March 27, 2006

Broken Lawnmower

Spring has finally arrived here in the Great White North. Time to give the lawn a trim (it's looking pretty bad because it was getting kind of long last fall and then, all of a sudden, it was covered by snow). My wife pulled out the lawn mower and tried to start it. After sitting all winter, it didn't want to start. I thought that it was about time it had some TLC. I'm not the most mechanical of people, but I can pull spark plugs and check filters. Working on the lawn mower on the garage floor wasn't something my aching back and knees really wanted to do, but there wasn't anywhere else to work on it (perhaps the kitchen table? No, I don't think my wife would be too happy about that). A workbench in the garage! That's what I need. I had some particle board and 2x4's left over from a shelving project I did last fall, so I had most of what I needed. A few hours with a saw and drill, and I had a perfectly workable workbench. Well, now I was inspired. A quick trip to the hardware store, and I put up some pegboard behind the bench. Finally, a place to organize all of those 'big' tools that don't fit in my electronic toolbox. I knew it was time to stop when I was seriously contemplating tracing out the tool outlines on the pegboard.


You know, I never did get to working on the lawn mower this weekend...

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November 30, 2005

NyQuil No Longer Effective?

I ran across this blog entry today. This certainly explains a lot. I've spent the last week suffering through a particularly bad cold - probably the worst I've had in several years. I've been taking NyQuil and DayQuil, but I've still been all plugged up. I'm certainly going to spend more time looking at product labels in the future.

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September 10, 2005

Bob the Builder's Voice Change

Can We Fix It? I'm not sure. I've known for a long time that the voice characters for Bob The Builder are very much different in the US/Canadian version than the original UK version. I can't tell you the look on Matthew's face when he watched a UK import of Bob the Builder and heard all of the different voices. Because of my family's British history (and my tendancy to BitTorrent newer Bob episodes from the UK) Matthew is more than comfortable with the two versions of the voices.

Recently, a whole new story arc started in the UK version, called "Project Fix-It". This is a sequence of stories with Bob basically building a whole new town in Sunflower Valley. The UK version has the original voices (such as Neil Morrissey as Bob. I woke up this morning to see that Sunflower Valley had finally arrived on Treehouse in Canada (More info here). However, both Matthew and I were shocked to hear yet another Bob voice!

I did some Internet searching, but I can't find anything on the voice changes.

Edit:

After viewing the PVR recording, I see that Bob's voice is now done by Greg Proops (you'll recognize him from the American version of 'Whose Line Is It Anyway'). It's funny that I couldn;t find any reference to this on the web. It's not (yet) in the IMDB entry, and I can't find it on The Official Greg Proops Website.

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September 01, 2005

Links to Online New Orleans Media Sources

nola-intel.org has been set up with a Wiki for distributing online sources of information on New Orleans. There's links to streaming audio and video.

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New Orleans Levee Breaches

The disaster that is unfolding in New Orleans has left me without words. I came across this blog entry that has done an excellent job of bringing together images from various sources and pinpoints the locations of the levee breaches.

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July 26, 2005

Vacation Time

I've finally done it. I've broken away from work for almost a whole week, and I'm going on vacation. There'll be no broadband, no TV, and plenty of mosquitoes. At least there's 1X coverage...

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November 30, 2003

Vegas!

My wife surprised me with a long-weekend trip to Vegas. What a wonderful break. Now, I'm not one for all of the glitz and faux-rennaisance crap that they have here (I grew up in Europe - a fake Eiffel Tower just isn't the same as the real thing), I must admit that I'm having a great time!

It's great to have a few days away from work, where I'm too far away to deal with anything even if an emergency came up. We've been to see The Blue Man Group (my favourite) and Celine Dion (Cheryl's favourite).

I managed to sneak in damn-near half a suitcase of technology to bring with me. High speed Internet access in the hotel room is becoming more common, but I was downright shocked to find a Wi-Fi acces point hidden underneath the desk in the room! So I'm blogging from the Zaurus wirelessly!

The one piece of technology that doesn't work is my brand new camera phone! I've got voice service, but no net access, and no ability to blog pictures!

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June 13, 2003

Friday the Thirteenth

Hey, I just spent the entire day not realizing it was Friday the Thirteenth. At least I didn't have any problems with any hardware today...

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