Robin Harbron

Sorry friends and well-wishers, the other job has picked up again and put me in that state of always feeling like I should be doing something other than blogging.

I’ve briefly overcome that with that feeling of elation that comes once a year when I’ve finished and filed my taxes. This year I actually owed money due to my extra-curricular employment. I’m a part-time schemer, and I was tempted to try one of my schemes with my tax payment.

Every year I notice the “If your balance owing is less than $2, you do not need to make a payment” (or similar) statement on the forms and elsewhere. So, why don’t you subtract $1.99 from what you owe? Think of the collective millions of dollars we could save!

I didn’t do it, since I figured that’s just asking to audited (not that I have anything to hide, of course, it just seems like a hassle I don’t need). It’d be way cool instead if next time they owe *me* money, they’d make the cheque out for $1.99 less 🙂

Oh yeah, that paper I blogged about last time was computer generated – some MIT students apparently got a couple papers generated with it accepted at some conference, much to the embarrassment of the organizers. Link to follow if I can find it again.

Here’s a paper I was working on for a bit – you might find it interesting, or boring. It uses some fairly technical language.

All 4 kids were gathered around the NES this evening, playing Super Mario Bros. (which is 20 years old this year, by the way). I took the girls aside for a couple minutes to show them another big part of the 80s, Mr. T. You should really check this out for yourselves – Treat Your Mother Right. Then at bed time we nearly finished off reading “The (slightly censored on the fly) Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” – not really from the 80s, but part of my 80s anyway.

It was one of those synergistic, holistic, harmonious moments because the girls also learned about the concept of insulting other people’s mothers. Mr. T had just finished telling us (in “song”) why we should leave people’s mothers out of it, while THHGTTG had this to say: “A dreadful silence fell across the conference table as the commander of the Vl’hurgs, resplendent in his black jeweled battle shorts, gazed levelly at the G’Gugvuntt leader squatting opposite him in a cloud of green sweet-smelling steam, and, with a million sleek and horribly beweaponed star cruisers poised to unleash electric death at his single word of command, challenged the vile creature to take back what it had said about his mother.” An amazing coincidence, indeed.

Okay, he’s not new, but he’s newly blogging. Tony’s Rants is linked to the right. Yup, he’s one of the most conservative guys I know, despite being one of the most liberal guys I know. He voted Green, even though an NDP sign would have looked really good outside his house. He’s a cow-orker of mine, and is as into 80s heavy metal as I am into 80s video games. I’m looking forward to him posting some of his Tbaytel I.T. department-famous “letters to the editor”, as seen in the Chronicle Journal.

Even though 2 of the 3 original members of NATS don’t know it yet, we’re having a reunion concert on Friday, May 6th, 2005. While we’re at it, we’re going to be sharing the stage with other luminaries of the Thunder Bay underground (church-basement) music-scene of the 1990s, The Transparancies, Mike and the Morons, Obadiah and Brian Dunn – direct from England!

Okay, time, distance and especially money will probably prevent most of this from happening, but boy, it’d be great, wouldn’t it?

My sister Erin and family will be passing through town in early May on their way to Russia. We’re going to try and have a coffee house / concert while they’re around, maybe raise a few dollars to help them out. Maybe it’ll be “just” Richard Pepper and me. But maybe something else could work out – we’ll see!

Happy Birthday Peter, 4 years old!

Peter is really into Mario, which I think is cool, because he’s a retro video game character who has stood the test of time. Because people really like short, fat, athletic Italian carpenters turned plumbers. It gives us all hope.

Peter and his sisters have played Donkey Kong (the original appearance of Mario, in 1981), Donkey Kong Jr. (Mario returns as the bad guy!), Mario Bros. (Mario becomes a plumber, and his brother Luigi joins him), Super Mario Bros. (spawned the excellent C64/Amiga game Great Giana Sisters), Super Mario Bros 2 (Mario can pick up and throw things, and some extra characters join him), Super Mario Bros 3 (Mario can fly and has a tail in this game, sometimes, strangely), Super Mario World (Mario is finally 16-bit), Super Mario 64 (Mario goes 3D!), Super Mario Sunshine (Mario squirts water in 3D!) and finally Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (Mario and friends pair off against each other in kart combat and racing).

