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It's Wednesday night and I'm done work for the day. I'm listening to my hometown radio station 630 CHED. I like talk radio and my radio station broadcasts my Edmonton Oilers hockey games and Edmonton Eskimo CFL football games. I just realized that I haven't provided my website address. It's called Michael's Domain.

Anyway Enterprise's The Expanse season finale was last week and I wasn't too impressed with the episode. The episode's teaser was interesting though as the alien satellite cut a swatch through southern Florida. Yikes! In 150 years my apartment will be obliterated! But it didn't have the impact like the devastation that the Borg left behind on other planets. I can't help but compare the show to other incarnations. In fact I was reading Star Trek Chronology: The History of the Future. I noticed that Gene Roddenberry wanted Spock to be the only Vulcan serving in Starfleet. I think he also meant for Spock to be the first Vulcan in Starfleet. So I will be furious if T'Pol resigns from the Vulcan High Command and somehow gets a Starfleet Comission!

I'm managing to work out twice a week and today would be my regular night for it. But since I'm not feeling well I'll take the night off. Last night we had a tremendous amount of rain (about a foot) that caused the airport to briefly close. Several streets flooded too. I've started scanning photos from my trips and one day hope to have my travel journals transcribed with accompanying photos. Hopefully my next blog will have the first installment of my 2000 Middle East trip. I've been contemplating buying a Dell laptop - one day I'm sure I will. With the amount of money that I've spent repairing my car I could have bought five laptops!

Darcy discovered the Friday Fiveness website. It looks fun so I'll play too. May 23 questions and my answers are:

1. Brand of toothpaste I use is whatever major brand is on sale but usually

crest, colgate or Aim.

2. Brand of toilet paper I prefer is whatever brand is available at the dollar

store - I don't prefer a brand.

3. Brand of shoe(s) I wear are Rockport (daily) and sometimes Dr. Marten's. I

actually have two pairs of Docs.

4. Brand of soda (pop for people from Western Canada) I drink is A&W

rootbeer and Coke.

5. Brand of gum I chew is Wrigley's Extra Polar Ice.

Well that's all for now - until next time...

posted by Michael at 7:08 PM

 

Saturday was busy as my co-worker was sick so I told her to go home. But that meant that I was by myself for five hours! I'm back at work Today early as I'd thought I'd have some time to play on the web. But as usual I've got tons of work emails to sift through, and my mailbox was full of stuff. I'll try and ignore that and focus on my blogging! Darcy gave me The Dilbert Principle to read. Very appropriate material. I had yesterday off so I did my full workout and may have set a record for the total amount of weight lifted (62,000 pounds). This sounds like an enormous number but bear in mind that it doesn't take a lot of lifting to make up a few thousand pounds. However, I did set a personal record yesterday of doing 141 chin ups at the park. It took me an hour with breaks but I surprised myself. I do at least 100 reps once a week. Ideally I'd like to purchase a chin up bar for home. But the Sports Authority store doesn't carry bars that don't require screws. There is one model that I saw on the Web though. I don't work out as much as I did five years ago. Only lift weights twice a week (Wednesday and the weekend) and I don't do much aerobic exercise. Anyway after working out I watched Buster Keaton's The General. A brilliant silent motion picture! I think that Keaton is under rated as most people are more familiar with Charlie Chaplin in the silent movie era. On Saturday we watched The Odd Couple. Going to amazon.com I just realized that they made a sequel in 1998! We'll have to rent it.

Darcy attended the BCLA annual lunch last week and sadly, or happily, neither of us were elected. She was going for Vice-President and I was going for Historian. Our Toronto/ALA trip is in one short month and our Spokane trip is in two months. So this will break up the monotony a bit. We've taken no vacation time since Christmas. I'm planning on putting my 2000 travel journal online shortly. I finally transcribed it into a word file and is quite lengthy (thirty pages at 10 point font). But considering my trip lasted nine weeks I really didn't write down much. I think that I'll post my journal in segments to cut down on the length. So it could be like a 19th century serial. Tomorrow Darcy and I are going out with a friend/co-worker (Anne) and her husband. Anne is a fellow Canadian and she is moving to Cape Breton Island. She was a good friend to both of us and she will be missed. On the weekend Darcy bought two more DVDs so her collection has quickly grown to three. But they are classic movies so we'll enjoy watching them (Lawrence of Arabia and one with Robert DeNiro and Jeremy Irons??). One day I'll buy the Clint Eastwood man with no name trilogy. The Matrix Reloaded opened this weekend to good reviews but ostensibly not having the visual impact of the first. I wonder why Terminator 3 is not getting much press. Maybe that's good as too much movie hype can bring down a film once it's released.

Well, time to go I guess. Be seeing you...

posted by Michael at 11:48 AM

 

This is my first every blog posting. My girlfriend, Darcy has been blogging for a few months so I finally decided to try it out. I am at work right now but not working at my job (I'm a librarian). I usually come in early for my shift or stay after work to surf as I don't own a computer. I'm html coding by hand, it's been a while, so hopefully there won't be too many mistakes in my entries. I've used Dreamweaver at work a few times and it's a powerful tool! But I'm glad that I learned to code by hand first. Anyway I've started blogging to write down aimless things and perhaps uninteresting things to people. But since many won't be reading this then it should not matter. I just finished reading a great book called The Star Trek Deep Space Nine Companion. At 800 pages it is extremely detailed and is a must for any Star Trek fan. In many ways that series had better fleshed out characters than The Next Generation. In my view Gul Dukat was the best Star Trek single villan since Khan. The Borg were a collective and I don't consider Q to be an antagonist. Staying on the topic of Star Trek for a minute, Enterprise is winding down its second season. Except for a few quality episodes such as Congenitor and an interesting story about one of the crew's backgrounds in The Breach the season has been rather forgettable. I just don't see the interest in re-introducing aliens that we've seen years ago (Andorians and Borg come to mind). Enterprise is simply re-hashing morality tales that have been done in the previous Star Trek incarnations. Enterprise messed up the Star Trek timeline, in my opinion with the episode Regeneration. I was so infuriated with that show that I broke down and wrote a comment to the Enterprise episode message board. I ended up reading some other threads and can see how the Enterprise writers could have maybe been partially successful in bending the timeline to fit this story. But I suppose I am a purist and that Enterprise's problems is that there is a growing trend of seeing how the crew deals with situations that will occur in the future and thus should not happen. The episode Bounty did a poor job of explaining T'Pol's microbe induced Pon Farr. First of all the blood fever does not affect Vulcan females! Secondly the plot was an obvious chance for T'Pol to scamper around in a sex crazed state. The few scenes with Phlox were amusing but Leonard Nimoy would have been shaking his head in disbelief if he had watched this episode. I'll now get off my soapbox. Almost time to go to the reference desk and begin my long shift. Be seeing you...
posted by Michael at 10:54 AM