig­i­nally at The Phoenix, they moved to the Kool Haus for rea­sons I don’t under­stand). On the plus side, we got a new book to read and got home about 2 hours ear­lier then we thought we were.

Coin­ci­den­tally we don’t know which band we saw. We think it was The Ponys but we’ll never know for sure.

Oh and as an aside, I’d like to write a quick letter:

Dear Indie crowd,

Stop smok­ing so much fuck­ing weed. Seri­ously. They didn’t have any smoke machines at that con­cert, and yet the air was hazy. And if you are going to smoke that crap, at the very least blow your smoke upwards, and not directly into my face. Actions like that tend to make me punchy.

Thank you.

Corey.

Friends­giv­ing:
Though not yet an offi­cial hol­i­day, it was great to get so many of my friends together in one place. What made it even better was the fact that every­one brought some­thing to con­tribute to the night, whether it was food or games or what­ever. Dinner was fan­tas­tic, and the turkey was fan­tas­tic, the pota­toes were great, and I did not know you could use maple syrup in so many ways. My pies were well received, and by the end of it all we were happy, stuffed little people.

Then the drink­ing started. And the games, and the Guitar Hero fol­lowed shortly after. The title of this post is actu­ally the utter­ance of Bart’s brother as he played a game of Aliens vs. Space­men, a game we cre­ated using a Jenga tower and some plas­tic aliens/spacemen. Believe me, there was much debate within the cre­ation of the rules but I think we got some­thing marketable.

I really hope this becomes a yearly thing, because it’s a great chance to catch up with people you haven’t seen much of, as well as an excuse to eat really yummy food.

I’m sure there were other things, but as my brain as the recall abil­ity of a rock, this’ll have to do. Stay tuned for more reviews and the like. As an aside, I dis­like the “More” tag. Don’t like how it works or looks on the site.

So i called up Marie; she’d have sex for free,
but for 10 bucks an hour she’d listen to me
Talk about rock stars and models on dope,
and why I can’t cope with this scene.

Every Monday - The Mar­velous 3

Corey sign­ing off.