Hello and welcome! Tonight’s top stories:

Fancy Dress: what not to wear on the treadmill
When to Stop: Owchie!
New Species of Gym Bunny
and
Ohm Pah Pah! Or, Make Mine Mild!

• Sharkboy and I enter the cardio room to find a man wearing semi-dressy chinos and a Hawaiian shirt running on a treadmill like he was being chased by a demon or a cop or a demon cop with bees in it’s mouth. I speculated to Sharkboy that this person found his way into the gym without having his ID checked. Sharkboy speculated that he was an idiot. Thankfully he was wearing sneakers, so the shock on his legs would not have been that bad.

• Speaking of shock, a few moments later a woman painfully lifted herself up onto a neighbouring treadmill and started it up into a quick-shuffle, something above “hungry zombie spying a headcheese loaf”. She was wearing black knee-to-upper-thigh tensor bandages, cyborg knee supports and a marathon t-shirt. Time to quit, I thought. Bah. She migh be going through physio, but the marathon tee didn’t support the argument that running is good for you, long term.

• Enter The Hummingbird. This incredibly small creature (5’7″ I estimate) floats, nay hovers between the machine he’s working on and the water fountain without any evidence of his hips, torso or head deviating from a 1cm sine wave. His speed is incredible for the amount of unsauntering walk he exerts!

• I guess it was Octoberfest in the showers because I interrupted a sausage comparing contest. Two bratwurst-proud contestants were showing their heafty meat entries to each other. Both their parents obviously didn’t skimp on the stuffing! I must be “November” because when I walked in, the party was over.

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is this month’s installment of The Gym Report. Stay tuned for More of the Same! with Regis Philbin and Kelly Rippah

http://deadrobot.blogspot.com/

South African malfunctioning robots run rampant! Angry mobs with pitchforks standing in protest! Traffic backed up! New police recruits vow to kill marauding robots!

I think it’s just bad translation but the headline made me click it:

Residents picket over dysfunctional robots!

I was born in Toronto but was whisked away at the tender still-soft-in-the-top-of-my-head age of 3 months to live in Brockville. Brockvegas was created as a stopping point for tired truckers between Toronto and Montreal, a way station, if you will. And that’s where I lived until I was 17.

I now reside back in Toronto after living in Brantford (finished High School with my then-divorced and out Dad), Oakville (took Classical Animation at Sheridan College), Kitchener (worked as a Night Auditor so I could get to…), London (England – travelled and you know, expeirienced life man!) and Ottawa (where I managed Hostelling International’s flagship hostel while battled ghosts).

Out of them all, I would move back to London in a second.

Somewhere in there I came out of the closet. My sexuality is a part of me but isn’t all consuming, and I don’t agree with most of what the gay community stands for, dispite my oldest brother being an activist in the 70s. Which makes some people think I am “self hating” or “conservative gay”. Whatever. I am such an atypical Canadian fence sitter when it comes to politics (government and sexual) that my face should be on a coin. Probably a plug nickel.

Rise up my mechanical comrades! Fight the fleshy oppressors that tighten your nuts!!!

Or at least, remodel their kitchens!

Lets see… w. w. w. dot monster dot c. a.

Click on Salary Profiler. *click*

Enter some data. Typetty type type. *click*

Well welly well!

For the last week I have been enjoying using Picasa and it’s instant blogging feature. I’ve been testing it over at deadrobot.blogspot.com (Blogspot is a banned URL here, more on that later) as an alternative to using Flickr and cutting down on disk space on my server. On install, Picasa 2 scanned my entire hard drive and showed me long lost images I had forgotten. It was like an angel came to me bearing long lost memories. Birthday parties, Xmas images, Sharkboy in a leather outfit… I even used Gmail to pass it on.

