LA’s Soapbox

I need a good laugh after all the crap this Spammer in Norway has caused me in the last week.. will tell ya all about it in my next post… I’d like to hang him up by his family jewels!
In the meantime, here are some bloopers and headline funnies. Hope you enjoy them as much as I did. Some are really subtle - read them again Have a good laugh!

In Flanders Fields
By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)
Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Friendship is really a matter of time…
the time that it takes to be kind,
the time that it takes
just to listen and talk,
to help someone find
peace of mind.

Friendship is really a matter of time…
the time that it takes you to do
a thoughtful and generous favour
that wasn’t expected of you,
the time that it takes
just to answer a call,
to let someone know
that you’re there.

Friendship is really a matter of time…
the time that you take
when you care.

After 16 seasons, 248 races, 68 pole positions, 154 podium finishes and 91 wins, Formula 1 said goodbye to Michael Schumacher, as he retired today. He has had the most successful career in Formula 1 history ever! He is one of the most, if not the most, complete athlete of our time. He will be sorely missed.

Thank you for all the magical moments.
Thank you for all the thrills.
Thank you for your courage.
Thank you for your determination.
Thank you for your dedication.
Thank you for the motivation and team spirit that you brought to Ferrari.
Thank you for making F1 so exciting.
Thank you for sharing your talent with Formula 1 fans.
Thank you for proving over and over that your jealous detractors are full of crap.
Thank you for the inspiration you have given to a lot of young drivers.
Thank you to your entire family for sharing you with us for so many years.

Happy retirement to the greatest Formula 1 driver ever!

Danke Michael!

Vacation… I need a vacation! it’s been a busy two weeks… and costly too :/ Including over $1,500 in car repairs and over $700 in dentist fees for daughter - panoramic x-ray, wisdom teeth removal, cleaning etc … vacation? Can’t afford a vacation now.. lol The next two weeks will be just as busy, between the three of us (Daughter, Mom and me) we have eight dentist, Dr, etc appointments.

Will also have to find time to rake up all the damn leaves in the yard. We had our huge maple tree cut down two years ago which left us with our gorgeous pine tree and our two lilac trees, whose leaves don’t change colours but just drop off very late in the Fall. So basically we don’t really have any trees left that shed their leaves in early Fall…. now the neighbours on the other hand… their leaves love our yard :Þ

I run a trivia bot on IRC (#WindowsNT on undernet), seems it’s missing me and acting out by giving one person’s score to another (people using too many different user@hosts is the real issue - heh) so I have to go tend to it… later folks *wave bye bye*

Sooo.. Takuma Sato thinks that he didn’t do anything wrong at the F1 Chinese GP… if that’s really the case he needs to have a good close look at the video tape of the idiotic manouver he made. He wasn’t disqualified from the race for nothing, odd how everyone else can see it. Maybe he needs glasses?! Maybe he needs his Super Licence revoked. Honda’s main team didn’t resign him for nothing!

The only reason this mediocre driver is still in F1 is plain and simple.. marketing! “Have to have a Japanese driver to attract Japanese viewiers/fans.” pfftt… what a bunch of hogwash! This guy has made so many mistakes over the past 2 years that it’s dangerous. Now that there is at least one other Japanese driver, it would be a lot safer and a lot less frustrating for the rest of the drivers and the fans if they were to get rid of Sato. There are better drivers waiting in the wings.

I’ve had a web presence for almost 11 years now. It all started with LA-Magic.com which I share with a wonderfcul friend. We used the same hosting company for close to 8 years. That was until I found out about the awesome advertising campaign that 1and1.com came up with: free hosting for 3 years! I signed up for a free account, set up my Photo Gallery and tested out the waters, so to speak (I can be such a sceptic lol).

After a year of excellent, reliable and fast service, we decided to move LA-Magic.com and its hundreds, upon hundreds of pages to 1and1.com.

Here we are almost 2 years later - lordy, time flies! There were only 4 months left on the free hosting when 1and1 announced that they were having a month long special: 25% off for a year. We figured what the heck, the sevice has been just about perfect, might as well bite the bullet and upgrade now (we decided on the “Developer Package”) in case there are no more special savings to be had in the next 4 months. If there are I’ll scream! ;Þ

I read all the FAQs about the upgrade process, noting that “all data will be lost” was written in bold letters under several headings in the FAQs! So we backed up and we backed up some more. All in all, I think we had 5 backups somewhere or another hehe. I especially made sure to backup the database for this blog! I would not have been a happy camper if I had lost my posts and especially all your comments! So 2 days ago I ordered the upgrade and held my breath!

