Apparently this site is now indexed by Google. Anyway, the end result is that people are coming here as the result of their searches for various things that I’ve talked about in the past. Several people have come here looking for Toshiba 1800 4K1, which if you’ll recall is the laptop model number. For those of you looking for my review - basically I love it. Having used it for a couple of months now, we’re extremely happy with it.

Other searches? Touchable bubbles actually made an appearance on the search terms list. That reminds me that I should get some of those to play with.

By far the most interesting (to me anyway) is the searches for Dori Doreau though. After seeing where I place on google under some of those searches, I was struck with how deep people are willing to search to find a link - sometimes my page didn’t show up until the 9th or 10th page of results… Anyway, the Doreau searches got me thinking about Sledge Hammer stuff on the web, so I did a little searching on my own. Apparently some episodes were released on VHS, which surprised me. Also, there were only 41 episodes made, so I’ve got over half of them on tape already - 5 tapes with 5 episodes each, plus another 5 episodes waiting to be archived… Kinda scary.

The most interesting thing that I found though, came courtesy IMDB, where I learned that Al Jean, and Mike Reiss both wrote for Sledge Hammer, before joining the Simpson’s as writers and Executive Producers. Not only that, but the theme songs for both shows were done by Danny Elfman. It’s interesting to see the things that some people wind up working on during their career in Hollywood. Danny Elfman’s list of credits is pretty impressive - including such classic themes as “Weird Science” and such crappy movies as “Hot to Trot“

Ah, IMDB, where would I be without you?

Never mind that though, if you do a search on Ebay for sledge hammer, you’ll find actual sledge hammers mixed in with Sledge Hammer comic books, and a Sledge Hammer that was actually used in the actual filming of an actual movie - The Mummy Returns - there I go with the IMDB links again.

Ok, enough about all the movie linkage and stuff. Here’s hoping more people will be searching for my next Simpson’s quote (quotes seem to be searched for quite often too)

“HI. I’m Troy McClure. You may remember me from such self help tapes as ‘Smoke yourself thin’ and ‘Get some confidence, Stupid!’”

Apparently the Great West Warehouse is currently on fire. For those of you who have never been there, I’ll give you a brief description. GWW is a used furniture store in one of the less nice parts of downtown Saskatoon. Every time I’ve been there, there’s been more stuff than the time before, which is no mean feat, because they have so much stuff packed in there that it’s hard to turn around once you’re in the store. What they do is buy stuff from estate sales, or when a hotel does remodeling, they’ll buy the whole shooting match of furniture thats being replaced.

Anyway, the place was packed so tight, that it was an arsonists dream. The building is three or four blocks from here, and it’s pretty visible from the offices on this side of the building. The smoke was just billowing out like crazy, then at some point the roof must have collapsed or something, and you could see flames that must have been at least 10-15 feet above the top of the building. No mean feat when it’s -30 out with the wind whipping. Much better view than the fire that was 20+ blocks away last year. I suspect that they won’t be able to salvage much from the store, and they’ll have a hard time putting the fire out completely at that.

Simpsons quote of the day:
Mr. Burns: “If the house catches fire, call this number.”
Marge: “Uh-huh. The fire department.”
Mr. Burns: “Yes. They’re new. But they’re good.”

I just read that Heroes of Might and Magic IV is apparently scheduled for a March 20th release. Gamespot has a pre-release section up for it, with some screens and movies and stuff like that here.

So, I’m back at work and everything, I wasn’t buried under an avalanche of emails, though I did have quite a few to go through. Thanks to all the well wishers who wished us well, both on our departure and our return.

I’ll respond to the Tulum comment from the last post here - I don’t think we actually drove through Tulum itself, though we did do a bit of a walk in Cozumel. It really looks like the tourism industry is well appreciated in Cozumel, they’re putting up a gorgeous strip mall at the port, and everything looked like they were cleaning and sanitizing to make culture shock a thing of the past. We did walk down a shopping district street in Playa Del Carmen, which seemed nice, but we were pretty rushed, and didn’t really have much time to explore. Would I return there for a visit? You bet. I think the two places that we visited that we’d like to go back to are the Cozumel/Playa Del Carmen/Tulum area (I’d like to make a trip to Chichen Itza after seeing Tulum) and Cartagena. Grand Cayman was really nice too, but a) I think we’ve seen everything short of snorkeling/scuba diving and b) it was very expensive relative to Mexico/Columbia. In retrospect I’d have probably enjoyed going on a snorkeling/scuba tour in Grand Cayman, but that would require getting certified and stuff - maybe some day.

