My Cobalt blue has been hiding in her burrow for the last couple weeks. Last night I got these pics through the lid of her cage. When I went to open her cage to get a better shot, she darted back into her burrow lightning quick. She's getting beautiful colours, too bad I never get to see her!

I fixed the top of the page. It looks relatively normal with IE6.

It wasn't easy.

Now I know why I couldn't reinstall IE5 or update it, Microsoft has discontinued updates for that version. Bastards. So I upgraded to 6.1 [?]. Checked out my page and it looks all messed up, especially the last 5 thing. My apologies to all the IE6 users who have been viewing my page, it did look just dandy in 5.5, I swear. Anyway, I'll try to fix it up so it doesn't cause any more epileptic seizures or anything.

Fixed the ddeml.dll error with this, I had to use the second approach. Yea for me, now I just have to get this update thing working.

Major problems with my computer last night. Whenever I selected a bunch of files to delete in Explorer, the damn thing would crash with a kernel32 error. The most common solution to this bug was to delete your password files and reboot. I tried that, didn't work so I kept digging. There were suggestions to rename your applog directory, re-install Windows, sacrifice small animals. I tried everything ['cept renaming that applog dir, too crazy for me!] and nothing worked. I finally reduced my video hardware acceleration [Display Properties-> Settings-> Advanced-> Performance] and that seemed to kill that bug.

But then I had it in my head to uninstall DirectX 9 and go back to version 8 because I've been having crappy performance since going to the newest version. Bad move. Microsoft seems to think that once you've upgraded you'll never want to go back, so they deliberately make life hell for you for even thinking such heretical thoughts. I downloaded a hack to uninstall version 9, I reinstalled version 8 and rebooted. Total meltdown.

Too make this sordid tale a little shorter, I stayed up till 3am screwing around with this sad excuse of an operating system, stomping out one bug only to have ten more pop up. Eventually I couldn't even boot into Windows so I had to run the install disc. Now I'm getting a problem with DDEML.DLL, its the old version, apparently, and Windows just can't stand that. I grabbed the file from the disc, no good. Tried the update thing with IExplorer, no dice, won't run. It's fucked.

Gonna back up all I can this weekend, wipe my hard drives and start from scratch. My site will probably be down for most of Friday. Damn you Bill Gates.

Had a weird dream last night where I was in a war or something and I had one of those big machine guns the marines tote around, not an M16 but the big one. [Mp5? The one with the grenade launcher underneath like in Scarface] Anyway, I killed a lotta enemies during this war but then it was over and everybody went back to normal life. Except for me. I kept packing this hemo machine gun around, looking around all crazy-like searching for phantom enemies. I was scaring the peeps.

Time to cut down on the CNN I think.

Cool, I got my 1000th visitor! Yea for me!

I'm going to try and watch the new mini-series/movies Children of Dune on the Canadian Space Channel. I'm a big fan of the books, the first time I read them out of sequence and then a few years ago I re-read them in their proper order. My favorite by far is God Emperor of Dune, which is strange because a lot of people hate that one. Whatever. The mini-series is a sequel to another series that was based on the first book [Dune] and aired two years ago. This one is based on the second and third books, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. The next one after that is God Emperor. I kinda hope they don't do God Emperor as I think it really deserves to be made for the big screen. Not that that's any guarantee that it will be any good. Like the Dune movie.

The last two books in the series are Heretics of Dune and Chapterhouse:Dune. I didn't like the last two very much the first time I read them, but after reading them in order the second time I felt they were quite good, especially the character Miles Teg.

Frank Herbert, author of the Dune series, died in 1986, so that was the end of the series, although he had at least one other Dune book in the works. His son, Brian, started to publish prequels, co-written with Kevin J. Anderson; Dune: House Atreides, Dune: House Harkonen, Dune: House Corrino, and Dune: The Butlerian Jihad. [The first three are called Prelude to Dune then Jihad plus The Machine Crusade and The Battle of Corrin will make up The Legends of Dune] [He also wrote a biography of his father, Dreamer of Dune] He's going to put out a sequel to Chapterhouse based on his father's notes as well. I've only read the first prequel, House Atreides, and I was not very impressed. Barely adequate, far shallower than his father's work. I'll probably end up reading them anyhow because I'm such a Dune fanatic. Well not a fanatic, but I really did like the books.

And of course, there was the Dune games. The first Dune game was an adventure game that I never checked out. The second one was Dune II, one of the first real-time strategy games. It was great, I played it through to the end as each of the three races, Atreides, Ordos and Harkonen. Something I rarely do. There was a remake of this game called Dune 2000, basicly the same game with upgraded graphics. Then there was another Dune real-time strategy game called Emperor of Dune. And I think there was another adventure game and an online game. And a roleplaying game?

Update

Just finished watching the first episode, which I believe encompasses the entire novel, Dune Messiah. I was quite impressed, much more enjoyable than the first series. All the actors were very good, although Duncan Idaho wasn't quite as charismatic as I pictured him from the books. The CGI used to render the sandworms was a step up from the first series. In fact, all the CGI used looked better than the first one, you didn't get that omigod that looks fake feeling as much. The fact that William Hurt wasn't in this one was a plus in my book, I thought he was terrible in the first one. They seemed to cover all the highlights from the book, at least what I can remember of it. Very cool, can't wait for the next two installments.

