Anji, Kailey and I went for a walk at Bowness part last night and noticed an unusual number of shiny white trailers. We had no idea what they were for but figured it was most likely some commercial or something being shot there. We wondered towards where the action was and came across a zillion people, even more trailers, and signs indicating we were entering a live set and if we proceeded we forfeit any right to complain about being used in their film for whatever. Cool! Naturally we entered. We came across some gazebo type thing with a bunch of kids in it and cameras and a guy sitting in a dark suit in a real directors chair. It was rather amusing to see. Further along the path they had a arch with “Neverland” written across it and two white limos driving down the pathway. A flock of kids with signs were cheering as the limos approached. I’m not sure what that was all about but rather nifty anyways. We even got to see the guy with the little black chalkboard thingy do his thing and watch them shoot the limo scene.
So anyways we left there not knowing what this was all about. Today a quick googling for “Neverland” and “Calgary” came up with a few articles about a new made-for-tv film being shot in Calgary about Michael Jackson. It’s kind of an unofficial documentary called “Man in the Mirror”. I’m not particularly interested in MJ but still it was neat to walk right through the middle of their set 
Here is a really cool new flashlight. It’s basically two LEDs that clip right on top of a 9V. It has two modes of operation; in low mode it will last 600 hours while in high mode only 75 hours on a single battery. The price is $24USD which seems a bit pricy though.
For all you Windows users I’ve added a page with links / mirrors of some of my favorite Windows utilities and software.
Had a good, but really busy, weekend.
Friday evening we went out to the Outback with Derek, Anna (Derek’s new fiance, our first time meeting her), Suman, Tyson, Naomi and Matt. The meal was pretty expensive but quite good and the company was great! It was really nice to see everyone again.
On Saturday morning I headed down to a free seminar on portrait lighting at The Camera Store. I’m not sure I really want to do much in the way of portrait photography but it was interesting just the same. The theme of the presentation was to simplify lighting. Julian showed how to make really nice portraits using one, or maybe two, lights and possibly a reflector. I was planning on buying a red filter for B&W but they had a bunch of other filters on 50% off so I ended up buying, in addition to the red, a yellow, a green, and a warming filter. All in all I paid about $60 and ended up with a nice set of black and white filters.
When I got home Pam and Ryan dropped by for a visit and we just hung out and chatted while Anji and I started putting things into boxes. We have way too much junk Saturday evening we dropped by Scott and Candice’s and watched a movie (can’t remember which one – conjoined twins?).
Sunday we went to Heritage Park for Mom’s Concert and then had Mom’s day dinner at Mom & Dad’s place cooked by Dad, myself and Christy. Kailey tried her first Watermelon Sunday evening and loved it. Anji gave her a whole big piece and she ate it (although managed to completely cover herself in it). We had to give her a bath immediately after because she was so messy. She was so funny. She would take a bit and look at Christy and just start laughing and laughing and then rub chunks of water melon on her head. I took probably a dozen pictures which I’ll post once they are developed and scanned.
This site collects geek dreams. Some of them are really quite bizarre like this one:
after a couple of days spent building and upgrading our new news server, i had a dream that we got disgusted with the disk-based storage model of news, and started to look into alternative storage media.
our research efforts somehow struck upon the idea of using the hair on someone’s head to store news articles. we’d worked out a method for encoding news articles into a piece of hair, and thus each individual newsgroup was stored on a single hair. new articles were added at the root, which made for easy article expiration – just get a haircut, and snip-snip-snip, all the old articles at the ends of your hair are snipped off.
we were trying to code a newsreader onto a comb when i woke up.
and this one
One of the scariest nightmares I’ve had in the past decade or so was about me being stuck in a Nethack dungeon. Everything was green on black (I’d been playing on a Facit VT100-clone) and in 7-bit ASCII. I distinctly remember being chased by a lower-case x, scared out of my wits and at the same time feeling ashamed of being such a wimp that a mere grid bug was a threat.
I think the most geekish dream I’ve had involved me getting frustrated because for some reason I’d bought a Mac and couldn’t run all the software I wanted to run (Linux stuff) on it. I would keep trying to compile things and it wouldn’t work. I woke up quite annoyed.
We had another nice and busy weekend. Friday evening we had dinner with my brother-in-law Ryan and his Grandpa to see him off as he starts at a new job in slave lake beginning in May. Saturday we headed up to Drum to visit Anji’s Grandma and Great Grandma so we took a few more pictures of Anji, Kailey, Anji’s Grandma, and Anji’s Great Grandma (Kailey’s Great Great Grandma) together. Sunday our Realtor decided to do an open house so we went out to Grassi Lakes hiking. It was a bit windy but a really nice hike. I loaded up with slide film so hopefully my pictures from the hike will turn out well. Sunday evening we had a really nice dinner with my parents and sister.