I just heard today that Dave Thomas from Wendy’s fame passed away on the 8th of January. Sad in some way, he’s been in so many commercials, it will seem strange to see a Wendys commercial without him in it.

Simpson’s quote of the day:
Newspaper editor: “We’re looking for a new food critic, someone who doesn’t immediately pooh-pooh everything he eats.”
Homer: “Nah, it usually takes a few hours.”

Well, we had a lot of time to kill at the Fort Lauderdale airport. It amazes me the lengths the security forces have gone to in the US in reaction to the Sept 11th events. To me, it looked for all the world like all the power hungry cops and security guards in the world are finally getting their wish. In a slightly misplaced overreaction, there was an armed checkpoint going into and coming out of the dock area. Then, another armed checkpoint to get through security at the airport. Not surprising, but they are really sloppy in some areas, while being overly strict in other areas. Even though they made Erin take off her shoes, and patted me down, and even did a spot bomb check on our camera bag, they didn’t even ask me to turn on the laptop. Seems a little silly to me. Having gone through security a bunch of times in the past while, I’m pretty sure if I’d wanted to smuggle a shiv on board, I could have done it. Not exactly the point of the heightened security. It seemed to me that the “extra” security was only there to make people feel better about being more secure.

I’d have no problem with the extra security if I thought it would actually work as advertised, but I have absolutely no confidence that this is the case. I mean really, a guy puts a bomb in his shoe, so now they scan shoes more carefully. That doesn’t really help, when security is primarily reactive, the advantage goes to the people trying to break the security. Don’t get me wrong, you have to react to flaws in the security system, but it seems to me that they’re not looking at their security pro actively as well.

Anyway, enough of my rant about the land of the formerly free. We got in to Toronto about 20 minutes late last night, so we really had to hustle to get our baggage, move it through customs and catch our flight to Saskatoon. We rolled in to the gate an hour and a half before our connecting flight was scheduled to leave Toronto, then had to wait 20 minutes for our luggage, clear customs, and put our baggage on a connecting flights conveyor belt. When we got to the conveyor belt, there was a guy there yelling and screaming at the attendants who were working there because they wouldn’t let him check his bags onto his connecting flight, because they wouldn’t have time to load them. I can understand being upset, but yelling and screaming until they have to call security doesn’t do you any good. As we were walking away, we heard the guys wife scream out (literally scream) “Well that’s because she’s a F****** B****” about the attendant. I assume they were still screaming when airport security showed up. I also suspect that the airline didn’t do as much as they normally would to rectify the situation later :) What’s the saying? You catch more flights with honey than with vinegar?

Ok, that was terrible.

Anyway, after that, we had a bit of a trek to the other end of the terminal to go through security again, to find our gate to get there in time to board. We were starving by this point, because it was 6:30 and all we’d had to eat since a small lunch was a bag of chips on the flight from Florida to Toronto. I figured that we had time to get some Harvey’s before the flight took off, but only barely. I waited in line at Harveys for 20 minutes. I would likely have just left, but I paid for my burgers about 5 minutes after I’d gotten there. The people behind the counters were moving in slow motion. I got the burgers and fries and rushed over to our gate just in time to board (or so I thought) but then found out that the plane had been delayed 10 minutes. We wolfed down our burgers, got on the plane, and arrived home last night at around 11:30. Glad to be home, glad to see the snow, glad to see the cold. Glad most of all to be out of the police state that is Florida. Sign me up for Saskatoon any time.

Today we’ve been unpacking, getting things back to normal before work on Monday. I really slept well last night, though our humidifier wasn’t working, so it was quite dry in here. Just needed adjusting really.

No pictures up yet, but I will try to post some soon. Anyway, if you want to read the trip dialog from the beginning, go to Here

We went to Jerry’s Food Emporium for lunch today. They’ve got two for one burgers there until sometime in February because of the A&W lawsuit (A&W took exception with Jerry’s advertising a bacon Mozza burger, apparently they think they ahve the rights to the word mozza or something now) Anyway, we got our burgers and ate them in less time than it took to get the burgers at Harveys yesterday. Considering one is fast food, and one is not, it’s quite funny. The burgers at Jerry’s were way better too.

We managed to get everything packed. It was a little bit in doubt, because we did buy a lot of stuff on the trip. Fortunately we packed relatively loosely for the way here (on purpose) so there was enough room for the souvenirs. The suitcases are very very heavy though.