Woke up Monday morning prepared to re-upload 500MB of files, reinstall WordPress and restore the database. I was pleasantly surprised to realise that the upgrade had been done and ALL the data was still there! Woohoo! Not a single file was missing. Everything was just as it had been the night before, including my SQL db for this blog. I was a happy camper

In all my years of being on the web, other than Link Exchange (before MS took it over and screwed it over), I have never done the advert or affiliate thingy on any of my web sites (and I have several)! As of today, that has changed. I believe that 1and1.com is a top-notch company and I’ve decided to become an affiliate. The service is beyond impecable (and I’m hard to impress!) and the features are amazing, as is the amount of web space allocated to the various accounts. So either click on a link above, or on one of the wee banners and check them out. If you’re looking for one of the best values for your buck, you won’t regret checking them out.

It always boggles my mind when a gunman goes on a rampage, be it in a school, an office or wherever. How do these people get to the point that they feel compelled to take someone else’s life… and most often many people’s lives. It’s so incomprehensible to me…. these people are so sick. They always seem to leave a trail though.. diary, journal, notes or blogs, as was the case of the shooter at Dawson college yesterday, so that we can get a glimpse of the type of person that has the ability to kill total strangers at random for no reason. Taking their own life is one thing, mass murder is another.

Kuedos to the police for reacting so quickly. It’s good to know that the cops learnt from the 1989 massacre at the Polytechnique (14 young women were gunned down). They learnt to take action and not secure perimeters, but to take action and do what they are supposed to do; get involved and protect people. That’s exactly what they did yesterday and I have no doubt they saved many lives with their quick response. It’s sad that a young man in his prime did what he did and had to be killed, but in the end, it’s one less gun-toting whacko on the face of the earth.

My pro-gun American friends probably won’t agree with me, and they are entitled to their opinions, but I too, am entitled to mine. Where there are guns, there is death and murder. There have always been weapons that kill and there always will be, but it’s a lot harder to massacre, harm, mutilate dozens of people with say a knife than some semi-automatic rifle and hand guns.

My daughter is the same age as the young men and women who attend Dawson College (cegep), she attends cegep here and will be moving to Montreal next summer to attend university. I just can’t imagine what the students and parents are going through. My heart goes out to all of them. I am so glad that the bastard who did this is dead!

I’ll try and keep this as short as I can and not get into all the gory details. :Þ

Daughter went to Montreal late Sunday of Labour Day weekend and returned Monday…. to make a very long story short, trip was pretty much a huge disaster. Daughter was very sad *hug* On the day that she returned her laptop was making odd noises, at first I thought it was the fan. Long story, 2 BSODs and tons of errors later I finally determined on Tuesday that the hard drive is slowly dying. The hotter the lappy gets the less time it works without freezing, lagging or BSODing. Of course daughter has never backed up her files in the past 2 years, even though nagging mom has told her a gazzillion times … I think she’ll do it more often now

I managed to get one CD burnt, but this makes the hard drive hot from churning, so of course it BSOD’s in the middle of burning the second CD.. this is just not going to work. In the meantime daughter realises that she has lost the AC adapter for her iRiver H120 MP3 player. I have an iRiver H340 and I have a spare power adapter .. same specs (5V 2amps) but the plug that attaches to the player doesn’t fit on Daugher’s H120 and since it’s an older model it won’t charge via USB like mine does *sigh* Daughter is even sadder now - can’t live without her music! So I charge my iRiver and lend it to her. Not the same taste in music, but there are some that will do.. hehe

Last Tuesday.. not a good day at all…my Mom was really down, daughter very sad from lousy weekend, and issues with MP3 player and laptop! Mom had blood tests in the morning, nurse made a mistake and had to take blood from both arms and Mom is supposed to never have a blood test or blood pressure measured from her arm on the same side as her recent cancer surgery. Nurse called back later in the day to say that she had missed another required vial of blood and so I had to take her back the next day.

Wednesday wasn’t much better. Daughter went to the dentist because a wisdom tooth was bothering her. She has to have both of them taken out and of course they are partially embedded so it will be complicated, painful and expensive! Which hurts more? Having your wisdom teeeth removed or paying to have your kid’s wisdom teeth removed ;Þ At least I was able to download Daughter’s 10 GB of files onto my iRiver! Now she can listen to all her own music

The rest of the week was plagued with obstacles…after days of searching, can’t find a replacement power adapter, will try modifying mine. Decided on a particular Hitachi Hard Drive for lappy after specing it out etc etc… out of stock everywhere … duh… so will have to go with a Toshiba.. seem to have found one locally.. hopefully they will have one when I go to the store… with my luck, who knows lol

There were a multitude of other smaller things that blew through during the week .. but that’s enough for now. It was one heck of a shitty week.. glad it’s over.

Happiness is not so much in having as in sharing. We make a living by what we get, but we make a life out of what we give.