Author: admin

So a coworker set me up for a blind date with a friend of hers. She organized a 5-a-7 which turned out to be her, I and 4 other girls – two of which have apparently been well briefed out about me. More on this later.

So, as often the case in these things, I was more interested in the friend of the friend, meaning the second of the two girls and not the one my coworker was originally pimping. Was a fun night. Met up at a little pub&grill, had a few drinks and talked a lot. A lot of it was about their work – they all work for or with the Liberal Party of Canada, so they had a lot of office gossip. I kinda could have done without that, and the girl sitting besides me – who incidentally was the girl that caught my eye – came to my rescue and we spoke about music and books (always fun topics for me, and she's a concert violinist who's studying to be a music teacher)

The party lasted 'till about 9:30, at which time everybody split up and headed on their merry way. I walked with the girl from Bleury/St-Cath back to my office (to pick up my laptop) and then I took the bus with her to CDN. She lives around UofM, so she's close by.

Got home, had a doobie and zonked out in front of the TV for a while.

My computer is making a high-pitch fast clickety-clickety sound. I am worrying about an impending HDD failure :(

A note about a briefing. When I was walking towards the bus with the girl, she mentioned that she'd been well briefed about me: my likes for sushi, my passions for music and books, a few other sundry details and….get this… the fact that I wear my pants high.

WTF?? Excuse me? I'm sorry, but geez, if it's important to mention it to the girl you're setting me up with, you might want to think to MENTION IT TO ME FIRST???

I was chatting with my friend Robin about that. Her comments: “you don't criticize a person's style until you know them better and until it comes up in conversation in such a way that it won't be insulting”. Besides the fact that I've been working with the woman for a year and a half, that is such a woman's point of view. A guy would just come up and say “dude, those pants!”. She finished her IM message with “Notice that I never mentioned it either Luv”… and I've known Robs for close to 3 years now.

So please, ladies and gents who might be reading this. Is there anything that would be a hindrance in my quest for female companionship? Like, I dunno, bad BO or horrid manners, in my part, that would need to be brought to my attention? (besides the “Urquel style pants” as Robin dubbed them – to which I answer that I am NOT that bad).

From the comments I've gotten so far from friends (a la Why the fuck are you still single?), I would have assumed that all is well – but apparently, it wasn't. So come on, now would be a good time to tell me.

I just finished watching Three to tango with la familia. I just realized that Neve Campbell is definitively someone I should put on my top 5 list.

Therefore, the revised list stands as such:

1. Alyson Hannigan
2. Neve Campbell
3. Claudia Christian
4. Charlize Theron
5. Jeri Ryan

with Kate Bekinsale as my #1 alternate.

Met up with Michel last night, for sushi and drinks. I was so friggin would up from work, it wasn't even funny. It took me a good half-hour of venting before I started to unclench and unwind… I really need to start looking for something else. Went for dead fish, always good, and then a drink at Hurleys, my preferred watering hole. (Unfortunately Sara, neither of our serving wenches were there).

We went to Ogilvy post-sushi pre-drink. I'd never set foot in the place, so I was amazed by the caliber of swankness. Wow… I will have to postpone my dreams of pure silk sheets until I'm filthy rich. Jeebus. 1000$ for custom-made sheets is WAY THE HELL out of my league. I was willing to shell out a few hundred, but this is just nuts! I'll go back to the Linen Chest and get some 450-threadcount Egyptian cotton sheets, and that will be more than sufficient.

Found this while surfing. The best collection of just plain wrong T-shirts in a while:

http://www.cafeshops.com/stuct

Favourite quotes from the story:

Moore describes “Fahrenheit 9/11” as a comedy, and, according to Variety, the film examines the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and paints the Bush administration in an unflattering light. […] Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, told the New York Times that Eisner asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Emanuel said Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where President Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, is governor.

S'good to be the king…

Reports: Media company attempts to stop Miramax from releasing Michael Moore documentary.
May 5, 2004: 10:07 AM EDT

Original Link: http://money.cnn.com/2004/05/05/news/fortune500/disney_moore/index.htm
Reuters Link: http://www.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml;jsessionid=DTNLHCMPN0IROCRBAEOCFFA?type=politicsNews&storyID=5046951

NEW YORK (CNN/Money) – Oscar-winning filmmaker Michael Moore's documentary linking President Bush with powerful Saudi families, including that of Osama bin Laden, is sparking the latest fight within Walt Disney Co..

The film, set to debut at the Cannes film festival later this month, has yet to be released. The New York Times and Hollywood trade paper Daily Variety said in their Wednesday editions that Disney has moved to prevent its Miramax Films unit from distributing “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

The controversy had little effect on Disney (DIS: Research, Estimates) stock, which was little changed in early trading Wednesday.

