I was going to start this post on a more positive note, but I attempted to use the GPS unit and now I'm in a lousy mood. Don't ever, ever buy a Delorme PN-40 GPS. I have had nothing but problems with this thing, and now it won't even turn on. I don't think I care any more, time to write it off as an expensive mistake.

Glad that's over.

Wow, itunes seems to be stuck on a Madchester kick I guess that is my fault for owning all that music.

Kat had her first day of school for massage therapy. She was excited about it. I could tell because she was telling me all about it with the fervor of the newly

converted and I'm glad for it. It is good to see her wound up for something, I think she'll be really really good at it. How bizarre is that shot of a school bag? How often do you need to bring your own sheets to school? Oh, and as Kat reads this, she informs me that they are called "linens", not sheets. And students learn the habit of saying "disrobe", not "get naked" or "strip, please."

They told her that she should be practicing things they teach because they don't go over what was taught in previous classes. It is a forward march from day one and they leave the slow and witless behind. I made the witless bit up, they'd never call somebody who paid for the classes witless, but it seems they are more than willing to leave you behind. I like that in a training environment. Looks like my fears of not getting any side benefits of the course were ill conceived. She is supposed to practice, practice, practice. The fact that she is supposed to practice helping somebody sit up is a little odd, but I guess that is a skill that may come in handy if I have a sudden and unexpected decline. I'm thinking of playing goalie for another soccer team so the idea may not be that far-fetched.

She's not allowed to miss many classes, which is good for training, but not so good in other areas. Kat had to explain that she already had tickets to go on a cruise, so she may be early leaving one class and late arriving at another. That's right, cruise baby! Our friend, Kevin, messaged me early last week with a deal on a cruise ship that leaves San Diego Thursday night, pulls in to Catalina Island for Saturday, then down to Ensendada (Mexico) for Sunday, and back to San Diego Monday morning. It was only $175 each for a ocean view ... of course that price will probably put us beside the engine room, but with an ocean view. The boat is MASSIVE I've always wondered what a cruise ship is like and now I'll find out. We are going with Kevin and his fiance, Kristina, which is nice: relaxation with friends. I am planning on almost zero 'extras', meaning organized shore leave. I'll let the plebs go ashore, which will leave more mini golf for me. We'll be heading out late October. Yay! I'll let you know what it's like. I'm going to try and remember to take some picture with the cell phone and see if the GPS unit works in geo-tagging the shot. I'll have to load that in to Google to see where on the ocean I was when the shot was taken.

One of the organized tours you can do is to go swimming with dolphins. Bah, I did that last Friday. Two of them swam by me while I was in the ocean. Okay it was around 20 feet away, but still, dolphins! Free! Ocean! Plus dolphins=no sharks.

Good god, I followed that link to the ship and looked at some of the virtual tours, the decor looks like a designer on valium just finished watching the little mermaid. I was hoping for classy mahogany and tux-and-tails ambiance. I'll have to refrain from drinking too much or I'll think I've fallen in to a bad disney nightmare. On the plus side I could look at the decor as bordering on Bioshock levels and enjoy a possible dark side to it. Kevin will get that, he's played Bioshock. If you haven't played Bioshock think art deco, undersea and Ayn Rand gone horribly, horribly wrong. Woo, now I have an entire sub-text for the cruise!

October will be a busy month, cruise aside, the Tragically Hip is coming to play at the Belly Up tavern. The Belly Up is a good spot to see bands, better than 4th and B where we saw them last time. It isn't as good as Barrymore's in Ottawa, which still stands out as one of the absolute *best* places to see a band. I expect that it will be full of expat Canadians. Last time we saw the band here, we were sitting beside a couple from Yellowknife who just happened to be down here on vacation when the Hip came. Considering how many times the guy had seen the Hip I found it very fishy that he just happened to be be in San Diego AND knew that they were playing at a local bar.

I'm heading out Sunday to hopefully pick up a surfboard. Wish me luck figuring out how to get that attached to the smart car. If I do I'll upload some shots.

On a last note I saw a reference to Gander The Dog somewhere. I read it to Kat and we both got the shivers, but now I cannot recall where I saw it. It isn't in any of the Mclean's I have and it isn't in the Economist. It still makes you wonder:

For saving the lives of Canadian infantrymen during the Battle of Lye Mun on Hong Kong Island in December 1941. On three documented occasions, Gander, the Newfoundland mascot of the Royal Rifles of Canada, engaged the enemy as his regiment joined the Winnipeg Grenadiers, members of Battalion Headquarters "C" Force and other Commonwealth troops in their courageous defence of the island. Twice Gander's attacks halted the enemy's advance and protected groups of wounded soldiers. In a final act of bravery, the war dog was killed in action gathering a grenade. Without Gander's intervention, many more lives would have been lost in the assault.Ω

I'm going to miss the early mornings at the beach when winter gets here. I had to get up at 5:30am last Friday (due to evil 8am meetings) and the sun hadn't even come up yet. By the time I was done in the waves and heading back to the car the sun was coming up over the valley, very pretty. I managed to catch some waves *along* the face of the wave rather than just down it, very cool.

