Author: Erwin

I admit I am not a fan of participating in extreme sports. While others might find it exciting to do skydiving, whitewater rafting, base jumping, and so forth, those activities aren’t in line with my interests. Yes, that might label me as boring but I’m too old to start fooling myself into something I’m not.

There is one activity I would love to try, though I’m not certain it’s offered any where to the public. I’d like to learn how to fast rope out of a helicopter. I’m not sure what the appeal is of sliding down a rope with no harness from a hoving helicopter but it probably has to do with several dozen TV shows and movies I watched over the years. I’m also a big fan of helicopters and have never even been close to a working one (though there was that one time a chopper landed outside my window). So yeah, combine the helicopter and the jumping out of it and you got yourself a fun time.

It could be a like a weekend course. They teach you the basics and then you get to fast rope out in different scenarios. First, like a simple field to start you off slow. Then we ramp it up a bit and try fast roping onto the top of an office building. For the finale at the end of the weekend, they let the class descend onto a tanker ship out in the harbour. Because everyone pays a hefty fee for the weekend, there’s a BBQ on the beach, where we strap all the BBQ fixings onto our back and fast rope onto the sand.

If this was even remotely possible, I’d go do it… short of signing up for the military.

I left work an hour early today to go see my doctor in Coquitlam. I was getting my second of three Hep A/B vaccine shots. Leaving at 5pm as opposed to 6pm makes a big difference. There are a lot of people running around downtown just after 5pm. Everyone is trying to get home from work.

I expected a lot of people to be on my bus but there wasn’t too many though the bus I caught was an articulated one which is double the capacity of my normal steel chariot. I also expected a lot of traffic but this also did not materialize. Content with the world, I fell asleep on the bus, which sadly is probably one of the most enjoyable things in my life right now.

I got home a little before 6:30pm which was a refreshing change of pace. I arrived at the doctor’s office around 7pm and in the evenings, it’s clinic style which means it’s first-come, first-served. The place was packed with people. The receptionist asked me if I wanted to wait an hour and a half. Yikes. I said I would but I’d like to come back. She put my name down and then told me to come back in an hour.

I drove home and had dinner with my parents before returning to the clinic at exactly one hour later. The place had emptied out quite a bit but there were still people waiting. As I sat down, I noticed there were some pretty hurting people with me. One kid was there with his mom. He looked to be around 12 years old. He was in some discomfort which I couldn’t attribute to anything specific. One old lady kept a hankie over her mouth and just closed her eyes until it was her turn to see the doctor.

I waited an hour before it was my turn. As my doctor greeted me, he told me I picked a bad night. I gave him the shot and he went away to get a cotton ball with some alcohol. Returning, he rubbed my right arm and asked if I was ready. I said yes and he plunged the needle into my arm. It barely registered as he injected me with the vaccine. As he pulled out the needle, he asked me to press firmly on the spot with the ball. I didn’t catch all he was saying but he mentioned something about “the needle going in pretty deep”. I didn’t realize what that meant until he asked me to remove the cotton ball from my arm and I noticed that there was a lot more blood on the ball that I had anticipated. It hadn’t soaked through or anything but considering he had only made a tiny hole in my skin that was a lot of blood. He wiped my arm off and sent me on my way.

I get my final shot five months from now. Now, if only I could come home at 6:30pm without getting a needle.

Without a doubt my favourite awards show to watch during the year are the MTV Movie Awards. The show is light-hearted, doesn’t take itself seriously, and always fun to watch. More entertainment than a chance for Hollywood to gratify itself, the list of stars that attend usually skews towards a younger set.

This years’s show was hosted by Jessica Alba who went through what seemed like a dozen costume changes throughout the show. Also in attendance were the likes of Owen Wilson, Steve Carrell, Will Ferrell, Keanu Reeves, Samuel L. Jackson, Borat, and Jim Carey among others.

As a sign of how laid back the awards are, the results are announced even before the show airs on TV. Taped over the weekend, the show will be shown on MTV and MuchMusic this Thursday.

There was only one category that I even cared for and when I read the winner for it, I was disappointed and a tad miffed. The Best Fight category is a unique one and always features some good nominees. This year’s list featured: King Kong vs. the planes from King Kong, some kung fu fight from Kung Fu Hustle, some gun battle with Bradgelina in Mr. and Mrs. Smith, and last but certainly not least, the lightsaber battle between Obi-Wan Kenobi and Anakin Skywalker at the climax of Revenge of the Sith.

Now voting was done online and from what I understand, there are no provisions in place to prevent ballot stuffing. As such, results can turn out like rolling a pair of device. So guess which movie won? Mr. and Mrs. Smith. That’s completely ridonkulous. It’s actually a crime in all honesty.

