The first issue of Aeon Flux is out and it’s 9.5 out of 10 in my opinion. The artwork has nods to Peter Chung’s original character/layout design and the writing manages to pull quotes from the original cartoons while tying in the movie look and feel nicely. MTV has some panels for your parusal, but you have to sit through some ads (pop up link, near the bottom).

I have a feeling that the movie will not be as true-to-the-comic (cartoon?) as Sin City but time will tell.

I’m so excited that I nearly dropped the comic book in the toilet of my office loo.

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.

Our plane hit the tarmac in Miami just after 3pm and we came out of the airport to somewhat heavy heat. Our taxi ride to the hotel was stop and go over into South Beach but we did pass by the cruise ship terminal where I got to see a Carnival ship (boo hiss!).

The Best Western on Washington St should be avoided at all cost. It may boast Art Deco and competitive rates but it certainly doesn’t offer anything else beyond that. The pool is 5 feet away from a street as busy as Bay St! The room smelled weird and the front desk guy (who seemed to live behind the desk the entire 24 hours we spent there) would not cash USD$ travellers cheques. But you know what? We didn’t spend that much time in the room other than to sleep (we were so tired there could have been a knife fight outside the door and we would have missed it) and to shower. So it was fine but no great shakes. After dumping our luggage we took off to wander the streets of Miami’s South Beach.

Amazing architecture! The colours and shapes were amazing to see and I was glad that we took the extra day to see it all. The damage to Miami didn’t seem too bad but there were a few blown out windows and missing sign letters.

The main strip was fun to walk down and watch the rich tourists wander in and out of posh, pastel neon lit lobby bars. In this particular hotel, I felt like I was walking right back into a ’50s hotel. We were later chased out of the hotel by security thugs. Sheesh!

Colourful characters lined the boardwalk. It was a real party town. We ate like kings at Outback Jack’s and had a long walk in the near full moon light along the beach. I was really looking forward to getting on the ship!

Tune in tomorrow for more!

Gallery pics.

This morning I had my boss under my desk on his hands and knees.

The Great Canadian Dream?

No.

He brought his dog into the office on the weekend and the poor pooch puked all over the underside of my desk for some reason. When I told the boss, he was quickly down there cleaning.

I’m impressed! He’s the owner of a large(ish) company and he takes responsibility for his dog’s barf.

In between my legs.

Go to Apple.com/trailers and just *try* to find this picture of Mel snuck into his new trailer for Apocalypto

Jon Erik Hexum. The first tv “hunk” I ever had a crush on. He and Lee Majors (I know, I know: how Marge Simpson of me) both had the hairiest chests on tv back then, at the start of the 80s. And Gil Gerrard too. Know him? No google searches…I will tell you in a moment.

There was a big boom of hairy chested beefcake on tv at the turn of the Me Generation: Regan was just a small virus spreading in California, Battlestar Galactica was so close to finding Earth, V was tv’s most lackluster metaphor for the Nazi rise to power (I thought Steven Speilbergs career at the time, was a better allegory), Magnum PI was using Higgins’ Ferrari, Dallas was on everyone’s yammering lips, and Buck Rogers (There…Gil’s tv show. Did you guess right?) was shooting up the Draconian space navy with Dale Arden. Bidda bidda bidda, Buck! Im rambling. Every male lead had a hairy chest for some reason. When did everyone become hairless? Was it with the death of disco? No more open shirts? Do we blame the Italians? Iranians? Turks? I can fathom the exact point in pop culture where we went from beautiful naturally hairy chests to these shaved house apes. I blame Calvin Klien.

Bad day on the moon… Work sucks. Every time it seems like the bar is getting popular or is rocking and everyone is happy, someone or something comes along and tears that happygolucky feeling down. Today’s little roadbump of dissapointment was the insurance company dropping our policy due to an accident a couple months back. I feel somewhat involved because the accident was on my watch and the insurance company used the website I maintain for the bar as an excuse to cancel the policy. Now, I know it’s not my fault. There were similar “crisco arm wrestling” contests all last year before I showed up to do promo for the bar, so it was just a matter of time before something like a broken arm was going to happen on stage. Sheesh. And the website didn’t have anything explicit on it other than a few S/M demos with a slave tied up. Oh and the odd cock with marbles stuff into it, but other than that…nothing extremely dangerous like other bars that do stuff like mud wrestling or arm wrestling. I just feel like my work has been twisted around to nail the bar. So I do feel a bit responsible. You know? There are other rumours about why this is all happening (typical Gay Village chatter that accompanies bad news…just making it blow up to EXTREMELY bad news) and some of the staff are crying “discrimination against the leather community!” before all this can be sorted out by lawyers. Crap…this whole thing is pretty hard to explain as I only know what I was told to do…take down the bar’s website. my baby! My reason for getting up in the morning! My extra skim milk in my earl grey tea…my zuggarat!

If I look at this positively, I can say I now have a month to redesign the site. Sheesh.

Random Flickr image:

Worksafe!

From the overly cautious minds of Toronto City Hall comes:

23 Division – Gun Play No Way
Event Date: Saturday, 25. June 2005

Description: The objective of this campaign is to encourage non-violent youth play in the community. Any child can bring in their toy guns in exchange for a variety of non-violent toys.
All Toronto Police Divisions will be participating in this event.
No. 23 Division will be holding their event at the Albion Centre, located at 1530 Albion Road.

I can understand where the city of Toronto is coming from with this campaign, but the TV commercial opens up with a child handing over his rather large Super Soaker, implying that water gun play leads to popping a cap into a punk’s ass outside some North York night club. That bulbous brightly coloured “gun” is now bad, ok? Hand it over, playa, and get your free pizza and pop.

Now, I would never give a child under 10 a “realistic” gun as a toy. Even after that age, I’d give them a stern serious talking to regarding the responsibility of gun use. But a frigging water gun? Toronto Police are sapping the life out of “fun”. Are we raising our children to be listless, over-coddled, flower arranging wusses? “What’s the matter, boobila? You hot? Here’s a styrofoam cup, half full of water so you can’t drown yourself. Go splash your friend. But dont use it as a weapon, ok? And make sure it’s filtered water! AND DON’T AIM FOR HIS EYES!!” To quote Foghorn Leghorn: “That kid ain’t right.”

Here’s where I mention that responsible parents teach their kids to respect guns and life, and who knows, that might even lead kids into a life of crime prevention.

Really, I wonder what overly leftist granola chomping earth child thought this one up and sold it to the cops.

Two of my coworkers have confirmed the exsistance of a brand spaking new Toronto Icon:

I give you Zanta!

Unfortunately no pictures of Zanta are available…yet! You will know Zanta by his big, muscular shirtless frame, pec tattoo and jaunty Santa cap (“Look Mommy! Santa!” “NO! Not Santa! I’m Zanta with a ZEE!”). Zanta likes to produce flowing rants of personal freedoms and will demand that you watch Speakers Corner for his 60 seconds of informative fame.

One co-worker tells me of Zanta’s run in with the man during one of the performances that took place during the Eglinton street festival this weekend. Zanta was “Hulk-Hoganning” during a busker’s show which angered many a good folk, causing the police to show up brandishing batons of pain. Zanta was hustled away to a safe area and the show continued uninterrupted, thankfully!

The other co-worker speaks of his usual stomping ground at Queen and John, where he usually informs beautiful women that they are “princesses” and they should be aware of his free speech.

We WELCOME ZANTA to Toronto!’

UPDATE: Well don’t I feel out of the loop. Even CityTV’s forums have whispers of Zanta. That’s the last time I ramble off without Googling it. And my one co-worker was wrong, no chest tatt.