Darcy Casselman

Neighbours helping neighbours

It’s rare that I get home before sundown these days, and I decided to take up the opportunity to mow the front lawn while I had daylight and it wouldn’t piss off the neighbours.

When I was driving in, I narrowly avoided running down a neighbour kid who was tooling around the roads on his bike. This happens infrequently. There are a lot of kids in my neighbourhood and they spend a lot of time just hanging out in my cul de sac avoiding cars and being bored. It’s what kids do.

Having gotten in and changed out of work clothes, I got something quick to eat and went out to start mowing. I didn’t make it halfway down the lawn before I noticed the self-same neighbour kid tentatively pedalling up towards my house.

He parked his bike in the road, dropped his helmet down beside it and started trudging up the lawn towards me. I stopped the mower.

“Can I help?”

“Huh?” I replied. I’ve never really considered myself good with kids. I wouldn’t have expected that that would be the sort of question that they’d ask.

“Can I help? I can use the ‘lectric lawnmowers, but I’m not allowed to use the gas ones.” He paused. “I’m bored.”

“Ah,” I said. I thought about it. I figured at worst he was probably going to try to extort $10 out of me, which I could deal with. It wasn’t going to take me long, but occupying bored kids with productive if mundane tasks is practically a community service these days, and if I kept and eye on him and kept him in the front yard I doubted anyone would start accusing me of luring kids for unsavoury purposes, as seems to be so much the fashion.

So I let him go at it. He didn’t do a half-bad job, either. A bit slow, maybe, and didn’t seem to grasp the finer points of cord management, which is always the trick with electric mowers. But he got the job done. I took the opportunity to pull up some weeds I’d been neglecting.

The only trouble was getting him to stop. “I’ll do anything you need,” he would say, “I’m a good worker.”

Indeed.

I had to let him start into the back yard, because I couldn’t tell him to go away and I’d run out of front yard for him to do. Eventually he just got bored and decided to go home. Which I was fine with. He’d done far more than I’d wanted to do tonight.

I thanked him for his help and off he went. As inexplicably as he came.

He didn’t even ask for money.

Corel is strange

There’s something deeply weird about Corel’s online store.

I’ve used Paint Shop Pro for ages. I’ve bought every version that comes out since version 7. Upgrades are usually pretty cheap, and the new versions have added useful stuff.

Corel bought Jasc, the company that makes PSP (they had the acronym first), a couple years ago. PSP 10 was the first version released from Corel. I dutifully bought the upgrade when it was announced.

For some reason I never did figure out, Corel sent me two copies. I’m not complaining or anything. I just gave one of the copies to a friend.

The new version, PSP Photo XI, came out recently. I’m not sure why they decided to add “Photo” to the name, except maybe to avoid confusion with Corel Painter. I was a bit undecided on whether I should upgrade. I haven’t been using it much lately, and I’d just switched to Linux. I use it at work, though, and the upgrade was only $40, so I decided to just go ahead and put in the order for the upgrade. I ordered the physical box because it was the same price and hey, they sent me two last time.

This time, however, they sent me a copy of Corel Painter X instead of Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI. I guess the “Photo” didn’t help them much after all.

I’m trying to decide how I feel about this. On the one hand, I didn’t get what I ordered. On the other, they sent me a $500 piece of software for $40.

Maybe I should put it on eBay…

Bullets over Belleville

* I spent the weekend in **Ottawa** for a friend’s wedding. That was pretty wonderful. I’m a big fan of weddings, and this was the first one I’d been to for friends (surprisingly, it’s taken this long). That’s so much cooler than extended family sorts of weddings. Not that I don’t like my family… Weddings are (at their best, anyways) parties, and parties with friends are quantitatively better.

* After the wedding, I spent a couple days in **Belleville** setting up my parents with my sister’s old computer. Old, but still newer and better than theirs. Actually, my parents computer would still be serviceable, except I think the harddrive is toast.

* So I missed the first couple days of the **commuter challenge**. I’m kind of annoyed that the metric they’re using for participation is kilometres. So because I bought a house 2.5km from work, even if I walk every day, I can’t hope to come close to matching the contribution of some dude who decides to take the bus in from his monster house in Cambridge one day (and never again, because that takes like two hours). So I’m a little perturbed. My dedication to the cause is obviously superior and I should be acknowledged and lauded for that fact! Because I’m awesome.