Maybe they could do justice to God Emperor after all!

The Smoking Gun has the ad the Hong Kong Tourism Board put out before the outbreak telling us Hong Kong will take your breath away! [shortness of breath is a symptom of SARS] It was too late to get the ads pulled.

In other SARS new:

• The Michael Smith Genome Sciences Centre in BC has sequenced the virus' genome.
  
  
• Three more people in Ontario have died from the disease. This brings the total deaths in Canada, all in Ontario, to thirteen. Two hundred and twenty-three cases in Ontario, two hundred and seventy-four in all of Canada.
  
  
• The WHO estimates there have been at least 2,960 SARS cases and 119 deaths in 19 countries.
  
  
• 200 workers have been sent home from a Hewlett-Packard plant north of Toronto because a worker showed up ill with SARS when he was under a quarantine order. Ontario's commissioner of public safety, Dr. James Young, has asked police to look at whether charges should be laid against the worker.
  
  
• Another sharp rise in deaths today bringing the worldwide total to 132. Hong Kong reported another 5 deaths, bringing their total to 41. Total worldwide cases reaches 3200.
  
  
• Cathay Pacific might ground its fleet due to the effect SARS is having on its business.
  
  
• Alberta has only had six confirmed cases of SARS, so I'm not too worried. After all, they've managed to keep us rat-free for 50 years. [Speaking of rats...]
  
  

I know this guy, Mohammed Saeed al-Sahaf, is [was] a nasty fuck like the rest of the Iraqi regime, but his daily press briefings were a nice bit of comic relief from all the death and destruction of the war. This site has a good collection of his, uhm, utterances. Hilarious. Maybe he could get a job with North Korea...

So I guess the movie people came today instead. They were done by the time I got home so I didn't get to see any big stars or anything. Not that they would have any on a movie called ER for Animals.

I'm downtown, working. Or should I say not working. Very dead down here today. The weather is nice, though; sunny, warm, if not a little windy. Hung out down by Prince's Island Park for awhile with the ducks and the geese and those white birds that look like gulls but they aren't. They're like smaller and very white except for a few dark feathers. Terns maybe? I dunno, they have really white heads with big black eyes.

It was nice and warm today, hopefully that's it for old man winter. And it was busy at work as well, always a good combination. I guess I'm not used to it being so busy, I crashed out for a few hours after work. Looking forward to next week's long weekend, I need a break. Unfortunately, it will only be a three day weekend cause most people will be open on Easter Monday even though I'm sure it will be really slow. Oh well, I can finish reading the Two Towers on that day maybe.

My cobalt blue has been holed up in her burrow for the past week. I think she's molted. I can see her a bit through the top of her burrow and I think she looks bigger. It's hard to tell, I guess I won't really know till she tosses out her old skin. Wonder if she'll expand her burrow for her new, larger body?

They were supposed to be filming a movie in my neighbourhood today. I think it was called ER for Animals. Anyway, they put up all these No Parking signs along 23rd Ave. and then never even showed up, at least as far as I know. I left here around 9:30 am [my day started slow!] and came home around 5 pm and they were nowhere to be seen. Oh well.

Added the last five referrers thing to the bottom of the page. It was a little tricky because I'm using a perl script called from my main page, so the referrer kept coming up as my index page! Very frustrating. Now I have a javascript function passing the referrer to the perl script, which seems to work fine as long as the client has javascript turned on. And if they don't, oh well, can't win 'em all.

Yesterday my brakes stopped working halfway through the day. Did I mention we got 15 centimeters of snow yesterday as well? It was hell, I had to use the old emergency brake for the rest of the day. [smashing foot into the ground to slow me down before catapulting into traffic] [and dying] When I got home I put my bike by the entranceway to defrost before going to work fixing the brakes. I was nodding off on the couch when I heard an ear-splitting bang. [!] It was my rear tire, the sidewall was worn out and gave way. I'm sure my neighbours enjoyed the gunshot-like hullabaloo. So now I had to fix the brakes and the tire. Luckily I had an old tube lying around.

Then, of course, I went back to the couch and crashed right out.

So when I woke up this morning I had to fix the bike pronto. I hate that. The brakes were easy to fix, I just used a spacer to get the brake pads closer to the rim. But the tire was more of a pain. The sidewall had a huge hole in it where the tube blew out. I used a piece of duct tape to cover the hole. Laugh all you want, but the bugger held together all day, tho the sidewall was bulging badly by the time I got home. The old tube was screwed up too, the valve leaked air when you tried to pump it up. But it did hold air when you screwed the valve down. [presta]

So I installed a new tire and tube tonight. And I'm sure something else will break tomorrow. Sigh.

It rained today. Then it got colder and turned to snow. It was one of those days when you spend pretty well the whole time outside, so I got soaking wet and froze my ass off. It's hard to believe it was +20°C just a couple days ago. Tomorrow's high is -7°C with more snow. Tomorrow I'm gonna remember to bring my gloves, dammit. I hate this world.