Les Bonnes Choses

True story: last night, I was sleeping soundly, having a dream about hosting a party where some old dude just wouldn't take the hint that it was time to go home when we started cleaning up, when I was suddenly woken up by a noise. It sounded like Rebecca had knocked the bed frame or something like that. So anyways, I open up my eyes and find myself looking at what I took to be some dude standing near the foot of the bed on Rebecca's side. As if that weren't strange enough, the figure appeared to be illuminated by an orange or red light, kind of like what you would do with a flashlight in a tent in your backyard when you were a kid. The blurred vision (I wasn't wearing my glasses, obviously, and my vision is abysmal) lasted at least long enough for me to have the stunned consideration that there was someone in the room. Then suddenly, I didn't see it anymore.

Well, that was strange. And yet, I wasn't particularly troubled by it all, mostly because I thought it was an interesting experience to comment on. So I went to the bathroom, since I was already awake. I was able to get back to sleep without too much problem.

So some observations: First, odd that I perceived the details to be blurry, as if I was actually looking at the figure without the aid of eyeglasses (normally, when I imagine seeing something, I don't blur my mental image, just for the sake of authenticity). Second, odd that I wasn't particularly disturbed by this. I attribute this to not actually believing that there was something at the foot of the bed, and having a couple of other perfectly reasonable explanations. This is related to the third observation, which is that I can see how someone could come to be a firm believer in the paranormal. Sometimes you see someone on TV who doesn't otherwise sound like a crackpot going on about an alien abduction or somesuch. And you wonder how that happened. Now you know. Fortunately for me, I know I didn't see a ghost: We're the first owners of the house, and I have it on good authority that the house isn't built on an ancient burial ground.

Today Rebecca went grocery shopping. And like any nutritionist (and Alton Brown) would tell you to do, she shopped mostly along the periphery: the periphery of a grocery store is where you will find fruits & vegetables, breads, dairy, & meats; all the processed stuff is in the inner aisles. She went out on a limb and picked up a crazy looking dragonfruit, and a starfruit. Neat snack. Except, not. They sure look interesting, but at least here in Canada, in the middle of winter, they suck. The starfruit was okay, I suppose -- kinda tasted like mild pear or apple. The dragonfruit, on the other hand, had no discernable taste. I couldn't even tell if it was sweet. So while they may be good conversation pieces, keep them out of your fruit salad.

And that wraps up my produce review for this week. Tune in next week when I take on the kumquat!

All that tea paraphernalia I got for Christmas is really getting a workout. Holy cow, I can't stop drinking the stuff. Just sayin' is all. Of course, I am drinking responsibly: after 4pm, it's no caffeine for me. My favourite seems to be this decaf green tea from Teaopia. I am reminded of this one time after one of our sushi parties. Joanne had brought some chinese green tea, and my thirst for it was unquenchable. Or maybe my hypothalamus is broken. Man, that would suck being thirsty all the time. It (almost completely) reminds me of that greek myth about a dude who is cursed to spend eternity up to his knees in water, but when he bends over to scoop some water, it retreats away. It would be a brilliant name for a disorder, if only I could remember the character's name. Maybe Alan can remind me...

I just read, to my horror, that Facebook has been asked to remove the scrabulous application. As I am presently in the middle of a 4-person game (waiting on Bridget, nudge, nudge), I am afraid that the application will go down in the middle of the game, leaving me with a big hole in my soul. Well, maybe I won't be that impacted, but I will be irritated at the lack of closure.

Thus, anticipating the imminent demise of Scrabulous, I am recording, for the sake of posterity, my Scrabulous record:

Rating	Playing	Completed	Won	Lost	Drawn	Best Bingo
1577	1	24	23	1	0	WEIRDOs for 97 points

Over my 24 games, I played 23 Bingos, which probably contributed to my favourable record. Most of the bingos occurred within the first couple of plays, as it becomes more difficult to play out 7 tiles as the board fills up. As good as my record is, a number of my opponents have bingos in their records that shame mine, so I was always aware that the game could swing at any time. My loss was to Vivian, though I have some barely eeked-out wins against Rebecca (in one ridiculous game, she racked up 3 bingos, and I only beat her because I played a fourth near the very end), Tony Augustine, Kevin Suarez and Jon Wong.

I had a love/hate relationship with scrabulous, but at least now I will be wasting less time on Facebook.

