A friend sent me this today, and I thought I’d share it here. It’s animated graffiti, and it must have taken an awful lot of work. You can find more of his surreal graffiti and drawings on his site.

A friend is trying to get me into mountain biking, so I went to the hill with him last week. It turns out that in order to ride down the mountain, you must first ride up the mountain. Our two hour ascent (probably 45 minutes for someone in any shape at all) nearly killed me.

We took a double black diamond run back down, because my friend apparently hates me, but I took it slow and had a lot of fun. It’s definitely something I’ll look into pursuing, but I’ll need to get in much better shape for it. I haven’t really used my biking muscles (i.e., legs) in over ten years, so I find it exhausting. By the time I get to the top of the hill, I’m almost too tired to enjoy myself on the way down.

Halfway down the hill, someone behind us took a six foot drop and landed chest-first on his handlebars. He didn’t seem to have any broken bones, but he must have been fairly bruised the next day. This incident really didn’t help my mental well-being for the second half of the ride, but I made it all the way down without falling. I had a minor incident where my shorts somehow got caught on my handlebars and I ran into a tree, but nothing serious happened.

When we got to the bottom of the hill, I rode my bike onto a wooden platform about three feet in the air, fell off the side of it, and landed head-first on the gravel, scraping my shoulder up quite nicely. I made it all the way down the bloody hill, only to eat dirt in the parking lot. Figures.

Struggling Writer passed this meme on to me several days ago, but I’ve been too busy wallowing in dental and financial self-pity to do anything productive (or blog), but here we finally go.

The rules:

1. Link to your tagger and post these rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 facts about yourself on your blog, some random, some weird.
3. Tag 7 people at the the end of your post by leaving their names as well as links to your blogs.
4. Let them know they are tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

I feel like I alluded to nearly everything remotely interesting or weird about myself in the life roadmap I did a while back, but I’ll have a go.

1. My parents are both psychiatric nurses. When I was in elementary school, my dad was working as a counselor in a detox centre and my mom as a nurse at the local jail. I took great pleasure in telling anyone who would listen that my mom was in jail and my dad was in detox.
2. When I was in my late teens, I wanted to give stand-up comedy a try. I even started to write a set. I had about a minute and a half of some of the worst observational comedy you’ve likely heard. I can’t remember any of the jokes, and I know I wrote them down somewhere, but I have no idea where.

   I lost my nerve and never did pursue that ambition, and I’d rather never see the jokes again, but I’d like to find and dispose of them as soon as possible. Once I become a famous crime-fighting novelist, I’d rather not have those popping up in the tabloids.

3. I played soccer for about fourteen years of my life, quitting when I started university. The last few years I’ve been telling myself I’ll get back in, but I never end up doing it. I’m a little worried to find out how bad I am now.
4. Other people’s interests rub off on me very easily. I’m either open-minded or a sheep, I’m not sure which, but if someone is enthusiastic about a topic or an activity, I want to become involved as well. I had to stop watching the Discovery channel in order to follow-through with my chosen degree.
5. One of my arms is longer than the other. Or my shoulders are lopsided. Or my tailer isn’t very good.
6. When I was growing up, nearly all of my friends had some strange physical party-trick they could do. One had two double-jointed elbows, another could flip his eyelids inside out, another could roll his stomach in waves. I desperately wanted a similar skill, but I couldn’t manage anything. My body just worked as intended.

   That all changed one day when I was stretching out my fingers. Someone commented that it was gross how they went back so far. I thought everyone’s fingers did that and was thrilled that I suddenly had something with which to disgust the girls on the playground. Unfortunately, I was nearly twenty when this was pointed out to me and would probably have been arrested if I had entered a playground and told the kids I had something interesting for them to see.

7. It’s 1:00am, and I just remembered that nearly my entire wardrobe is sitting wet in a washer downstairs in the closed laundry room, and I work in the morning. That’s unfortunate.

I’m not sure who has done this already, or who wants to do this, so I’m just going to list seven weblogs I enjoy. Feel free to do this if you want.

1. An Unreliable Witness
2. Schizogeny
3. Attack! of the Killer Weblog
4. Kyklops
5. Absolute Vanilla
6. The Ill Man
7. The Scottish Lemon

Social software: love it or hate it, it’s here in abundance and isn’t going anywhere.

I personally love the direction web applications have taken in the last few years. I couldn’t have imagined ten years ago everything that’s available online these days. I’m a member of a few of these social websites, so I figured I’d share what I’ve tried.

Last.fm:

I’m way behind on this one, as I only just started to use it a couple of weeks ago. It keeps track of every song you play on your computer and MP3 player, displaying them in handy charts. It will also recommend users who have similar tastes to you, so you can pop over to their profile and see their playlists. It even provides samples of most music and will create a ‘radio’ out of your common artists.