* Dell’s Days of Deals are dangerous. I bought a new **printer** yesterday. My old one sucked, though, and the new one prints duplex and works fine with Linux and Mac OS X. I might give the old one to my sister or something.

* Speaking of walking, I’m debating whether it’s possible to do most of my regular **grocery shopping** between the butcher, the baker and the international grocer which are all on my route home from work. The only problem is the butcher and baker both close around 6. Hm. More on this in a future non-bullet post.

* **Doctor Who** on Sunday. 7pm my place, unless I hear a better idea.

Commuter Challenge

Folks at work got us out on the patio for a barbecue at lunchtime to tell us about the [Commuter Challenge](http://www.commuterchallenge.ca).

My Daily Commute (For some reason, I keep wanting to insert a ‘p’ in “commuter”).

I was torn between feeling guilty and virtuous. I mean, my “commute” is only 5km a day total, and I’d be walking that if I could. Even if I drive every day, the distance traveled in one year is about as much as one SUV driving coworker who lives somewhere in the 905 does in two weeks. (I noticed he wasn’t at the barbecue…). But I haven’t been walking much (due to pain, which I guess is understandable).

Even though I’m fully on board with the principles and goals of the event, it all seems a bit silly to me. I suppose that’s my non-conformist nature shining through again. This is all stuff I know about, but I guess there are people for whom “you can bike! or take the bus! It’s better for everybody!” is news.

I do want to start getting out on the bike more. I haven’t done that in ages.

Photo Scunt

I’m not having a whole lot of luck getting my head back into work stuff. It probably doesn’t help that the people I’m meant to be working with are still stuck in their own projects. I need people to talk to.

But instead of complaining about work, I think I’ll write up some sort of [Anime North](http://www.animenorth.com/) thing.

Last year, John, Bill and I decided that we needed something to do on Saturday afternoon because we usually just ended up wandering around the dealer’s room spending money and getting annoyed with the kids doing security. So John came up with the idea of a [scavenger hunt](http://slashdot.org/articles/07/05/11/1631250.shtml), except with cameras so as to discourage the usual vandalism and destruction inherent in scavenger hunts.

Thus the [photo scunt](http://www.animenorth.com/photoscaven.php) was born.

We wanted to start it out small this year with a few teams and lower expectations. And with those, things went swimmingly and we’re now thinking about ways to grow it next year. I’ve got a few ideas, anyway.

* Next year, I think it would be nice to just print out lists for non-participants. I mean, it’s all for fun anyway. Full contest participation is probably more commitment than a lot of people want, and we don’t have the man-power for everybody to join in anyway.
* The contest doesn’t really scale very well, because there’s a whole lot of downloading and sifting through photos that needs to be done. In Physical scunts, the participants are restricted by how much stuff they can carry, so they’ve got to go back to the judges frequently and get things checked off the list. In a photo scunt, you just leave all the photos on your 2GB card and come back at the end for judging. Which means lots of tedious work for us. We’ve got to find a way to speed up that process if we’re going to have any hope of increasing the number of participants.
* From my little window on the proceedings, people seem to think in terms of collecting series and then collecting characters. I think we can work with that. Our list was kind of all over the map, in terms of what it wanted from people. We can probably be a bit more flexible while still getting people to find the things we want them to find. I hope, anyway.
* When we were tallying up photos, we had people saying “Oh, but I have a much better photo for [insert anime series]”. But we only count the one, so it doesn’t matter. Personally, I think a quantitatively cooler photo *should* count for more points. We can possibly do that with things like modifiers and combos. Maybe provide *hidden* combos for more points for things that make sense specific to the series or fan culture. That way, we could simultaneously simplify the list and make it more interesting.
* For example, we had on our list something like “Sailor Moon Cosplay.” So we accepted only the one Sailor Moon picture. But if someone found an incredibly adorable little girl in a Moon Princess costume with a plush Luna it would be worth a bit more than your typical sailor scout. Because we’d have modifiers like “cute” and “little kid” and series-specific modifiers like “Moon Princess” and “Luna mascot”. Likewise, we’d have modifiers for group sizes and other things. We need to be doing more to reward awesomeness.
* We were assuming people would get on the Internet and look things up, but I don’t think that happened. The hotel has free wifi. I’d like to find ways to encourage people to do this. :D
* We seem to have a bit of overlap with the masquerade ball with regards to required IT resources. Maybe we could work something out there… Just an idea…

I’ll see if John’s willing to put up the list for people to look at. I think it was a good first stab. Maybe we can get some feedback…