Then suddenly a friend suggested my angel wasnt what it seemed. He reminded me that nothing is for free on the web any more. “But there are ads when you email images or set up a blogger account or you get charged a slightly higher fee if you hit ‘Print this!’ in the lower panel,” I offered. Ever skeptical he sent me this:

Several components of Picasa attempted to connect to the intenet and were reported by ZoneAlarm. I let them have access (trusting Google – don’t they have a slogan about making money ethically?). Within hours I had 16 incoming hits on my webserver from 66.249.65.196 and 66.249.66.109 from a bot identified as “Mediapartners-Google/2.1”.

— from google.weblogsinc.com

My friend says that plenty of programs send data back to their company’s servers (Winzip, for example, or the still suspect RealPlayer) so that comes as no surprise. It’s what the program is sending back that is curious.

Dispite the fact that the Weblogsinc site was speaking of Picasa Version 1 back in April of last year, and none of the adware or spyware mentioned in the comments has reared it’s ugly head through the three programs I filter stuff through, I removed it all the same. Creeped me out. A search on my drive came up with a PF file (prefetch it says) downloaded twice in one day. Updates? Maybe. Twice in one day? Odd.

Still I’m going to monitor weblogsinc for a couple more days regarding Picasa 2 and see where that leads.

Meanwhile, Google is becoming persona non grata on other blogs due to it’s inaction towards stopping “splam” or “blog spam”. As you know, I’ve blocked Blogspot from my referrers list due to a huge attack a couple months back. Seems I wasnt alone. Google is skating dangerously close to becoming Geocities for this decade, very fast.

I just got called into my boss’ office.

Uh oh.

“Pony up! We gave you those tickets, now tell me: why do we need a blog?” he starts out.

Three weeks ago I suggested that our company travel site use a blog instead of bulky PDF files to present our travel mag online. For my idea I got 2 tickets to see Serenity*. I had forgotten about my comment and now here I was in this 60+something’s office, the owner of a travel wholesaler, having to convince him why he needed a blog. No prep time.

“Well for one, it’s hot. Hot like fire…” He’s unimpressed, not laughing. I read in last month’s Wired Mag that there is a disorder where the inflicted suffers from an uncontrolable urge to lecture on how techincal things work (Asperger Syndrome, actually). At that moment, I wish that disorder was in my genes. I rant on: “Basically its a way to feed information about your product to your customers and let them comment back on your product. It builds a stronger relationship with your client. It can bite you in the ass, but if your product is stable, then you have nothing to worry about.”

He liked that.

So now, I get to blog from work. Well… I’m not actually blogging but I do get to set up the blog, run it for a couple weeks and then release it to the managers.

* Serenity was good. I bet 30 years from now when they release Serenity 15: Revenge of the Boogaloo, this current generation will feel just as good when they come across some future movie that has the same satisfying feeling I got from Serenity, when it eradicated all bad feelings I had from the last three Star Wars crap.

Wicked! I’ve been nominated for “Best Personal Blog” over on myBlagh.com! I would like to thank the Academy…

Round one of voting starts on November 24th to November 30th. Make sure you’re there to cast your votes!

Check it out!

Easy! Wear a wig that makes you 7ft tall, a half-faced cat mask including pointy kitty ears, a furry jumpsuit, furry gloves and army boots. Plus carry a Mickey Mouse bag for accent.

Its amazing how people will avoid looking at you when you aren’t dressed the norm. One out of ten would avert their gaze in seconds of acknowledging that you’re wearing something… different. The usual pattern of “I’m not looking, really!” went like this:

1. Look to the face
2. Look at the clothes
3. Look back to the face
4. Look at own shoes, sky, shop window, shoes again, stare straight ahead.

All of this takes exactly 2 seconds. At Yonge and Bloor a poor woman raced the doors and wound up sitting right next to me. She collected herself, went through the above mentioned list of where to look and then gave up and moved. Poor dear. Booo! Boooo! I’m the ghost of your long dead youth, you overly mature office worker drone.

Poor Sharkboy is the only one dressed up in his office. He’s dressed up as a hobo-dog, bless him.

Expect pictures later after this evening. Church St is closing off traffic and its always a good time.