A1Great! From Ottawa, Ontario

A1 Great! Part lies, part heart, part truth, part garbage.

five twats from twitter

No public Twitter messages.

If short attention span stuff is your thing, my Twitter page is probably where you want to be.

arnold anderson can eat it

Baseball returns to Ottawa. Our new team will compete in the Intercounty Baseball League, and you’d better believe I’m going to go to the first game against the Brantford Red Sox and boo the shit out of the visitors. Who’s with me?

posted here on March 11th, 2010 | Permalink | Comment here »

here i am, here we are

Five years and a day ago, the mighty A1 Great dot com was launched, with dignity and aplomb, the same traits you have come to know and love around these parts. Happy birthday!

Having just left my best-paying job, to that point, managing a dealership for TELUS Mobility in a most excellent fashion (more lucrative than you might expect due to commissions and raises every six months, and if TELUS wasn’t fucking their dealers – and clients – left and right these days, ownership of such a franchise might still be a career path to consider), I was embarking on my first real attempt at ‘working from home’, though the stay-at-home-dad role was pretty intense at that time. We were still about a year away from any real sleep, though we had recently found out that the kid was suffering from reflux, so hey, we’ll just prescribe some prevacid and that’ll be that! We were so ready to believe…

There’s a book waiting to be written around this topic, no doubt. How To Make Your Special Needs Child Just Fucking Sleep For More Than An Hour So You Can Feel Like Not Driving Off A Bridge Into A River Every Day. I have come to know a couple of people who would be looking for signed copies, bless them. Perhaps only a pamphlet, though, because here’s the full text: drugs, surgery. Better drugs than prevacid, that is. Better surgery than eardrum removal, even if you can’t wash for a month.

What were we talking about? Five years ago, right – then I met Stuart while testing out electric bikes in Vanier, and I offered to do some stuff for his little NGO startup, and made a button – two, actually. See?

Not much more happened after that.

Here’s a few of my favorite posts:

Hello green water. I have seen no evidence of four and a half year old mutant me-s around this area, though they just knocked a bunch of trees down around there, so there may yet be time to make some freakish discoveries.
Listen to your BOB FM. I found Jon on Facebook! Still no Randy.
Adventures in Ottawa South. Stuart claims not to remember this meeting. I don’t remember the names of the people who owned the house. I do remember the overdone hamburger off the grill, but it was my fault, I was late. Oh well.
No cancer, no glory. I am still pissed off that I came second in that contest.
Always ready to help. I remain unable to understand why some of my most longstanding and trusted friends, who I hold in high esteem and whose intelligence and good taste cannot be called into question, continue to choose to live in the United States.
Just like that. Marking my father-in-law’s sudden passing, and holding forth on my own family experience at the time. We’re better, I think, though some are still very insecure about the family dynamic. What can you do? Only so much time to go around, both on the calendar and cosmically speaking.
The luxury. Resolutions for 2007! Learn to drive: well, maybe one day, but it’s not looking good. Tattoo: birthday gift, 2009, so that was only two and a half years late. Ice skates: 2010, three years later. Sounds about right.
Press one for inglesh. This was really just a dig at someone annoying who I used to work with. Feels good!
Hold up. More vitriol. I really hate the whole “Earth Hour” idea.

Of course, one must consider one’s audience. Turns out that my favorites are not your favorites: since 2008, the most popular posts here are about setting your own player images in Pokerstars, being thankful at Christmastime, that sublime combination of a good buzz and good music, something I posted only two weeks ago, and the time I met the Barenaked Ladies and got them to hold lightbulbs. Whatever, people!

Thanks for reading, eh?

posted here on March 1st, 2010 | Permalink | 1 Comment »

please obey the box model

As Wikipedia puts it, Internet Explorer 6 “is widely derided for its security issues and lack of support for modern web standards, making frequent appearances in ‘worst tech products of all time’ lists, with some publications labeling it as the ‘least secure software on the planet.’” As such, IE6 Funeral is a clever bit of promotion from a design group in Denver, based around the shared hatred of everything that’s wrong with that ancient piece of crap software that remains rooted in enterprise environments (due to dependence on the program from other applications developed around it) and your technically un-savvy family members (due to it’s default installation in Windows XP).

The ‘funeral’ event page floated around the usual social sites a couple days ago, and the timing seems even more savvy now that YouTube will no longer support users browsing with IE6, announced today and to be made official as of the middle of March. That bit of news came at just the right moment for the ‘funeral’ idea, and goes to show that timing plays as big a role in good marketing as anything else.

