Periodically.org

We went to go buy a sectional a few days ago. Now that we are out in the burbs, we have enough room for furniture that is not featured in the latest dystopian sci-fi film with a good-on-paper but terrible-in-practice brainwashing authoritarian regimes and limitless seas of white people dressed in grey. Films that illuminate the unreachable spark of the human soul and how the bastions of technology and society will never breach it, nay, not in a thousand years, not in a thousand million years, and definitely not with shock troopers that have been creatively garbed using 3 gallons of white spray paint and a $57 spent at the army surplus store. In fewer words, we can now afford furniture that can fit more than two petite, overly polite exchange students. So we went to the area around town that sells furniture: it has great edifices built on the idea that industrial warehouses can be semi-attractive and not depressing at all furniture showrooms. Never mind the exposed metal rafters overhea...

Buying a new computer is a geek rite of passage. For the masses -- those who have no idea what a d20 is and have really no opinion on Greedo and his itchy trigger finger --it's a foreign concept. They know not the agony of buying a computer; for them, it's a simple matter of buying it from Dell. Ah, but the geek carries a heavy burden. For the geek, there are endless reviews to read. Specs and opinions, reliability ratings, benchmarks, and voltage readings. For the geek must, must find the optimum component for his computer, and cobble it together, piecemeal, a Dr. Frankenstein working in digital parts. He must give birth to the perfect PC. And it's arduous. Technology moves fast. What may have been the perfect price/performance ratio for your overclocked RAM will be worse than old if you don't move fast. Did you check up on the intermittent disk failures for that harddrive you have decided on, specifically when you video encode Bulgarian Soap Operas? Did you know that...

One of the things about living in BC (a province of Canada, one of ten, on the far west coast. We're like the Oregon of Canada, except more hippyish, without the high-brow Intel connections and a Nordstrom's on every block) is that the veracity of your Canadian-ness is always in question. It usually revolves around the lack of severe cold weather that plagues BC. If you haven't faced certain death from -40 C weather simply because you've missed your bus, you just ain't Canadian. So when a particularly nippy winter hits us, we always get the transplanted Ontario-an/Newfoundlander/etc roll their eyes, purse their lips, slap their short-wearing leg and say "You think this is cold? This ain't cold..", then proceed with a none too entertaining foray into the finer points of hypothermia and the futile effort to combat it with a Tim Horton's double double. There is something within the (let's face it) male psyche that yearns to undergo the greatest ha...

You may know him as the uber nerd bus token collector on "King of Queens", now know him as: Comedy. God.

Is there anything as bracing as hours upon days reassembling particle board furniture? Many of you might say, "Well, hell, yes. Many, many things. Almost everything in fact." I will attempt to argue the contrary ( oh look, I sort of wrote about this before ). Particleboard Assembly & Interaugmentational kNackery is a time honoured craft. While it is new, and doesn't have the panache of say, masonry, or the callus-on-the-hands down-to-earthedness of roofing, it has its charms; to wit, the Allen Key. Ah the Allen Key, simplistic hexagonal faux-screwdriver for the mechanically disinclined. A champion in a sea of hard to learn and impossible to understand 'crafstmanship' and 'professional workmanship'. A leveller, if you will, for those who would like to walk into the local Rona with pride, or at least, with a little less angst. Sure, sure, all you are doing is reapplying some European engineers assembly plans to cobble together reconstituted sawdust. But...