The Disney edict could herald the bloodiest political battle yet between Miramax's feisty co-chairman, Harvey Weinstein, and Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who oversaw the purchase of Miramax a decade ago, Daily Variety said.

“Fahrenheit 9/11,” is Moore's follow-up to his Academy Award-winning “Bowling for Columbine.” Rumors had been circulating of a July release in North America, but the film does not appear on Miramax's summer schedule, the Variety said.

Moore, a vocal critic who denounced Bush and the war in Iraq during his Oscar acceptance speech, caused a controversy during the Democratic primaries when he called Bush a “deserter” for not finishing his National Guard service during the Vietnam War.

Moore describes “Fahrenheit 9/11” as a comedy, and, according to Variety, the film examines the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and paints the Bush administration in an unflattering light.

The Times quoted a Miramax spokesman as saying that the company was “discussing the issue with Disney. We're looking at all of our options and look forward to resolving this amicably.”

But the paper said Disney isn't willing to budge on the issue.

“We advised both (Moore's) agent and Miramax in May of 2003 that the film would not be distributed by Miramax,” Zenia Mucha, a Disney spokeswoman, told the newspaper.

Officials from Miramax and Disney were not immediately available for comment Wednesday morning.

Independent stock analyst Dennis McAlpine said that there has always been a tension between Miramax and Disney since the media conglomerate bought the independent studio in 1993.

“They've done their own thing for the most part. Disney has been content to leave them alone and give them money and pull in all the Academy Awards,” said McAlpine.

He said that despite the shareholder criticism of Eisner, he doesn't think that this battle will necessarily cause the embattled executive more problems.

“If there is a fallout, it's that some of the creative types say, 'I'm not going to take my next pic to Disney,'” said McAlpine. “But Hollywood is a wonderful place for saying one thing and doing the opposite the next time.”

McAlpine said that he could see Miramax releasing the film under a separate label, as it has done with some controversial films in the past. The controversy and the attention the battle is getting will help draw viewers to the film, according to McAlpine and other box office analysts.

“There is no better way to do this,” said David Mumpower, president of box office tracking firm Box Office Prophet. “They're taking a page out of Mel Gibson's play book for 'The Passion of the Christ' to let the media coverage sell the movie. All the coverage is better than ads.”

Mumpower doubts that Disney will be able to stop the film from being released altogether.

“I'm absolutely certain it will be released. Whether it's done by a Disney subsidiary is another question,” he said.

Moore's agent, Ari Emanuel, told the New York Times that Eisner asked him last spring to pull out of the deal with Miramax. Emanuel said Eisner expressed particular concern that it would endanger tax breaks Disney receives for its theme park, hotels and other ventures in Florida, where President Bush's brother, Jeb Bush, is governor.

The Times reported that Disney executives denied that allegation. One executive told the paper it did not want to be seen taking sides in the election and risk alienating customers of different political views.

“It's not in the interest of any major corporation to be dragged into a highly charged partisan political battle,” said the executive, who was not identified by the paper.

But Moore said he believed the protection of tax cuts was the reason for the media conglomerate's position.

“I would have hoped by now that I would be able to put my work out to the public without having to experience the profound censorship obstacles I often seem to encounter,” Moore said in a statement Wednesday, referring to his agent's charge against Eisner.

“The whole story behind this (and other attempts) to kill our movie will be told in more detail as the days and weeks go on. All I can say is, thank God for Harvey Weinstein and Miramax, who have stood by me during the entire production of this movie.”

Oh joy, oh rapture.

I'm a coder again. This is what I love to do, and this is what I do best. Finally, I've gotten a reprieve from writing boring analysis docs and I got to play with code.

Basically, I had to write a JDBC connection framework to connect to mySQL from openKnowledge, our flagship product we're working on. I could have used something vanilla, but I wanted to do something with a bit more umph. It took a while, but I managed to figure out how to do proper connection pooling configured by user-overrideable property files. The examples given from the mySQL website were shit. The JDBC through JDNI code never worked properly (probably because the documentation is shit), so I ended up using something from the Apache DBCP group. It works, and all is well. 8 hours just went zoom :D

Now my day is done, and for the first time in a long time, I'm happy with the work I did today :)

Just wanted to share two little comics that really hit the nail on the head these days :)

A warm bed on a cold night
Mom's homemade chocolate cake
Fresh laundry smell
A book that makes me laugh in the metro
Feeling a cat purr on your chest
Watching a fire burn down to embers in the fireplace

… nope. Still feel bleh.