I tossed out a previously written post, or partially written. I finally understand why important people outsource their speech writing. It's a lot of effort to get all worked up about something. Okay, no it isn't. It's a lot of work to get worked up about something and try to write about it in a serious manner with fact checking and well created paragraphs. Also grammar, don't get me started on grammar, once it gets its evil clutches in to you it colours everything you read. I need to be rich so I can hire some smart people, tell them I care deeply about X and Y, and I want them to write me good speeches and articles about it. Go make it happen, I've got a really big check here that says I care.

I can see why people on the fringes like the one sentence summaries and sound bites, WAY easier to do. Throw the sound bite out there, piss people off, make THEM do the work to prove you wrong. More time for the fringe people to think up more sound bites while you are working on gathering the facts to disprove the stupid things they've said. They can think up 10 stupid things to say while you are still trying to disprove the first one, you can't win.

Let me find some of the doozies they've been tossing out regarding socialized medicine ...

Stephen Hawking, I'm sure you have heard about.

Sarah Palin and her "Death Panels".  I hope she runs for President, that's a farce I'd almost pay to see.

Mmm, post soccer game laziness. I've finished off some english muffins with peanut butter and I'm eying up the wine bottle. Don't worry mom, I had a good lunch.

Kathleen has decided to kick the unemployment monkey in the gonads and head back to school. She has always been interested in massage and she has signed up for a nine month course to get certified. She figures this will work well in conjunction with theatre and it is something she can be passionate about. I'm all about the side benefits, practice, practice, practice. It is starting next Thursday so we will see how that goes, I'll keep you updated.

Previous to that she has been on a real spree around the house. The wall along the stairs is now painted, the low wall where we used to feed the cat has been painted (and covered over all her dirty paw marks, yay!). She even painted the upstairs bathroom!

Me, I'm going through an unfocussed streak at work. Doing more reacting rather than preemptive strikes. There is a whole centralized user storage and registration process that I'm working on, but it has stopped thrilling me. After going to all these Web 2.0 seminars at work and finding out we don't have much of a budget to send me to talk to our customers, I decided to leverage the new social media to get feedback on our sites. Turns out everybody loves talking about it, but nobody has any externally facing infrastructure. Woo. I'll find some other way to gather information.

I went to a lunch presentation on 'Where is my motorcycle?' put on by the motorcycle club at work and the local police department. Very informative. It turns out that stealing sport bikes are really, really big business in San Diego. They tend to focus on the latest model race bikes from Honda, Suzuki and Yamaha. The two police guys who came in described how the crooks steal the bikes and it turns out they are dead easy to steal. Crooks just bring in ignition pieces of their own, wire them to your bike, start it, and ride off. They figure an unlocked sport bike can be hot wired in less than a minute and ridden to Tijuana in less than 15 minutes.

I mention TJ because that is where all the stolen bikes from San Diego go. A couple of years back the San Diego police used to work with the TJ police in recovering bikes. Bikes that have LoJack installed are easy to trace a lot of the police cars have the LoJack scanners installed. Unfortunately one of the drug cartels became interested in the money being made from stolen motorcycles in TJ and decided they wanted a slice. So now bikes that make it to Mexico are never recovered by the police, ever. Retrieving stolen bikes in TJ is neither safe, nor fiscally wise for Mexican police officers. San Diego police officers that work near the border turn off the LoJack kits in their car because of all the noise it makes when they get close to the border. It is depressing.

Happily for me there is little demand for the type of bike I have, which means there is a very low risk of my motorcycle being stolen by professionals.

I miss all our friends back in Ottawa. We had a link sent out yesterday regarding Pigeons being faster than the internet. The email thread degraded to the point where Rick Pali was causing hat makers in Surrey to be tossed out in to feces filled gutters. Nice going Rick. In case you read the link about pigeons carrying memory sticks and thought about the airspeed of an unladen swallow, yes, we went there too.

Bad Island! (by the way, that image says Tap Fever, it'll become relevant later)

I'm sure everybody keeps up on international news, who doesn't? So you would have heard by now that the Turks and Caicos Islands lost their independence. The U.K. government came in and removed the elected premier, cabinet and assembly. Nobody seemed to care.
I was confused as to how England could possibly do this so I went to do some research and now I'm both less confused and more. Didn't know that was possible. Turns out the Turks and Caicos were still considered a British overseas territory. That is a pretty broad term since it takes in Bermuda and the Cayman Islands (which I've always thought to be independent) and the Falkland Islands, Gibraltar and the British Antarctic Territory (which I've always thought weren't independent). That means Canada is safe from Queen Elizabeth for now, but no getting uppity in the colonies!

I knew I had heard of the Turks and Caicos before in reference to Canada. I'd heard that at one time they wanted to become a protectorate of Canada (probably because we wouldn't suspend the elected officials). Turns out we have quite the history with those islands (all quotes lifted from Wikipedia):

In 1917, Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden suggested that the Turks and Caicos join Canada, but this suggestion was rejected by British Prime Minister David Lloyd George.