Carla did a great job on the cake. Sometime I gotta find and scan the picture of the Commodore cake she made for me 5 years ago or so.

Peter has been unwittingly recreating scenes from the movie Death Race 2000. Unwittingly, because he’s never seen the movie, of course. His killer car of choice is a souped-up pink doll stroller. He straps in his baby doll Caesar (“I call him Caesar because I didn’t have a boy doll named Caesar before”) and the games begin. “I chase after Heidi and Ben. Because I like doing that.”

Peter has also been helping me test the PAL DTV (the DTV has been the cause of my lack of blogging) – this morning he’s been playing a lot of Impossible Mission. He’s been taking great delight in repeatedly making “his man” fall down the holes in the levels. It’s accompanied by a long drawn out scream, as apparently the fella falls many stories to his doom. Peter is then somewhat perplexed how “his man” suddenly reappears on screen, as if nothing has happened. Then he decides “The man gets hurt when he falls down the hole. But then he climbs back up.”

Shroom: Not stale, not yet!

Okay, this is the last entry at this old location, http://my.tbaytel.net/macbeth/blogger.html – please update your links etc. to http://www.psw.ca/blogger.php – I already have on my main page.

I paid extra when I moved to godaddy.com hosting so I could continue to have cgi support which my comments system requires. It turns out that Godaddy has really lousy cgi support – it’s extremely restrictive, and after too much fiddling, I’ve given up trying to get my old blog system working.

I’ve still got all the old comments in a file, but the new php-based system I’m using has a different file format, and it means the old comments have to be changed over. I treasure your comments, every one of them, but it might just be too much trouble to convert them all. If I had time, I’d probably try to learn perl well enough to do it somewhat automatically. Anyone want to volunteer? 🙂

This new system is called “Poster Child”, and it seems I couldn’t get it running at tbaytel due to it’s php-ness. So if you’re reading this on tbaytel, please go over to psw.ca so you can leave a comment, and let me know it’s working for you. That’s where all the action will be from now on!

I’m switching hosts for psw.ca which is where my blog’s commenting system lives, so the comments may act strange for a while. But once everything’s settled, it should work much better, and get rid of that stalling problem that happens sometimes with my current you-get-what-you-pay-for-and-can’t-complain host.

Both my real job and my top-secret-cool-job have been pretty busy lately, leaving little time and/or energy for the kind of blogging I like to do. But Carla’s been picking up my blogging slack – she’s the Disenfranchised Housewife linked to the right. I think I’ve been linked to the Right too.

Finally, it was uber-cool listening to my good friend Richard Pepper’s “Free Stanley” song being played on As It Happens, a nationally broadcast radio show here in Canada. Rianna did a very interesting interpretive dance while the song played, and then the Harbrons cheered right along with the hosts of the show. “Well done, Mr. Pepper!”

I spend a lot of time thinking about being creative. I think about articles and blog entries I want to write, I think about video games I want to program, I think about books I want to write, songs I want to write and record, even an idea I have for a movie (a fictional documentary) I want to make. A lot of these ideas are pretty concrete too – I can read or play or read or listen or watch (respectively) these things in my mind, at least partially.

Unfortunately, this happens almost exclusively when I’m too busy to actually do any of it. And then, when I have time, that creative spark leaves, pulling all the motivation away. I guess I’m a part-time escapist.

I’m glad I actually have completed some projects, so I’m not only a dreamer – I’ve had many of my articles published in newsletters and pseudo-magazines (even been paid for several of them), I’ve recorded some of my songs and put together a couple homegrown CDs, I’ve freely released several computer programs (and even been paid for a few others). And sometimes I blog. This isn’t meant to be a brag list, I’m just trying to reassure myself that I’m somewhat credible, because for every project that I complete, there’s several that I didn’t. And for every project that I didn’t complete, there’s another dozen “great ideas” that I never even started on.

And I still want to see many of these ideas come to life. There’s a few that I think of daily – I’d almost say that I’m haunted by them, but the thoughts aren’t unpleasant enough to describe them that way. But it’s such a long path from conception to final creation with these bigger ideas – so I’ll just keep on blogging along until inspiration and free time intersect.