22.10.2006: it's that time of year again when my eyes water constantly. sometimes late at night when i'm walking home i'll just let them stream. it's that or rub them raw. is this something that happens to everyone or just me?

last night me and amanda went out for a few drinks and to see 'the prestige'. the drinks weren't planned but with the showing we wanted sold out there was nothing to do but cruise the bars for three hours. really what we did was sit in the wayne gretzky bar and half watched the ice hockey. i was tempted by the ten tier chocolate cake (a dollar a layer) but couldn't. it wouldn't be right. besides, my heart had already been taken by the thought of guiness chocolate cake at the place around the corner. one day, for sure.

so this cinema we went to, i swear it's the largest cinema i've ever been in. the cinema-going experience was completely different. even with the enormity of our screen hall we still struggled to find seats (amanda was right about us needing to go early, it's just insane) and then before the film started we were subjected to constant adverts. this is before the lights go down, this is the whole time before the film. just too much.

as for the film i really i enjoyed it, pleasently surprise etc. and i found myself appreciating the characters much more once i'd figured out what was going on. the clues are all the way through the film, and when it came it to the end i wished they'd left out 'the reveal', it was unnecessary (oh primer, look what you've done to me) and totally against the magician ethic, if that makes any sense. i had loads i wanted to write about the film but me writing it down isn't going very well, so i'm not going to. like, blah blah blah obsession, blah sacrifice, blah blah etc.

i read the first four books (all the library has) of 'y the last man' in one day and it was brilliant. now i'm working my way through promethea (the sixth issue is fantastic, i love alan moore's 'ideaspace'). i also read iain banks's 'the player of games' and a couple of joe sacco books. the library less than three.

20.10.2006: i'm angry because i thought it was media democracy day tomorrow, when actually it was two days ago. thank you adbusters, with your incorrect information. so i missed it, despite it being based in toronto and me knowing it was about to happen.

my problem is that these exhibitions are supposed to inspire me, but all they do is make me think i should put my camera away. not just because theres's no hope of me ever coming close to this brilliance, but mostly because i'm thinking "why do i want to weild a camera when i could using my hands to actually help people?". that old cliche. hey, if everyone's taking photographs who's going to be throwing the molotovs?

anyway, to console myself i took some photos of our spice jars

and from tomorrow to the end of the month i've got a whole new bunch of images for my site layout, but only because my .net skills weren't good enough to get a regular cycle of 20 going. i now have 31. stupid date object.

18.10.2006: the thought that's been worrying me is "how long can i keep this up?" i live off my website, simplisitcally and frugally, but it's a life with more possibility than i'd otherwise have. i mean, am i not halfway around the world doing as i please? the problem is that it's not sustainable. it has an essence of playing with fire, or biting the hand that feeds you (one of those phrases that never quite mean what i want them to). one strike and you're out. so the harder i push, the more i take, the quicker i'll fall.

have i been lucky or am i being paranoid?

it's hard to tell, but just incase i've made efforts to 'clean up my act'. i actually read the relevant programme policies and everything, even taking note of the woolly grey scale rules that don't make any sense. go figure. so here's me touching lots of wood. luckily we bought the cheapest ikea table and it's not even finished.


anyway, a while ago i finally got around to reading seth's "it's a good life if you don't weaken", and i'm glad i waited until i did. it's set in toronto and i recognised nearly all of the landmarks he drew, even the minor ones. most of them are within a couple of blocks from my apartment so i'm guessing he must have lived around here somewhere. well i thought it was exciting anyway.

and also seth related, i just finished reading mister x. so i know where alex proyas got his inspiration for 'dark city' from. although that's not really using the word 'inspiration' correctly. maybe it's inspired how he stole the whole concept, the city and the main characters. something like that. anyway, it was all very confusing with the art changes and similar sounding names (all part of the plan?). in retorspect mister x is clearly grant morrison. he strikes again.

i've been really enjoying geosense. i figure if it's helping my world geography then it's not wasting my time.

