Friday, November 04, 2005

Edmonton...Part 3

What is there to do in Edmonton on a Saturday afternoon at the end of Oktober?

Well, if the weather is nice, which it was this past weekend, although a little chilly, you can go up to Whyte Ave. and the Strathcona section of town and hang out with superannuated hippies (like me) and hardy western patio latté sippers bookstore browsers art gallery appraisers.

Or you can go to West Edmonton Maul. Been there. Done that. Got the sweatshirt. (I’m not joking. A few years ago, I had a sweatshirt specially embroidered with those exact words at the West Edmonton Maul.)

If you’re from out of province it’s almost obligatory that you engage in some kind of shopping. Why? No provincial sales tax! So I did. I bought two things, big ticket items as they say.

One: my new cell phone. A little early for this one. The old one was working fine, but the battery was beginning to seem a little iffy. Off to Telus downtown, a block away from my hotel. This turned out not to be such a big ticket item, though, because (unlike DT) I signed up for three years, since I need it for my other work anyway. Cost me 50 bucks (no sales tax but still the infernal VAT, or GST as those placid Canucks call it). However, I had to go through technohell to program it. Or rather the inexperienced sales clerk/Saturday manager went through technohell, because for some reason the phone had been previously programmed for Alberta of all places and needed to be reformatted or otherwise dumped in an acid bath so that it would respond to an Ontario accent. And after that I discovered that none of the speed dial or Mike numbers had been transferred to the new phone and so I spent a good portion of the next 2 days doing this by hand after basically figuring out how to work the damn phone by trial and error because the manual’s a piece of crap.

Two: an iPod. See, over the last couple of years I’ve downloaded small stacks of Buddhist teachings from the Internet. I won’t say Buddhist monks/teachers are long-winded. But many of these files are too long to fit onto a CD. What to do? They’re taking up space while I decide to listen to them as I type up my weekly blogette. So I bought an iPod. Oddly enough, the installation of software to my computer went well. But not well enough. Something was not quite working. A day later, the iPod informed me it needed to be reformatted as well. Restored was the word, I think. Restored? It’s brand new! The Sistine Chapel needs restoration! The Roman Catholic Church needs restoration…(sorry, that was reformation wasn’t it?) Not my brand new iPod. But sure enough, after being restored it began operating just as all the pdf userguide tutorial help pages assured me it was supposed to. Now I have my ears iPlugged with Dharma. Yeah, I’ve put some music on it too.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

oh my, i am impressed. an i-pod. (If I capitalise the pronoun, do I then say I am impressed, an I-iod?)

But I do mean it, I am impressed. You'll have to show me your i-pod someday, lol.

I-pod, as a word, brings up images of milk-pods in my head. Or that pivotal classic scary movie, where the aliens grow in pods and you can't go to sleep or you become one of them. Aliens from outer space, that is, and not people who come from another country.

In the same few days that I bought my cell phone, I figured I might as well do it all at once, and also bought a Zire palm pilot thingee (although I believe for Christmas I'm getting the updated really cool version), and an USB daisy chain (tech companies seem to want us to equate their products with nature) so I can now plug in more things to my laptop. To take advantage of that, I bought a new jumpdrive, and can now wear all my stories and poems around my neck - lol. (The literature that came with the daisy chain says that I can link something like 30 of those daisies together to add 120 USB ports to my computer, imagine that, lol).

And then just a few days ago, when an unexpected $500 check arrived from CanCopy (it comes every year at this time and every year I am newly surprised), I bought a little printer (which, let me tell you, cost a hell of a lot more than the big printers).

You know, if I buy a new digital camera, and one of those camera cell phones, I can now print my photos up "wireless" on the printer - laughlaughlaughlaugh. It's somehow comforting to know I could do that (I have a bin of computer wires that have been collected over the years and theoreticaly I can now dump them all!).

But having said all that, I do like the compact nature of this little printer sitting in my kitchen next to my little computer.

It seems ideas do not strike me in my office, but during day to day living, which is more likely to happen in the kitchen near the patio doors. Yesterday I spent the whole day there writing a single poem. What a lovely luxury.

Larry Keiler said...
This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.
Larry Keiler said...

(Previous comment deleted because it had a typo. Not a spelling mistake. Larry's allowed any spelling he wants. But Larry didn't preview the comment and it had a stupid mistake in it. Larry's not stupid. Just lazy. This is the same comment that he deleted. With the error corrected. Because Larry's more or less perfect. Ha. Ha.)

You're impressed? That sounds like a whole techno smorgasbord you've got there. A palm pilot? One might think you have appointments to keep! An iPod ain't nuthin' but file storage with earplugs. (For killing time while I imagine appointments...)

Help! I've written and I can't get up!