The fight between Obi-Wan and Anakin should have won by a long shot. That lightsaber battle makes all those other fights look like verbal arguments between senior citizens. The sequence remains the longest duel in cinematic history. First hinted at in the novelization of A New Hope in the late 1970s, Star Wars fans had been waiting for nearly three decades to see how the events transpired on a lava-filled planet. How long did they fight? How did they start fighting? What did the planet look like? How did Obi-Wan defeat Anakin? How did Anakin drag his charred body out of the lava? All these long-standing questions were answered in this single, dramatic sequence.

It was this very fight that led to the creation of one of, if not the most, iconic villains in cinema history, Darth Vader himself.

So, my friends, how is it that Mr. and Mrs. Smith won? The answer is not because the fight sequence was especially good but because it had Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in it and they just happen to be the hottest couple in Hollywood.

Now Star Wars fans are usually pretty good with the Internet and stuffing ballot boxes so I’m not sure what happened this time around. All I know is that they dropped the proverbial ball like it was a thermal detonator in Jabba’s palace. I voted for Sith twice myself, once at home and another time at work, thinking it would be enough. I was wrong.

Sith was also nominated for two other awards, Ewan McGregor for Best Hero and Hayden Christensen for Best Villain. Suprisingly, Christensen won his category even though McGregor had a way better performance in the movie and simply kicked ass while channeling the spirit of Alec Guiness.

I’m probably the most miffed guy out there about a light-hearted movie awards show. You can download the 2006 MTV Movie Awards show on Bittorrent starting June 8th.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jerpcvXR–w]

In this segment, Borat investigates different hobbies. I’m not sure which part I found the funniest. It could have been when he showed the yoga teacher his dance, when he said to a woman she looked older, or when he sniffed some guy’s crotch.

Eggo microwaveable pancakes can be pretty damn tasty at any time of the day.

I threw up a little bit in my mouth when I read this.

Sometime around 10am on Tuesday morning some individual gained unauthorized access to the server that houses both my web site and my e-mail. I actually didn’t notice it until nearly 2am early Wednesday morning. I should have been in bed and was indeed heading that way when I strangely decided to see who else was on the server at the time. I usually don’t care.

The server I’m on is shared among many users. So when I saw that I was not the only one logged in, it wasn’t a big surprise. What was strange was the other user was named “test”. To my knowledge, no one has that username. That got me a bit worried. “test” also didn’t show up in the list of user directories which also worried me. What sent alarms off in my head was the origin of the login. It appeared that whoever “test” was, this person was originating from Romania. Eastern European hackers are notorious for breaking into places they shouldn’t be. I couldn’t see exactly what he or she had been doing but I could tell they’d be idle for over an hour and a half. I could also see that they’d been logged in since 10am that morning. It kinda looked like they were using the server to gain access to other systems.

It’d been over 12 hours since they found some way into the server. I began to get concerned for my data and e-mail. About six years ago, someone else hacked into the server and deleted everyone’s e-mails. I didn’t want history to repeat itself but I had limited options.

It was already 2am and the keeper of the server, Stephen would mostly likely be asleep. I didn’t want to call him and wake him and his wife up. It would, however, be another six to eight hours before Stephen could be notified of the intrusion. It could be mere minutes possibly for the intruder to delete my entire web site and e-mails.

Cursing the fact that I should have already been asleep I decided to download as many e-mails as I could. It took about ten minutes and I decided to delete a few documents I had lying around on the server that contained things like my SIN. I then crawled into bed. I closed my eyes for less than a minute before I decided I couldn’t just lie there while some hacker was running lose in my server.

Instead of calling Stephen I decided to call the network operations centre where the server is located. This place is also where Stephen works. A network engineer is on duty 24 hours a day. The phone answered on the first ring. I explained the situation to the dude on the night shift. It turns out he knows Stephen.

He poked around a bit but in the end, his hands were tied. He had no access to the server because he didn’t have an account. He also couldn’t block the Romanian IP from coming into the server. It was nearing 3am so I had to resolve this quickly. I told him to physically walk over to the server and then turn it off. It’d be a crude solution but it’d be effective. The network guy asked if I knew where the server was located. I told him I had no idea. He explained that the facility he was in contained thousands of machines located on several floors. He had no map that would help him find the right machine. There was nothing he could do.

Damn. I thanked him for his help. He said he’d leave a note for Stephen in the morning. I had to go to sleep knowing I could do nothing.

I woke up groggy this morning to find that the Romanian had done nothing major over the night. My site and e-mail was still there. I decided to wait until I was at work to contact Stephen. When I finally got a hold of him, he was pretty surprised at my findings. He said he’d go look at it immediately. We hung up and I went back to my computer to watch him on the server. He logged in as “root” and he immediately did stuff that I have no understanding of.

