Archive for March, 2004
I swear I’ll be online by this weekend.
By Karen | Friday, March 26th, 2004 | No Comments »
Okay folks, I think I finally won my battle with my computer. And the bonus: Linux Mandrake 9.2 and Windows 2000 and living in harmony in the same hard drive! (I was having trouble with that on my last reformat.) I still have to install the other stuff like our MTS DSL connectivity and a firewall before I can computer it up from home. Anyone know how to setup a Linux DSL connection with MTS? Please?
Going salsa dancing with Hymie and Melissa tonight…it’s the dance contest finals!! I wonder who will win???
Books: Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire (done!), Educational Psychology
Boys: Kurtis, the cute intern on the West Wing…though he looked much cuter in ‘Bring It On’
Quick post before computer dies again.
By Karen | Sunday, March 21st, 2004 | No Comments »
I bought that can of compressed air and did a thorough cleaning of my dusty computer. I don’t think I’ve fixed the problem, though. Now it will stay alive for an hour or two before dying the blue-screen death. It also eats up the 256MB of RAM as it gets sicker. Hymie suggests that my problem could be related to Zone Alarm. I will reformat the computer tonight and see if that helps. Does anyone else have suggestions on how to fix this? Post me a comment.
My friend Mike sent me this link of someone’s homemade monorail. It’s pretty funny, especially the part where you see the dinky monorail racing the actual city’s monorail. Visit the site if you are interested.
In case you get bored like I do and want to randomly surf the Net for junk, I’ve also added a link to random.com in my Links menu, over there —->
Post me a comment if you come across a site worth mentioning.
Well, time to reformat. Wish me luck!
Books: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Boys: Kurtis, Jonny 
This week: sickness and blue screens.
By Karen | Thursday, March 18th, 2004 | No Comments »
I’ve been computerless (again) since Sunday. Got the blue screen of death; not the CTRL-ALT-DELETE kind… the “beginning physical dump of memory” kind. Not good. I think it’s because our CPU has 3 inches of dust built up inside. Either our fan is clogged by it or our fan broke because of it. Cannot wait to buy a can of compressed air!
Also have a bad cold that has kept me sickly and whiny all week and stuck in bed all day yesterday. Sorry Kurt, I am a baby when I’m sick. Thank god for Christine Cushing Live and all the TLC home improvement shows!
Hopefully you will see me online by the weekend. Later!
Books: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Boys: Kurtis
Dave’s Screenplay a Festival Winner!
By Karen | Tuesday, March 16th, 2004 | No Comments »
Plugging my friend’s screenplay that is one of the Top 20 Screenplays in the World, according to Key West Indie Fest, an annual independent film festival in Florida. Dave says he’ll be going to Key West in May to attend the festival, and a Vancouver magazine will be interviewing him this month about his win. Congratulations!
http://www.keywestindiefest.com/indibio2K4.html#screen
Books: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire
Boys: Kurtis, Dave
Do the Geek Test!
By Karen | Friday, March 12th, 2004 | No Comments »
It’s all Karl’s fault. Found another online test to do. It’s The Geek Test…here’s my score:
41.8146% – Major Geek
I am a little disappointed at my low geekiness factor. I thought I was a bigger geek! Doesn’t have enough references to spelling bees, RPGs, anal retentiveness, Sailor Moon and Buffy. Ah well (shrug).
If you take the test, tell me what you scored. My comments feature is working better now!
Books: No Logo (Naomi Klein)
Boys: Kurtis
In a quote-y mood.
By Karen | Thursday, March 11th, 2004 | No Comments »
Anyone who knew the AIESEC SFU exec teams knows the ubiquity of the email quote footer. We used them to advertise AIESEC and events, represent our personalities, inspire others. I am actually not a big fan of quotes (my email footer was just my VP title and contact info). I suck at quotes! You know how people watch a movie or TV show once and are able to regurgitate the dialogue, ad verbatim? I am the polar opposite of that. I can barely remember the context let alone the sentence structure. You can see my extreme suckiness whenever I try to deliver a joke.
Well this week, I found that rare quote that I feel strongly enough to put in an email footer. Now that I’m gung-ho back into dancing, I think it’s apt.
“…Don’t forget that Ginger Rogers did everything he did…backwards and in high heels.”
It’s originally from a 1982 Frank and Ernest cartoon (artist — Bob Thaves):
Here are some other stupid quotes that came out of my mouth today.
“Buy me a chew toy!”
–after I hurt Kurt by gnawing on his forearm…again
“But olives is a vegetable…”
–after I screwed up by lining the waffle iron with olive oil, not vegetable (canola?) oil
“Argh!…That’s impossible to do in that many keystrokes!!”
–getting frustrated that the guy in Revenge of the Nerds created a 20 second line animation “on the fly”…on an ’80s computer with less than a hundred keystrokes (I’m a nerd, why do you think I was watching this?)
PS: I had to ask Kurt to remind me of what I said word-for-word, to be able to write it here. Bah.
