I read a blog suggesting that as many as 80% of Canadians were watching the game live – which makes me wonder if the other 20% of people were wandering around outside wondering where everyone was. It must have been a ghost town out there. I wouldn’t know – we had to be near the TV so the players could hear us.

What’s even more improbable though, is that the erector set centerfugist who made the video is none other than the mysterious Neil Fraser, who’s path I’ve been near-missing regularly since the early 90s like some kind of ghost comet. I’m not sure he’d even recognise my name, but we met once (working on the Schoolnet MOO) about 15 years ago, and since then we’ve been running in apparently the same social and technical circles without ever colliding again. I’ve been stumbling on his prolific digital breadcrumbs all over Slashdot, Makezine and Youtube – the guy has been busy in the past decade or so.

If you’re reading this, Neil – when we finally do meet again, we should run and jump at eachother and see if our meeting undoes the universe.

It turns out that tightening our Lagostina frying pan handle required a Phillips Pozi Drive nib! (Although I suspect they were designed so a regular Phillips head nib would have fit the shape) And the bike bottle holder I got for my birthday had a hex socket that I could have used an Allen key for, but it was much more exciting to use my standard metric hex nib for the first time ever!

I’ve now tightened 6 types of screws. This is a major accomplishment. I wonder if the rest of these have some extremely obscure application – maybe submarines are built entirely out of Fluted Socket screws or something?

I’m glad to have all of these things up to date, but the updater processes seem oblivious to eachother, and to me, trying immediately after bootup to grab up as much of my puny laptop processor as they can, tripping all over eachother’s feet, and fragmenting the heck out of my hard drive.

300MB and two restarts later, I’m considering looking more seriously into a “Startup Delayer” app to force my updaters to wait their turn as the OS boots. Anyone had any experience with this?

Little breaks in my routine usually kick-start my creative juices, but today I’m looking at a long list of fairly technical tasks. Maybe I’ll be inspired to find an interesting new way to migrate database tables?

It turns out that a .pages file is really a RAR archive (like a zip folder) and you can open it up using WinRAR (or a similar RAR de-archiving program) and take a look around inside.

There are two useful files in the archive. In the Quicklook folder, there’s a formatted PDF of the document you can use to make a printout, or you can cut & paste all the text into word or whatever you’re using to edit.

In the root folder, there’s an XML file with the text contents of the document. The formatting in this XML file is pretty weird, but if you’re really desperate, all of the text is in here. Look down near the bottom of the document, for the <sf:pagestart> tag.

I’m not sure that the Quicklook PDF includes multiple pages, since the mysterious file I was working with was only one page. If it turns out there’s no way to fish out the information you’re looking for, consider asking the .pages creator to re-export the document to word format, following the steps in this video:

http://www.apple.com/iwork/tutorials/#pages-msoffice

Here’s Scott Dadich providing a scarily monotone description of what they put together. (All he’s missing is the earbud, and he could be chasing Neo through the Matrix.)

Despite Mr. Dadich’s compelling argument that they’re investing all of this effort because their “readers have a relationship with brands”, the ads are the LAST thing I want to pay to have enhanced. I’d pay more for a version that had no ads at all! Spare yourself the enormous cost of developing QTVR spinarounds and short films of cars I don’t want and just send me your content (which I can already get for free, off your website, with my adblocker turned on).

I’m not worried at all that this is going to catch on – there’s no business case here. A limited number of compatible readers, the enormous development cost, and an industry that’s already barely making ends meet will combine to ensure that this demo won’t see the light of day as a real publishing tool.

The doomsday scholars have it all wrong – the real event foretold in the the Mayan calendar is the end of me wearing braces – scheduled for March 23rd 2010. As you can clearly tell from the markings on the stone – the supernatural rapture caused by having my braces off will inspire a feeding frenzy (on popcorn, gummy bears, and everything else I can’t eat) of such devouring incredibleness that the earth will split in two and a giant snake will gobble up Scandinavia. Or something.

So close to the end!

So the movie was okay – it sortof lived up to it’s end of the bargain – lots of explosions and absurd vehicles and weird bad guys, but in being a “grown up” G.I.Joe, it kindof lacked a few of the “oldschool” touches I think it needed. They kept a bunch of esoteric Joe details in (the base in Egypt) but left out a bunch of the major ones that any kid growing up in the 80’s knows.

For starters, everyone knows that G.I.Joe only flies one kind of jet, the ultra-American Navy variable-sweep-wing F14 Tomcat. (Hoo-rah!) All of G.I.Joe’s vehicles are green or white and their missiles are always orange. Their vehicles are bristling with hugely oversized guns, which fire an unlimited number of laserbeams that never hit anyone, but cause spectacular bad-guy helicopter crashes that starts an avalanche or a bridge collapse right in the nick of time.

Cobra commander -always- gets to the control panel of his doomsday weapon first and screams “You’re too late to stop me, G.I. JOE! Muah ha ha!” and activates the supercannon, but discovers that the resourceful second team of soldier misfits have deactivated the core while he was monologuing. As they descend on him he jumps into an escape rocket which launches him into high orbit and a self destruct mechanism destroys the evil base just moments after the Joes escape.

Give me a hundred million bucks and I’ll build a gigantic sandbox and show you how it’s done.