In the end, he cleaned some stuff up and booted off the Romanian. The weird thing is, Stephen has no idea how that person gained access in the first place. We also don’t know what that person did while he or she had acccess either. Odd and perhaps a little unsettling.

This is what nerds do when they want to cause trouble.

I’ve discovered that doing things downtown after work suits my schedule the best. The long bus ride back to Tatooine always departs from downtown, so if I’m already downtown when I’m done doing whatever, it’s a lot more convenient for me. Case in point, this evening where a co-worker and I had dinner at this pho joint. After we were finished eating, I walked to my bus stop and jumped on a bus to Port Moody. Simple and easy with a spill-proof opening.

In other news, the et.com t-shirts are slowly making their way to the corners of the globe. I sent off Phil’s tonight. The post office said it would take two business days to get there. Jonathan is coming by my office to pick up his tomorrow. Now that I have the shirts, people who didn’t request one in the first place are asking for one. Where were you people earlier? I do appreciate the interest and that gives me incentive to make batch number two.

As I lay awake last night trying to fall asleep, I thought of an idea for an entertaining post. I remember thinking, “Wow, that would be really funny.” Too bad that’s all I remember about that. I should keep a notepad with me at all times to write this crap down.

Despite my best efforts to resist, I go to Starbucks nearly every day now. I usually get a venti green tea which costs me $1.60. It’s just not the beverage that makes me go. It’s just that I look forward to a break around 3pm. I always go with a few co-workers, which is nice since we get to go outside and talk about “stuff”. The Starbucks near the entrance to the Island is also a great location. If you click here, you’ll find a great article about how Starbucks has changed the American culture. Here’s a bit of trivia, there are only 13 Starbucks in the entire state of Arkansas. There are probably more than 13 locations in just Kitsilano here in Vancouver.

Last but not least, here are my thoughts on the local weather. I think it has been too cloudy and too cold for my liking. We’re days away from June and in my opinion, a sunny day is a rarity this spring. Sure today was nice but the forecast is for clouds and showers for well into the weekend. And that’s what grinds my gears.

The first batch of official erwintang.com t-shirts arrived in the mail today. I am pleased that I went with the navy colour. Personally, I think the navy looks great and it’s a safer colour that will help encourage you to even possibly wear the shirt out in public! Ha!

I actually took a chance and ordered a single t-shirt in kelly green for myself. I have another green t-shirt that looks good and I thought I could recreate the magic. Sadly, I was very, very wrong. You won’t see the green one on me very often. I am convinced though that red or scarlet will be the next colour. It would look awesome!

Ok, so now to the important part for my readers who wanted a shirt. I’ve decided for those who live in the Lower Mainland, I will deliver the shirts personally to you. It’s cheaper for me and it’ll give me an excuse to see my readers in person. For the three of you working at EA, you’ll get your shirts together either through Garrett or Chris. The dinner club group will get yours together as well. The Toronto/Ottawa contingent may have to wait until Adam arrives in Vancouver next month. If he agrees, he’ll pass the Ottawa shirts off to Kristina so that Nic can get his. Jonathan, you live in Vancouver, so we’ll meet up for yours.

The only ones that I’ll need to mail out for sure are Suzanne and Phil. Phil I got your address, so your shirt will be in the mail shortly. Suzanne, I’ll need your mailing address.

To everyone who requested a t-shirt, thanks for showing interest and visiting my site. Enjoy the shirts and it’d be really cool if you could get photographed with your shirt on in various places around the world. Send me the photos and if you want, I can start a gallery!

Do you ever wonder how popular a web site is? The truth is, there is not a single source where you can find completely accurate traffic rankings for web sites. Each web site can have very detailed traffic logs but no one releases this information to a third party for analysis.

So, people have to guess how popular a web site is in comparison to another. One way is to track stats for people who have a certain toolbar installed. The Alexa toolbar for example has such functionality. The people at Alexa then analyze the stats sent back by all the Alexa toolbar users to generate traffic rankings. As you might imagine, there is nothing statistically relevant about the results. The results only represent what web sites Alexa toolbar users visiting. The sample size is probably too low to fairly represent what the rest of the surfing world is doing.

Nonetheless, it is interesting to see how web sites stack up against each other, even if it’s within this small sample of users. For example, this web site is the 4 046 746th most popular web site among Alexa toolbar users (at least at the time of this post). I’ve dropped about 606 000 spots over the last three months, meaning at one time, I had the 3 400 000th most popular web site. Damn, time to put more nudity on the site!

Of course, these stats should all be taken with a large grain of salt. Feel free to see how popular some of your own favourite sites are.