It’s a great way to find new and interesting music, so I’m surprised it took me so long to sign up. The only problem I have right now is that my iPod Nano usually doesn’t update my recently played list, so those songs don’t get added to my play count, which is very frustrating. It does work occasionally, just to keep me hoping.

Twitter:

This site lets you broadcast messages to whoever has signed up to listen. The messages have a 140 character limit, so they need to be short and sweet. The neat bit is you can update and receive the messages via text message.

I haven’t decided if this is lame or not. I currently have the messages popping up in Digsby, my instant messaging client, and that’s working quite well. It can be nice to break up those long work days with random messages sometimes.

Pownce:

This is like Twitter, but you can broadcast files as well. I haven’t found much use for this. I get e-mailed right now if there’s any activity on there, but I don’t use it much at all. Apparently, Digsby will be adding support for it eventually, so I might look into it again when that happens.

Flickr:

Everybody loves Flickr. They’re the quintessential example of how to do things right. I bought a Pro account with them when I first signed up, and I haven’t regretted it since. I don’t take nearly enough photos these days, but hopefully that’ll change with the new camera.

Facebook:

Yes, Facebook. Pure evil on earth, yet impossible to break away from once you join.

LibraryThing:

I signed up for this a few days ago, and I’ve added about half of my books. I’m really not sure what this is all about yet, but I basically signed up for this because I enjoy lists. Give me a beer, something to snack on, and group of objects that need itemizing, and I’m your man.

Basically you list all of your books, and then other people list their books, and….I’m not really sure what happens then. I guess it’s just interesting to compare libraries with other people. It also gives you recommended books based on what’s in your library, which could be handy.

One neat feature is that they’re adding the libraries of famous readers. I apparently share six books with Ernest Hemingway.

The one thing that worries me about this site is its focus on the books you own rather than what you’ve read. I’m currently trying to wean myself off buying too many books, and this site probably won’t help with that, but I figured I’d sign up and see what all the fuss was about.

Feel free to add me as a contact on any of these or share any sites you’ve been enjoying.

The tooth had to have a root canal, so I had the first half of the procedure done today after we finished with the first filling.

When it was decided to go ahead with the root canal, I had to move to another operating room within the office, one that had the necessary tools. In the time it took to make the move, the local anesthesia he had administered apparently wore off, and we didn’t realise this until he started drilling. I won’t be forgetting that moment for a while.

I have to return on Friday to finish the procedure and get another filling, and I’ll have a few more appointments over the next couple of months. I’m quite annoyed that I need to have so much work done. I thought I was fine when I was going in. I brush and floss twice a day, and didn’t have any pain at all, but I have been avoiding dentist appointments for years now. I’ll be making my regular cleaning appointments after this, though, as I’d rather not have to go through all of this again any time soon.

What’s even more fun is my work’s dental plan is terrible, so the root canal isn’t covered. Two surprises in one day - lucky me!

I’m back from the conference. It was good, and I learned a lot. I knew more overall about the technologies going in this time, so I feel like I was able to get a little more out of the talks.

I won a 3rd generation iPod Nano door prize, which is pretty cool. I already have my own 8gb Nano though, so I’m not sure what I’ll do with this one. I’d like to find some cool use for it, but I might end up just keeping it as a backup or giving it away. The next draw was for an iPhone, so I unfortunately just missed out, but I also dodged the book draws, so I can’t complain. Nothing worse than winning the draw for a book when an iPhone is coming up next.

There was much drinking and a serious lack or sleep this weekend, so I’m still recovering. I have my first appointment for dental work tomorrow, which I’m dreading terribly. I get to find out, while in the chair, whether or not I need a root canal. It’s a surprise!

I’m off to Seattle this weekend for a Java conference, so you might not hear from me much for a few days.

We’re going to the No Fluff Just Stuff symposium. We went the last time it was held in Seattle, and it was fantastic. The hotel accidentally labeled the conference No Stuff Just Fluff that time, but it definitely had stuff. I really picked up a lot from it.

The focus is on learning. You don’t have to sign up for the individual sessions, so you decide what to view throughout the day instead of committing at the beginning, and no one tries to sell you anything or push their products. It’s set up in a way that allows you to get the most out of it.

The conference is right in Seattle this time, instead of being in Redmond, so we’ll have more to do at night. It should be a fun weekend.

Shared items from my Internet travels:

Radio Waves Cure Cancer?

An exciting discovery that may lead to a cure or better treatment for cancer.

BC Ferries board gives itself $18,000 pay increase

An $18,000 pay increase for each part-time board member is a bit much when ferry fares have been rising so much recently. I'm going to start swimming to the mainland soon.

DreamWorks to make 'Ghost' in 3-D

DreamWorks has acquired rights to Ghost in the Shell and plan to make it into a 3D live action movie.

Choice Reviews of Lonely Planet Colombia from Amazon.com

Some reviews from the fraudulent Lonely Planet guide.