No big deal in this part of the interweb, of course. The mighty A1 Great is developed with the latest browsers and users in mind. No room for grandma browsing slowly around here, I tell you what.

posted here on February 23rd, 2010 | Permalink | Comment here »

taking stock

As people who exist in a world of forms and documents and receipts tucked away here and there, we are a family surrounded by paper. It’s tiresome, but necessary – did I ever tell you the one about how my taxes were audited because of our special medical and caregiving expenses? Our column of numbers caught someone’s attention over at the CRA, and it was a good thing that Jennifer and I are as disciplined as we should be about keeping every shred of evidence that, yes, we did spend over $150 on diapers last month, for instance.

Listen n’ read: The White Stripes - Astro

One thing we are not disciplined at, however, is making sure that those forms and documents and receipts are filed in the right place, for posterity’s sake. Stacks of the latest evidence of money spent were growing in the kitchen, in the basement, and in the living room, and I was kind of tired of it. So last weekend we decided to start tidying up, labeled some file folders correctly, sorted the pulp from the chaff, chucked a bunch of crap in the fireplace. Freedom!

In the process of putting anything old away, however, there is always some opportunity to unearth even older and more interesting things, and then a diversion into evaluation of whether an item deemed ‘must keep until dead’ a year ago, three years ago, or ten years ago is still deserving of that designation.

Case in point: film. Remember film? The stuff you used to have to put in cameras in order to take pictures? We were so primitive once!

If you’re anything like us, you probably have several dozen sheets of negatives sitting around. Good stuff – wedding photos, for instance. Once upon a time, that’d be essential, hands down, and no questions asked – keep forever! But times have changed. The number of places one could take negatives to get reprinted into something physical is a small fraction of what it was in 2002, and who ever gets reprints of wedding photos eight years after the fact, anyway? Will film negatives be a recognizable artifact in another eight years, or will I need to spend a day finding the one print place left in Ottawa, only to pay a thousand bucks for the dude behind the counter to crank up some dusty old reproduction relic of his own?

The consensus around these parts was as follows: chuck ‘em. Yet the pile still sits on my desk, waiting to make that long trip from the basement, to the bin, to the curb, to the truck, and to the landfill. Gone forever. Thanks for everything! Easier said than done, I guess.

How about you? Still socking your negatives away somewhere? VHS tapes? Cassettes? Floppy disks? Does obsolescence in the outside world turn your media into junk, or do you hold on in the name of ‘just in case’?

posted here on February 21st, 2010 | Permalink | 3 Comments »

psychic permafrost

The thing about hanging around with two-year-olds is that they bring every damn viral illness home with them from wherever it is that they spend their time. And so it goes around our place, as we are now finally shaking off the last vestiges of the latest bad cold to go to town on our mucous membranes. It was about a week and a half of coughing, and sneezing, and fatigue, and all manner of unpleasantness, generally speaking.

So, having resumed something like a sleeping schedule, and with a little bit of energy in the reserves as a result, I’m back at work. Let’s do more links, because I haven’t cooked up anything with a point recently, and I’m nothing if not completely honest. Part garbage, indeed!

A visitor from out of town wanted to know where the good pubs were for watching sports in downtown Ottawa. I chipped in with the Highlander in the market and Atomic Rooster on Bank, though I don’t think either are really perfect for settling in in front of the TV. Not a lot of great pubs downtown, really. (I can’t include the Royal Oak as they apparantly no longer serve Moosehead, which is unacceptable for a Canadian establishment, according to me.)
This photo collage suggests that some sort of sporting event, with a kind of relay race leading up to it, is going on.
Also from Ask MeFi: Crazy person gets a little too OCD about a broken CFL bulb in a child’s bedroom. Fortunately, the responses to this “omg what do I do?!@#?@#” are measured and intelligent, which is more than you can say for most other discussions around this topic.

Speaking of CFL bulbs, my homiez over at One Change are giving away an official, signed, Martin Brodeur jersey. Head on over to their website to enter the sweepstakes. Note, however, that it’s not something as cool as his official Canadian Olympics jersey… no, just his usual Devils gear, which you wouldn’t actually wear, because anything to do with New Jersey is shameful and you wouldn’t want to associate yourself with that. Suitable for wrapping your dead pets for burial or something, though, right? Maybe stuffing into a hole in your wall to keep the cold air out? Lining your new green bin? One of those.

posted here on February 17th, 2010 | Permalink | 1 Comment »

“And you know that you’ll find what you need to know.” – It Should Be, Change of Heart