17.10.2006: it was half past one when the alarm woke us up. a loud shrill ringing that penetrated our apartment from the communal hallway. a hysterical alien noise that confuses and disorientates, that drags you from your sleep and your bed and out into someone else's cold night.

we were the first people from the building, i was commando and foolishly leaving behind my camera, which wouldn't have taken a second to grab. for the next five minutes people came out of the building in an irregular stream, seemingly unbothered by the screaming fire alarm, until we were about nine people standing there shivering on the sidewalk. the crazy guy who lives above us didn't leave his flat and nor did a woman on the top floor, the tell-tale television flicker visible through her curtains giving her away. six out of fifteen flats isn't bad, right?

i joked about three fire trucks racing down our street, but i wasn't too wrong. the distant wailing turning into blazing red and white lights and the smell of diesel or petrol or whatever it is these trucks use. it was all about the drama.

we all failed miserably to turn this into a positive, a good get to the know the neighbours session (there's a lot of new people in our building), but it was late and cold and perfectly understandable. and if you're wondering, i managed to grab my camera while letting the firemen into our apartment to check it.

i talked to our landlord this morning who came over to investigate, apparently it was leaking water which caused the alarm. i'm not sure how that makes any sense, but i'm satisfied. i quite enjoyed the whole farce.

in other news i accidently bought $13 of cheese (mostly parmesan), very unlike me, and if you're in any doubt as to the quality of the patti king in kensington (which you shouldn't), those pattis satisfy like no other.

16.10.2006: i'm hoping you didn't notice, but a while ago i switched technologies. for too long i've been running this show manually, doing everything by hand, and it was finally time for change. so i've updated all my code, changed some pages to ASP.NET and started rocking the XML (mucho thanks to dan). i'm still doing it by hand but now it's streamlined (and sexy too). the only possible benefit to you is my new RSS feed, so aggregate away.

but the change over process wasn't without it's difficulties, and i have a lovely example of the kind of unpredictable problems you can expect with search engines when you mess around with your site. the first potential issue (and cause of all evils) is that ASP.NET requires a different file extension (.aspx instead of .asp), so when a page is updated it's technically a new page on your site. to avoid the usual problems you'll want to place 301 redirects on the old files to the new ones. now i didn't have to do this because i've only changed my homepage, the filename of which is actually hidden as it's the default file for my root domain - i.e. if you access http://www.emoware.org/ my server is set to give you index.asp. you can normally configure your default files and their preference, however my hosting service doesn't give me that luxury. how my server is set up is that if index.asp is present it'll serve that over my new index file. the obvious thing to do is simply delete index.asp, after all it shouldn't be directly linked to (another reason why i tell my clients to link their 'home links' to their root domain), but for some obscure reason google seems to think that it should. and it went even further last week by only showing a link to my index.asp and not the root domain at all (if you know how link popularity works you can guess how many positions i lost).

it's weird though, because this was only when you ticked the "pages from the uk" box (actually it's neither a box nor a tick, but nevermind). it's just google being strange and they appear to have solved the problem (for my site at least, not all), but at the time i wasn't sure what to do. my first instinct was to upload index.asp (traffic from those SERPs were reaching a "page not found") but put a redirect on it to the root. this obviously was never going to fly, there's a nasty cyclic reference there. my second thought was the slightly more sensible redirect from index.asp to the new file, but i didn't want to do that either. i don't want google to know about that new file, once they know it's there i have the same problem again - they have my root and my index file (and cache them both seperately? no thanks).

so i left it alone. i haven't noticed a serious drop in traffic so it wasn't disastrous, but you can see how it could be. i've emailed my hosting company asking if there's any way i can have more control over my server but they're yet to reply. if only i could use ASP and .htaccess at the same time i'd be all set.

15.10.2006: underneath the skyscrapers and busy streets of downtown toronto there's hidden 16 miles of underground pedestrian walkways, buried like a secret labyrinth beneath the city's surface. we know people who've lived here for years and never even heard of it. it's called PATH and i can't help but find it intriguing (this no doubt due it's maze-like nature). so on friday we found ourselves in the southern business district and decided to root it out, then try and find our way home underground.

