bone in sub

spent about an hour making this panorama of my room with just a tripod and my 3-year-old consumer digital camera.

click for:
pretty big
huge (15500×1439!!!)

now that there is a precedent to search laptops, ipods, and flash drives when flying internationally, i figured i should prepare myself. i use my ipod as a flash drive, so in addition to firefox portable, keepass, and my music, it now has a very special rar file on it, containing:

• the complete works of shakespeare
• a couple news articles critical of the search policy
• a 1.3 mb w3g file
• a text file named ‘dc8_schem.txt’, containing only the line “MADE YOU LOOK!!!!!”

those files are inside a gzip, which was then compressed to 32 separate 256kb rar files renamed to .part**.bin, which are inside the final rar file. tomorrow i’m flying to richmond for my 21st birthday, which is on sunday. i really hope my ipod gets searched!

i played this sweet 3-minute piece at a pretty big concert last month, showed up right before and left right after i played. imagine my surprise when i go downstairs earlier today and see a letter from the CBC containing a large cheque paying me a share of the broadcast fee because the show was aired on the radio. that’s in addition to what soundstreams paid me! those were a very profitable 3 minutes.

immediately after that i noticed my bike wasn’t there – i played some marimba at the tranzac last night and rode home in a van with my marimba, and i guess i was so tired i completely forgot that my bike was still at the bar. i walked back tonight to pick it up at 2:30am, and there was a cab parked right in front of my bike. the driver was asking me all these questions about my bike while i was unlocking it and getting on; “when did you get it?” “how much was the lock?” “nobody can steal it?”. weird!

last night me and some folks went singing at the best karaoke place in toronto. we all had a good time, but it was a little surreal when two drunk chicks slam open the door to our room and start rocking out with us. one of them was wearing a boa and tiara and later explained to us she’s getting married next week, and this was her bachelorette party. they were about to leave when the song “9 to 5″ came on and one of them got REALLY excited (“i love this song!!!“) and they stayed for another song.

i’ve been sleeping 5 nights a week (not sleeping sunday nights and thursday nights) and it’s really helped my sleep schedule. now i go to bed at normal times, between 11pm and 1am, and sleep for 8 hours straight. i also get a lot more done because a) i’m not sleeping during the day at all and b) two sleepless nights a week is actually a huge amount of free time. late night walks and bike rides are really relaxing, too. only downside is i think i’ve been hallucinating a little, but i don’t know if it’s causative or just correlated.

i ordered pizza tonight and they sent me two mediums instead of the two smalls that i ordered. bonus!!

this is almost as good as the one time that my pizza was free because it took them 41 minutes to deliver.

i was reading some stuff about airport security, and saw something about the SSSS markings on boarding passes. i remember hearing about this before (it means you get a more serious search) so i looked at my boarding pass from saturday’s flight – yes, i was marked for extra screening. this has happened before, and i had to empty my backpack and have it swabbed for residue, and then i go into a chamber where air is blown all over my clothes checking for explosives or whatever.

the weird part is that this time, i was flying at 10am on a saturday morning, there was nobody in line at the security checkpoint i was using – the tsa agents were in no rush at all – and i didn’t get screened! x-ray and metal detector only.

last week, i visited my family in virginia for a week. my sister’s high school graduation ceremony was on Thursday. i did a lot while i was there:

• a nerve test involving electrodes placed inside my arms via needles (no nerve damage or carpal tunnel!)
• more driving than i’ve done in the past year
• attend two parties thrown by high schoolers – that was a trip after being in university for three years
• buy some new clothes; funny how i used to hate buying clothes and now i love it
• watch the final playoff game – i don’t really watch hockey, and it was a great game to watch!
• set off $70 of fireworks…this doesn’t happen much in downtown toronto
• lose an arm-wrestle to my sister’s boyfriend
• play two hours of Guess Who and Connect Four with the above pair
• check in friday night and go through security to find that my plane home had turned around shortly after leaving toronto for mechanical reasons
• eat a lot of barbeque sandwiches (one of my favorite foods, and a rare one in toronto)
• take the next plane (saturday morning), arrive in toronto and take a taxi to work, and work for the rest of the day

i got my grades back last week – amazing. i honestly didn’t expect to do that well!