For a little while now, a battle has been brewing to decide the next generation of digital media (well, commercial video, mostly). The contestants in the battle were Sony's Blu-Ray -- support for which has been included in the Playstation 3 for awhile now -- and HD DVD, developed by the 10-member DVD forum. And while hindsight, as they say, is 20/20, I can honestly say that I thought that Blu-Ray was going to come out on top two christmases ago. The reason: clarity. Here's the logic: back during the beta/vhs wars, two very similar technologies came out that gave consumers the ability to do something they couldn't really do at all before: record and play video at home. If you want to know why VHS won out in the end (despite being an arguably inferior format), you'll have to research that yourself, but I think it came down to marketing. Next up came DVD (no competitors, because those 12" video disks never caught on at all). Relative to video tape, DVD had obviously superior resolution.

Here's where I think the clarity issue comes into play: At about the same time, people were converting in droves from their old 4:3 TVs to HD TVs and tuning into all these HD channels and seeing a huge difference - the same difference people saw when they first saw the improvement from VHS to DVD. In other words, perhaps in the consumer's minds, DVDs are already HD. From a marketing perspective then, the HD DVD brand has been diluted because it doesn't seem like a new product. Blu-ray on the other hand sounds like something completely different.

Also, Hitler apparently endorsed HD-DVD, which is never good marketing:

For the last 10 minutes, I have been watching a program on HD Discovery Channel (because when you have an LCD tv, and are paying an extra $18/mo for HD, you damn-well ought to take advantage of it). The show was of the 'crazy man sticks himself in remote parts of the world and harasses wildlife' genre, so it had only limited appeal to me, since he's no Steve Irwin. Thus, I came upstairs to blog about why I watched as much of the program as I did: in the introduction to the episode, the intrepid Jeff Corwin was startled by something as he stepped gingerly through a swamp, at which point he yelped and did a funny tip-toe jump. Wade was the last dude I saw do that manoeuvre, and it was when John and I were jumping out of a row of corn when a group of us visited the haunted Belmont corn maze at night. Now, I don't want to imply that I wouldn't have a similar reaction to slimy things lurking in a swamp, but then again, I don't have a globe-trotting animal-wrangling show on Discovery.

Speaking of HD Discovery, while I appreciate that they seem to have fewer commercials than other network channels, I am quite bored by the lack of variety. The only commercials I ever see are for: other programs, the Panasonic Viera plasma TV, and for ordering HD Discovery. I understand the first, but as for the other two: If I can see your commercial, you can reasonably assume I already have an HD TV, and I already subscribe to your station. For the love of god, please show me a beer commercial.

I have a few minutes to kill as I wait for the completion of the reconstruction of Alan's MRI brain data. So this seemed like a good time to write a blog entry.

Just one week after I wrote about the Amazon Kindle, I came across this article, entitled Why Amazon's Kindle is a Disaster. I stand by my original assessment though. I think the big things going for that gadget are its display (being able to read it in sunlight) and, more importantly, the delivery system. The way I see it, publishers must be able to provide electronic text because that's how the books were printed in the first place. A clever agreement with major publishing houses should be able to get virtually any book into Amazon's offerings. The rest of it is just coming up with fair pricing, and perhaps a few bonus features like mp3 playback (again, from the Amazon mp3 store). If they can't make that product work, it's because they dropped the ball.

I was mortified to find that I had a typo in my previous entry, the title of which should have read scurvy rather than scruvy.

I logged on to facebook so I could see whether Kevin had played another heezy word in scrabulous. I don't know if heezy is even a word, because heeze doesn't appear in any online dictionaries, and yet that word, with the Z falling on a double letter square as part of a triply-scoring word brutalized me. So I shall add it to my repertoire. Just don't expect me to define it.

While I was logged in, I saw one of the stupid paid ads. This was for one of those useless devices, like those magnetic bracelets that you sometimes see advertised on TV or in the drug store. This device is to be worn as a pendant as a talisman against electromagnetic waves. So I clicked the link and went to the product website with genuine scientific research and theory! Naturally, I assumed that the manufacturers don't expect you to actually read the research, but instead just be satisfied that it exists. So I clicked on the first entry which describes a pilot study. I read a little bit before I found the following ringing endorsement:

It is argued by the developer that this EMF acts as a carrier wave for subatomic ‘information’, and that this information assists in strengthening an organism’s resilience to stressors. However, there are a number of elements to the above theory that are not verifiable (some because critical details have not been made available by the developer, and others because science does not have the requisite tools at present).

The authors also introduce the product by stating that the EM radiation from which it reputedly shields you has not been shown to have any negative effect whatsoever. So I wonder whether the people at Q-Link even read the paper before posting it.

Key words: snake oil, voodoo magic, hocus-pocus, scam, buffoonery