Steve Irwin was killed today in a freak accident off the coast of Queensland, Australia. He was filming some footage for a documentary when he was struck in the chest by the tail barb of a Stingray, delivering a fatal injury. I am sad to hear this news. He was certainly one of the most daring and exciting to watch documentary hosts. I loved his Aussie charm and cheesy one-liners. Sorry to see you go, Steve!

CBC’s Report of Steve Irwin’s Death
Wikipedia entry about Steve Irwin
CNN Report about Steve Irwin’s Death

General, News, TV | 1 Comment »

Chris posted about this bandwidth speed test on his site and I decided to post my Bell Sympatico results here for future reference. Since I am in Toronto, it seemed that for this test, the New York server was the closest. Brian reported some slowness issues with this particular test in MacOSX, so I will see if I can get Guin to run it on her Mac to see what happens for her. As a side note, we used to have Rogers High Speed Internet but there were problems with it in our building and our speeds were as hideous as dial-up, so we switched to Sympatico and, while we don’t get 10Mbps, our connection is fairly fast and very reliable compared to what we had with the cable offering. I am sure that cable is good in certain areas, but for us, dsl was the way to go.

PS: In mostly unrelated news - Check out this deal for 19″ widescreen LCD monitors at Tiger Direct!

General | 2 Comments »

I was reading a post on Linton’s Blog today regarding his unusual half-waking experience with what may be the Bogeyman! This inspried me to write up a post about my own strange experience with a frightening creature in my dreams or sometimes when only partly awake. Now, I don’t really believe in these sort of things as real beings, but I do believe that we have all had experiences like it that we can chalk up to various weirdnesses within the human mind and with the way our brains interpret reality under different circumstances. That is to say, we have all had our own versions of a perhaps shadowy figure that seems to be visiting us in the night, enhancing our fear during dreams or while we are half-asleep and just seeing things that aren’t really there. They often coincide with things that are really happening with our bodies - ever had a dream about having to pee and then waking up and really having to go bad?

My version of the shadowy figure, is what I call “The Hag”. The Hag is really my childhood bogeyman. I believed, as a child, that this creature lived in my parents house, only coming out a night to visit me in my dreams. It lived in the basement in a little crawlspace we called “The Cubbyhole”. My hag was a nasty-looking, extremely aged female figure with a shadowy cloak that she always tried to envelope me with. She caught me a few times, but, after being plagued by this nightmare for many years, I eventually came up with a scheme to rid myself of her forever. And it seems to have worked! (crosses fingers) What kinds of bogeymen(women) have you experienced and how did you get rid of it (if at all).

EDIT: A couple of links:

Sleep Paralysis
Bogeymen
Accounts of Shadow People

General | 3 Comments »

I saw this on YouTube today and I thought the performance was really good. This performance reminds me of one of my favourite piano artists, Tori Amos.

This clip actually introduced me to Rockstar Suprnova and I have to say - It’s the most appealing “Idol” show I have seen. It could be that the music is more to my taste or that the contestants are more interesting to look at. I’ll definitely be checking out this show while I wait for the next round of reality TV in the fall. Yes, I have a weakness for Survivor. It’s one of my few television vices.

TV | 1 Comment »