my suspicions were confirmed, it is very odd. it's a huge network of malls, featuring around 1200 shop (smaller shops forced underground by the increasing real estate above) in the basements of over 50 buildings and encompassing 4 million square feet of retail space (not that figure will even mean anything to you). unfortunately it's almost impossible to effectively navigate around, since each section of the PATH are independently owned they don't want to encourage shoppers to leave their section of mall and take their business elsewhere. hence it's hard to find signposts and they're not so useful when you do. and it doesn't help that the walkways completely ignore the grid system above. one time we needed to backtrack through a couple of large sections because we took a wrong turn and then finding ourselves in one the 20 parking garages with no easy clues as to which way to proceed we finally gave up.

this is not the place you want to be stuck during a power cut, as i dreamt last night (thinking about it now, i'm not sure how it works dreaming you're surrounded by pitch black, but nevermind).

anyway, incase you're wondering what season it is:

last night we had another lovely dinner around john and margarets place, up yonge street and just past eglington. it was good to have a family dinner and i hope next time they can come round ours. i'll show them what lentils were really invented for (evil laughter, etc). they're very generous to us (we even get nibbles before dinner), and this time we came away with real maple syrup and an unused set up 'gourmet' knives.

oh, and we found a GPS in the 'garden' infront of our apartment. it was still attached to it's car-lighter power supply umbilical cord thing, so i presume it was thrown from a car or something equally strange. it houses a 2gb sandisk card, which unfortunately isn't compatible with my camera. so if anyone wants it, come get it. i'm a bit scared to switch it on incase some special ops guy suddenly sees it blipping on his monitor and sends some hit squad to come pick it up. some crazy spy fantasy like that.

and last night we were also thrown out of an empty childs playground by three cops on bicycles, apparently we hadn't seen the sign that said adults were allowed in only accompanied by a child. i told him i thought that was if you actually wanted to go on the rides. duh.

14.10.2006: "$700 for two bibles, christianity is good" was what she said, with her eyes narrow and a smile spreading out her lips on the word 'good'. out of context her comment sounds even worse than it did at the time. well reasoned good logic, that's what i like to see. "if you think god's good let me take you to starbucks", was what i wanted to say. but didn't, of course, in real life i'm not very quick witted.

it was my first auction at the goodwill community store, and it got me wondering what kind of goodwill shopper would pay $700 for two bibles. we wont complain though, as the money all goes back into the community. hence why christianity is good, how it's trying it's hardest to make up for the crusades and the state of america, something like that anyway.

but since it's now too cold to sit still outside i went and read in the old cabbagetown library. there's a great reading spot in the corner infront of a big round set of windows looking out onto gerard street. their selection is thin but i can work with it. i decided to read spiegelman's 'in the shade of no towers', as it's not a book you could be bothered to carry home with you. the real reason i picked it up was someone had 'amusingly' etched "DIE" acoss the north tower on the book's cover. i also felt bad because i chuckled when i saw the twin towers' status listed on the wiki as "destroyed" (in red letters). anyone think they could get away with changing it to "annihilated"? or worse, "Own3d"?

sorry, that wasn't even funny.

it's just that there's something about the date today, the 14th of october, that has me concerned. like i remembered it for a reason. like it's someone's birthday. or the date someone died. like i should be phoning someone to congratulate or console them. or maybe i'm just missing something i really wanted to see. hopefully i'll never know.

13.10.2006: some days you can't help but keep finding reasons to be glum. like firefox busts up your div alignment and destroys your website layout. your pagerank goes down. old web accounts wont let you access them anymore. you discover the guy you currently consider one of your main influences is younger than you. through over enthusiasm you ruined last nights dinner and this mornings breakfast. all your posters fell down when you walked into the room. you have to throw out half a tub of delicious icecream because it's the only thing you ate that could have possibly caused your stomach pains during the night.

when i go outside i'll probably get shat on by a pigeon

i saw 'a scanner darkly' last night. it wasn't disappointing but wasn't amazing either. should that make it a disapointment? ever since primer the scale of amazingness has been somewhat stretched. it'll be a while before a film amazes me again, i think. last week we also saw 'the journals of knud rasmussen', a danish film about the last innuit shamen. it'd be easy to mistake it's atmospheric style for it being long and slow, which it is to be fair, but it's also fascinating and touching.. and how the shamen saw the extinction of his culture inevitable, and simply gave in to christianity at the end, that was just depressing.

but yeah, i'm not really feeling this. i'm going to go and read.

12.10.2006: the top of the manulife financial building is telling me it's six degress out side. tha