evanroberts.com

Breakfast / Lunch

• Dooney’s
  • Bison burger with cheese and onions
  • Garden salad
  • Side of home fries

Snacks

• Two Coronas

Dinner

• Jack Astor’s
  • Chicken pad thai
  • Two pints of Creemore

I will admit, I like graffiti on walls. Not those stupid “tags” that some no-talent idiots draw with a marker on a door, I’m talking about nice colourful graffiti, which I usually can’t read, but at least can admire. Some of these guys are really artistic, painting impressive renditions of people on the walls, or even cartoons of characters doing things. All in all, as long as it looks decent, and that someone with talent was the artist, I think graffiti is quite nice to have on an otherwise drab wall.

It’s because of these no-talent dimwits that graffiti gets a bad rap. What is the point of “tagging” a door, or a wall, or even the TTC, with a scribble that a three year old could do, or even improve upon? That’s just plain and simple vandalism. Graffiti to me, is art.

On the subway between the Keele and Dundas West stations, there is a wall down in the parking lot on the south side that has some wonderful graffiti. There is a depiction of B.B. King. There’s a woman who looks to be from the 1920s. There are some amusing cartoon characters. All of it is colorful and while you can tell that this was put together by different artists at different times, it does flow together really nicely. For the longest time, I planned to take a panoramic shot of it, just so I could have it. Unfortunately, I never got around to it. Now, some fucking asshole has used a paint roller to put his idiotic moniker up over some of the best drawings on the wall. For what? What does that prove? If I knew who was responsible for this, I would happily kick the shit out of him.

Anyway, enough ranting.

Guy forwarded me a link to a short movie where some artists in Buenos Aires and Baden created an animation short using graffiti. The time involved to create this blows my mind, as they would have to paint each frame, then paint over it, and paint the next frame, and so on. Some of these frames are the entire sides of buildings, so this was no small feat. The animation itself is pretty good for what it is, yet the imagery is pretty messed up (people coming out of people’s mouths, etc), so some of you might not like it. That’s your only warning. View at your own discretion.

Also, as a joke, I sent the following to Mike as he watched it and noted how messed up it was:

Surgeon General’s Warning: Do not consume mushrooms or other hallucinogenics prior to watching this animated short.

Check it out: http://www.blublu.org/sito/video/muto.htm

If YouTube is better for ya, use this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuGaqLT-gO4

Breakfast

• Two light Babybels

Lunch

• I Love Sushi
  • Assorted sushi (eight pieces of sushi, a six piece spicy tuna roll, one California hand roll)
  • Kikkoman soy sauce - red cap
  • Small salad
  • Miso soup

• Bangkok Paradise
  • Two Thai spring rolls - seafood
  • Sweet tamarind sauce

Snacks

• One of Linda’s Lollies - fruit punch

Dinner

• PJ Wong’s
  • Large chicken with creamed corn soup
  • One spring roll
  • Sweet and sour chicken balls
  • Beef with black bean sauce
  • BBQ pork fried rice

For the last few weeks, Molly and I had been planning to head down to San Francisco with the desire to surprise my brother. Even his wife Liz was in on it, which helped immensely, as we planned to meet up at one of his favourite restaurants, and eagerly awaited to see what would happen.

As it turned out, the look of surprise was only on his face for a split second, before he burst into laughter at how we just showed up, seemingly out of no where. I couldn’t have asked for a better reaction. 

Check it out: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lQVJEi_XQ3c

San Francisco was just as beautiful as I remembered it, but this trip we got to know the city for what it is: a city. Before, Molly and I walked away from San Francisco seeing it as a utopia, which is many ways it still is, but as with all cities, there are some shady aspects. There are a great many homeless people always asking for change, or urinating in the streets, and a number of mentally-disturbed people walking around shouting their heads off. This, of course, was mostly observed in the downtown region, and we also happened to be near the “Tenderloin”, which is a neighbourhood that is best described as “sketchy”. Every city has an area like this, so it’s easy to pass quick judgement, and I shall refrain from doing so.

All in all, it was a great trip down to San Francisco, and it was awesome to hang out with Greg and Liz again. Our two resident experts of the city (pun intended), they introduced us to new delights, and expanded our knowledge of the metropolis they reside in. Molly and I also found some new places as we wandered around, and wander around we did; on an average of 7km per day, we racked up at least 28km of travelling by foot. Going up the hills was a task in itself, especially while we journeyed with our luggage, but we enjoyed the exercise involved, which helped as we weren’t really following our diets… hey, we were on vacation, remember?  

