Ne-e-e-e-e-erd!

“Japan’s first robot buddy cop movie”

Posted on by Patrick

There’s a phrase that makes me perk right up and pay atten­tion. I found this on the Inter­net, thanks to Wil Wheaton, and it struck me that whether or not it’s true, the sto­ry is awesome.

And I quote:

Japan’s first robot bud­dy cop movie, a silent film released in 1919, was shown only once, to an assem­bly of wealthy land own­ers in Tokyo. When the film end­ed, the audi­ence demand for afford­able giant robots to work their fields and con­trol the peas­ants was so insis­tent, emper­or Hiro­hi­to had the only copy of the film impound­ed and destroyed to pre­vent the idea from cap­tur­ing the public’s imagination.

Found via Wil Wheaton’s tum­blr. Go ahead, click through. There’s a great pho­to and everything.

Star Trails

Posted on by Patrick

Star Trails

The trails are stut­tery because the clouds rolled in, off and on. But I’m quite enam­oured with the colours that I end­ed up with.  (And here I con­tem­plat­ed doing it up in black and white, to avoid the orange glow of the streetlights.)

Video:

The Evans Theatre

Posted on by Patrick

Part of the “web­mon­key” side of my pro­file:  I’ve been mon­key­ing with the Evans The­atre’s web­site, try­ing to make it look pur­ty and be use­ful. I’d like to think I’m close.

Have a look:  Evans The­atre’s new site

<nerd>It’s a hand-cod­ed Word­Press theme using respon­sive design con­cepts.  Check it out at var­i­ous brows­er widths — the images should (most­ly) scale nice­ly.  If you’ve got an iPhone or some oth­er pock­et brows­er, I’d love to hear comments.</nerd>

So?  Is it pur­ty, or what?

They liked it

Posted on by Patrick

That went well.
As they say, “That went well.”  The Face­book com­ments for my sto­ry “Exit Inter­view” were all very pos­i­tive. (Whew.)

You can click the lit­tle wee screen­shot to see ’em, if you want.

On tap for tonight: Write Club. (Fol­lowed up, almost cer­tain­ly, by a farewell to a cou­ple of our writ­ers, who are going to Guelph* and Chi­na, respectively.)

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* I think it’s Guelph, anyways.

Interesting, to say the least

Posted on by Patrick

I got a new watch from my wife for my birth­day last month. It’s a great watch, and I like it rather a lot.

My new watch

Today on my lunch break, for no oth­er rea­son than “because I’m a nerd”, I punched my watch’s ser­i­al num­ber into Google, expect­ing to find — I don’t know, maybe its incept date*. Noth­ing much, anyways.

Instead, I found a US Mar­shal for­fei­ture auc­tion list­ing that includ­ed my watch.

My watch's lot

That’s it in the bot­tom mid­dle of the lot.

The things you learn.

[update] Appar­ent­ly, the auc­tion com­pa­ny in ques­tion “sells all the jewelry[etc.] seized and for­feit­ed nation­al­ly for the U.S. Mar­shals Ser­vice.” So… do I have a drug deal­er’s watch? Was it seized in a tax fortei­ture? The rather shal­low mys­tery deep­ens a very lit­tle bit.

[2nd update] As it turns out, there’s no mys­tery here. What I took to be a unique ser­i­al num­ber was appar­ent­ly in fact a glob­al prod­uct num­ber. So it was­n’t my watch in the prop­er­ty auc­tion; just a watch just like mine.
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* See, there’s that nerd thing creep­ing in again.