In 1974, Canadian New Democratic Party MP Max Saltsman tried to use his Private Member's Bill to create legislation to annex the islands to Canada, but it didn't pass in the Canadian House of Commons.

In 1979, independence was agreed upon in principle for 1982, but a change in government caused a policy reversal and they instead approached the Canadian government to discuss a possible union, but at the time the Canadian Government was embroiled in a debate over free trade with the U.S., and little attention was paid to the suggestion. In 2004 the Canadian province of Nova Scotia gave an invitation to join but Canada's government said they would look at the matter later

Props to Nova Scotia. I'm pretty sure if that had worked out the entire population of Nova Scotia would have moved to Turks and Caicos for the winter months.

In true Internet fashion discussions on this have descended in to hyperbole and farce. People are bringing up neo-colonialism and the slave trade. I'm guilty of taking an extreme stance during an argument to prove a point, but it is hard to take somebody seriously when they try to make tossing out an allegedly corrupt government and connect it with the slave trade. Welcome to the Internet, the shrillest will win.

Speaking of bizarre things to happen I found yet another example of why California will eventually end up imploding as an economy. It's the bureaucracy. When Kat and I first tried to buy a house here we were stunned by the amount of red tape that was in the way. If I squinted I could see how it originally started off as an attempt to protect the average person, but it soon was co-opted by business to make as much money as possible off everybody. I won't start on my normal rant about the red tape involved in buying a house in California. Suffice it to say that Kathleen and I sold a house in Ottawa for $700 in lawyers fees, we *bought* a house here for $4,000 in fees. I make an effort to make bought stand out because normally they hit up the person making the money to pay the largest fees. Here we paid 6X the cost to be the buyer in Ottawa. We haven't sold a house, but I'm scared.

Let me take moment to get rid of those evil memories. In with the good air, out with the bad. Breathe, breathe.

Right, here is the latest. As some of you may know, Kathleen and I had a surfeit of two wheeled motorized vehicles in the garage. Two motorcycles and a scooter. As a good person I had them all insured, even though I rarely drove the scooter and never drove the Yamaha (I learned it was more expensive to sell it if it wasn't insured. One guess as to who has been lobbying the government). So I finally sold the Yamaha to a friend of a friend for a dirt cheap price. I just wanted it out of my garage. I call up the insurance company later to remove the Yamaha from the insurance (I need to make this clear, from three motorcycles to two, remember that) and the guy on the phone tells me that my insurance will be going up by $1 a year.

Yeah. That's what I thought as well. WTF?

So it turns out there is some bizarre California law about the more motorcycles you own the cheaper it is. I've tried to rationalize that but I'm having a hard time coming up with a good reason to legislate it. Perhaps the insurance guy was lying to me, that fits in far better with my world view.

I was going to post a picture of the bunnies outside my workplace. I've been impressed with them ever since I started up my not-so quiet motorcycle 14 feet away from from them and they didn't even flinch. I'm sure if they could isolate their middle fury digit, they'd be pointing it my direction. Sadly the photograph I took of them was another 'find the animal' type of photo, as I posted with the deer. Every time I use the camera in my phone I'm overcome with awe regarding eyeball design. Everything looks good while I'm looking at it, pull out the camera and I'm looking for the zoom button to define things. Good design on that eyeball.

Last weekend Kevin Six sent out an invitation (on Facebook, the bastard, I'm still not on facebook) for a meeting at La Jolla Shores for surfing then beach party starting at 5PM. I was all for that, since Kevin brings all the surfboards. Then I realized that our good friend Kristina had a tap recital at the same time. Surfing and s'mores or a bunch of unknown kids messing up tap dancing?

I should clarify that Kristina teaches tap on the weekends in addition to her normal job. I'm not just showing up to some bizarre amateur tap. She can dance, so can her fellow teachers, it's the people they teach that worry me.

So what did we do? We went to watch Kristina's kids tap dance. It was at a Pacific Beach public school built in the 60s with bad audio, broken air conditioning, and wooden seats. I don't think any money has been put in to the infrastructure since they bought the red-velvet back screen in the 70s. Welcome to the California public school system. If I manage to link in the bad cell phone picture it's because I want you to suffer like we did.

The kids in the photo were dancing to Bjork, which I have to admire. They spent most of their time looking off in to the distance, waving at the audience members or responding to their inner monologue (which I hear is much stronger in children). Only when the chorus kicked in did they slam dance their way around the stage with tap dance shoes on. I almost wanted children during that moment. Oh wait, I'm over it.

I figure our Karma points went up because we spent two hours watching bad tap-dance for a friend. Of course by telling you that it sucked I'm pretty sure I lost all the Karma points I gained. Stupid Karma. At least Kat came out on top.

Random addition.

When I sold my cruiser the guy asked me how I felt about the bike, I told him I liked the old bike, but I love my new bike. It's so true. I left work today, put on the leathers, fired up the moto bike, felt the heat soak in, kicked in the tunes and thought; oh yeah, commute time, bring it on. I feel that way going to and from work, how kick ass is that? Tunes for the ride today were started off with Aisha by Death In Vegas, odd video, good tune.