As with any travelling, it’s always good to be home. My father was kind enough to take care of the cats while we were gone, and the little furballs welcomed our arrival with plenty of meows and excessive purring. Looks like they didn’t trash the place while we were away.

And so ends a highly-anticipated trip. I’ll probably write more as I think about it, as a lot of amusing things happened. Pictures are located in my gallery.

Breakfast

• One Nitrotech Hardcore protein bar - strawberry cheesecake

Lunch

• Three light Babybels

Dinner

• PJ Wong’s
  • Sichuan chicken
  • Large chicken with creamed corn soup

Breakfast

• Three hard boiled eggs

Lunch

• Bangkok Paradise
  • Thai rice noodles (Pad Thai) in a Tomerind base sauce

Dinner (at the Airport)

• Pizza Pizza
  • Super slice
  • One cup of Diet Pepsi (fountain)

Snacks (in San Francisco)

• A Spicy Bite hot dog with nasty processed cheese from 7-11
• Three cans of Budweiser

Have you ever been so tired that you were somewhat energised, yet you knew it could fail at any moment?

Last night, I couldn’t sleep. This wasn’t a normal case of dropping off around 2am or 2:30am. No, this was something altogether different. I recall seeing 4am before finally passing out. I distinctly remember thinking that I should just forgo sleep, as I would more than likely be tired in the morning, and waking up would be a pain in the ass. This was not an issue this morning, however, as I woke with a start, and have been going strong since.

I’m not one who usually drinks coffee or tea with any regularity, so I know that if I were to have a cup of either, I’d be flying on the caffeine for a few hours at most, and then crash hard. And then there’s always the chance I’d have an anxiety attack, which was the entire reason I stopped drinking coffee and tea in the first place.

Anyway, I think my lack of slumber was due to my excitement for what an awesome weekend this promises to be. Usually when I have something planned that I am looking forward to more than anything else, I can’t sleep. I believe that is the same with everyone, so I’m not sure why I mentioned it. Yet again, fatigue is making me ramble.

I’ll stop now before I say something REALLY dumb.

Back when my site used to be run by the Postnuke CMS (content management system), I used to be able to assign an avatar for each category. For example, on drunken rants (which were occasional back then), I had an image of me slamming a beer. Basically, it was a setup similar to Slashdot, and I kinda liked it.

When I finally had enough of Postnuke, as it seemed that the CMS was going no where and support for plugins was minimal at best (I don’t know if this is still the case), I switched to Wordpress, and never looked back. However, I didn’t know how to easily assign an image to each category, and truthfully, I was hoping to have something different for each post this time.

Ironically, one of the web comics I read every week, Ctrl+Alt+Del, has a setup sort of like how I wanted. Tim Buckley, the creator, draws his avatars, and sometimes has different ones depending on the post. For my posts, I sort of want to have a mix of either a snapshot of myself if I’m in a weird mood or desire to display my mood for the post, or even just a run-of-the-mill graphic. Basically, a mix of Ctrl+Alt+Del and Slashdot.

After a bit of searching, the plugin that I found that would let me do this is “Post Avatar” (original name, eh?!). You have the option of including the avatar within the post, or if you wish to use CSS, you can specify the CSS class name you’d want to use, and then configure that class within your style sheet. I opted for the latter, and knowing very little about CSS, I had the avatar popping up all over the place within the post, until I came across someone else who was doing sort of the same thing, but for putting avatars next to comments. Using Firebug, I was able to see the CSS class he used, and nab it. Applying it to my site too a bit to figure out, and also determine what size of avatar would be best, but again, Firebug helped me out with this, and so far, it looks pretty good (in my opinion, of course).

I don’t think I’m going to go back and update EVERY past post with an avatar, because even though I only have 105 posts (including this one), I’m quite lazy at heart… even if this endeavour did take a bit to put together. Slightly hypocritical, eh?

Anyway, hope you like these as much as I do.

Just now, while talking with my co-workers about the names that people have, I asked aloud:

“How do you get ‘Dick’ from ‘Richard’…?”

…and suddenly realised what I had just asked.

Fuck.