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Monday story pitch

Once again, it’s time to pitch the dreaded “bad blurb”. I hope others will follow me in this grand entirely pointless tradition. Famous movie producers should note that the rights to my bad blurbs sell for ONE MILLION DOLLARS! (each)

Corky Corkster McCorcoran was accidentally born as a slug, although in all other respects, he seems completely human. School is difficult for Corky–his classmates tease him and, in sports, players often mistake him for the ball in rugby matches.

One day, Corky is stepped on by the famous television chef, Emeril Laflasse, who agrees to nurse Corky back to health and train him to say “BAM!”. Soon Laflasse and Corky become fast friends and Corky becomes a master chef, with an impressive range of dishes.

Then, during the taping of Corky’s first television appearance, a flying saucer lands on the studio’s roof: it’s Corky’s real parents, who are accompanied by several warriors from Slimeron Four of the Slimerian Star Empire. As the Slimerians ooze through the studio’s hallways, sliming everyone, Corky whips up a batch of his famous salt-crust salmon and offers it to the warriors to stop their muderous rampage. After the warriors eat the salmon and shrivel into raisin-like lumps, he explains to his Slimerian parents that he’s really happier here on Earth and would they please stop killing everyone. His parents agree to depart, but leave directions back to Slimeron Four, should Corky change his mind.

Everyone (still alive) in the studio celebrates! Corky has saved Earth from invasion, and has created a delicious salmon-and-raisin dish in the process! BAM!

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Slothful Sunday

Since I’m on vacation for the week, you might think that I’d be off somewhere–maybe camping or hiking. Or maybe having a barbecue down at the beach. But you’d be wrong, because: 1.) The extreme forest fire hazard means all wilderness areas are closed, and 2.) I’m just ludicrously lazy. So what that means is that Day Two of my nine work-free days was almost entirely free of anything productive.

Almost, except for the thousand words I added to the story. I just emerged from a difficult bit in which our hero and heroine finally get a chance to talk, and motives are suddenly not as pure as one had previously thought. Ooooh. And then an old man shows up. Do I know how to build excitement, or what? Maybe I shouldn’t offer that second choice there.

That was my morning. And for the rest of the day, I wandered the city aimlessly. If you ever find yourself in Steveston, visit George’s. It’s a little Greek café with something on the menu that resembles Greek poutine: fries with a Greek salad on it, and plenty of olive oil. I had a variation of it that included some kind of meat. Chicken, I think. It was hearty enough that I won’t need to eat for at least a week now.

It’s been Insanity Week for me, so a day without deadlines or committments was a welcome relief. It’s 9:30. Time to…uh…time to do more nothing. I want to see how much nothing I can fit into one day.

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In the ‘cool stuff’ category

Warning: if you’re not a computer geek and you have no interest in computer gadgets, reading this blog entry will cause your brain to dissolve into a liquid, leak out your ears, and stain your shirt.

Because I’m upgrading from a desktop to a notebook shortly, I found myself with an ickle problem: what to do with my 60GB hard drive? It’s nearly full of vids, music, and photos. I couldn’t possibly squeeze all of that and the 20 gigs on my primary drive into my notebook. Well here’s the answer…

This brilliant little gadget is a drive kit for mounting a hard drive or CD-ROM drive externally. You can mount pretty much any IDE drive inside the box, which plugs into a USB 2 port. For Macophiles, it also comes in a Firewire version.

With a transfer rate “up to” 480 megabits per second with USB 2 and significantly less than that with USB 1.5, it’s slower than an internal drive. Notebooks, however, don’t give you the option of mounting extra drives internally, so this is a nice solution. And it comes in a purty two-colour box.

So now my media has a new home, and if/when I get another hard drive, I can use one of those removable drive trays in it to swap out the drives as needed. Nifty.

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42 days of water left

An article on Canada.com reports that the Greater Vancouver regional district has only 42 days of water left. A hot summer with little rain has dried up the reservoirs, and water restrictions are in effect.

Oddly though, golf courses and car washes, among other businesses, are exempt from the restrictions. City council will analyze the weekend’s water usage sometime next week and decide whether having green golf courses is more important than having enough water to drink.

I think extreme restrictions should have been imposed on everyone early in the summer, as soon as the reservoir level dropped to fifty percent.

But I shouldn’t second-guess the wisdom of city council–they really know the business of running a city. And the mayor has a pretty good swing, I hear.

Link: Canada.com: Water bans eyed for business outlets

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Saiyan wield ways and means

As a technical writer, I always appreciate a concise and well-written set of instructions.



Click to show full image.

In this example from Darren Barefoot’s “Hall of Technical Documentation Weirdness“, the warning is clear:

WARNING

1.With appertain rotor of screw setting pre ceiling on the under standing that serew no wield. May wield two-faced, pressboard securing. wield pre to begin with wiping ceiling of bilge dasto.

Ah, this is the standard of excellence in documentation to which we should all appertain!

(Thanks, William K., for this link.)