Site feed available, but comments still suck.
By Karen | Thursday, March 11th, 2004 | No Comments »
For those of you who are PDA-enabled and are endlessly fascinated by my blog ramblings, you can now download PDA-friendly versions of my posts. There is a new link called Site Feed by Atom in the main menu, over there somewhere –>
Click the link to view the text-only posts. What you do to download it after you get there, I don’t know…but I’m sure you techies with PDAs will have no trouble figuring it out 
Or ask Hymie for help, as he’s the one who requested this feature!
Still struggling with my comments feature that still shows you “permission denied” error messages, even though your comment gets posted OK. Hopefully I get that fixed in the next week. If not, please remember that you can post comments; to view it after the error message shows up, refresh your browser window.
Bah. Maybe I’ll ask my “little brother” Dennis to take a look. His blog / AIESEC Toba resource / forum / überwebsite kicks ass!
Oh, and it took me a min of trial and error to discover that ü is ASCII character ALT+129 … what a geek I am.
Books: No Logo (Naomi Klein), Educational Psychology (Chapter 5)
Songs: You and Me and a Bottle Makes Three (Big Bad Voodoo Daddy)
Great Swing video clips!
By Karen | Tuesday, March 9th, 2004 | No Comments »
Came across this terrific website from the swing dancers in Melbourne, AU. First site I’ve seen with an abundance of free video snippets on Lindy, Balboa, Charleston and East Coast (AKA Jitterbug or Jive…what’s in a name anyway?). Check it out, they are the best I’ve seen on the web.
My favourite clips (Windows Media Player…max out the volume!):
Promo clip of swing dancing
Frankie Mannie does the Shim Sham
“Traffic Jam” performance
A routine by Swing Patrol’s founders
I’m on a Swing high after going to UMswing’s workshop last night. The people are great, very friendly! And Danny from salsa dancing was there too so there were some familiar faces. I will have to get to know the layout of the UofM campus if I’m gonna be going there every week. Anyway, better get some dinner going so see you folks later!
Hometown Celebrity Spotting.
By Karen | Monday, March 8th, 2004 | No Comments »
Hey, just saw Riaz Meghji (AIESEC SFU) and Amalia Townsend (fellow LFA ‘97 grad) on MTV Canada Select. Riaz was interviewing a sports team (the Thrashers?) and Amalia was interviewed about the Rock for Choice benefit. They both seem to be doing well for themselves. Way to go guys!
Vancouver… *sigh*
By Karen | Sunday, March 7th, 2004 | No Comments »
All the stuff that happened this weekend has made me feel nostalgic about Vancouver. Just got an email from an old friend, Corey. He and I met in first year at SFU, even before I knew of this thing called AIESEC. Now our mutual friend Albert is going away on a traineeship. His email’s reminded me of the friends and family I’ve left behind when I moved to Winnipeg. For the first 6 months, it was very hard here to make new friends and get settled in, and I guess it made it easier to cope by losing touch with the people in Vancouver that I missed.
Missing other things about my hometown…especially the springtime. Spring is probably my favourite season because of Vancouver. The freshness of that after-rain smell that lingers in the air. The pink cherry blossoms that fall from the trees, making the boulevards rain flowers. The sudden regrowth of green that happens at least 2 months before the rest of Canada (I hear Winnipeg won’t see it until May!). I wish I could visit just for a day, to see some of that springtime this year.
As it happens, we won’t be moving back in May, like we planned. Kurt will be working overtime during tax season now that he’s graduated. So we extended our lease to the end of July, and are now planning the U-Haul drive in the first week of August (-ish). It works out better this way, especially for Kurt. We won’t have to pack in the busiest time of year. He’ll have more time to scout for a CA job. It means three more months of not seeing my family and friends back home, but I’m sure the homecoming will be even sweeter when we return.
On a more mundane note, today was our family-and-couch-potato day. Went to the McTavishes’ for Finn’s birthday brunch, then came home and watched the Star Wars trilogy. We even took a break between #2 and #3 to make dinner. It was a nice relaxing day, considering that my Friday (with Hymie) and Saturday (with Melissa) evenings were non-stop salsa dancing at the Empire.
Salsa was a blast! An instructor from Ottawa was here for the past week so got to dance with him on both nights. He’s such a great dancer; it’s too bad I kept on messing up and stepping on his feet (at one point I knocked him pretty hard on the head, whoops!). Before dancing on Saturday, Melissa and I saw Dirty Dancing 2: Havana Nights. It was nowhere near as good as the original movie (and it wasn’t really a sequel) but I enjoyed it nonetheless. The lead guy is pretty cute 
The one thing that I found pretty amusing is that the dancing in the movie was pretty crappy compared to the dancing I’ve seen amongst the salsa’ers that I’ve met in Vancouver and Winnpeg.
It’s bedtime for me…bye for now. Hope your weekend was good too.
Books: Happenstance (Carol Shields)
Songs: Ewok Celebration Song (Return of the Jedi)
Boys: Kurtis