I went to the Versailles mall this morning with Judith to go give blood. We had talked about it for a few months now but with our busy schedules we hadn’t found a good moment for both of us. We even tried going just after our Christmas exams and before the holidays so that we would have a reason to eat ravenously at our respective grandma’s. But we forgot. But this morning was the good one. We took an appointement, we went to eat at Cora before so we would be well fed and not feel sick as they told us and arrived at the mall with a good hour to spare. Unfortunatly for us, we went shopping and had a great time ( I got a new handbag, the FFXII guide and two balls of mohair/silk ) before going back to the Globules center.  It was super easy and although one lady was really unfriendly it went well except that at around 3/4 of the bag capacity, I started feeling lightheaded. In only a few seconds I went from perfectly fine to seeing a lot of black dots. Actually, I was seeing more dots than real life so I informed the lady next to me who stopped the blood drain and asked for help. A man walked quickly in my direction and twisted the chair so that my feet would be higher and my head down and gave me cold water compresses and in only a minute I felt perfectly fine again, but they wouldn’t continue with the other arm or something for the last 100 mL and told me to relax. I’m super happy I went and tried and that I got that far, but I’m very disapointed that I didn’t end up giving enough for it to be usable. Judith was fine and her donation went perfectly. We had cookies and juice and then left.

We decided to go back in 56 days. It was really far too easy compared with all the good it does to tons of people. I’m almost impatient. Next time I will stress less and I will have a huge breakfast with eggs and bacon and toasts just to make sure. We’ll try to convince another friend to join us.

No, I didn’t hit it on the table.

But it now fuels two of my passions together. I have found a way to play video games and knit at the same time. I can hardly believe it myself. Final Fantasy XII’s new “Build-your-own-Artificial-Intelligence” system is absolutely wonderful. I created a set of rules for my characters to follow and now I can put my controller on the ground in front of me, and as long as I’m not battling bosses, I can use my big toe to move around with the joystick… while knitting my sweater! And I’m not even talking about the 15 minutes long cut-scenes. Whenever someone’s low on HP, it gets healed. Whenever someone has a status effect, it is removed. I can even set it to steal every character once before attacking. And when battling a lot of monsters, I want to make sure the whole team attacks a single one until it dies before moving on? Well I tell everyone to attack who the leader is attacking and I tell my leader to attack whoever’s closest. And I take them all out, one at a time. (insert maniacal laughter)

Damn, they really didn’t exaggerate when Penny Arcade teased the system and said that the game was masturbating. It really does play on its own. It’s really fun because it takes out the tediousness of previous iterations of the game and yet gives a lot of responsibility to the gamer… yet I feel it’s really a sort of easy way out. They didn’t have to write a really complicated AI system because they leave it to the player to make it dynamically!

I can tell my big toe is going to get a lot more exercise now. Soon, I will be just like Beatrice in Kill Bill : wriggling my big toe :)

I just read a really short but interesting article that was linked on Slashdot. It’s making me feel at the same time anxious and exhilarated. It also made me laugh with the best analysis of what web 2.0 actually is all about.

As far as I can tell, Web 2.0 is mostly about rounded corners, low-contrast pastel colors, and domain names with missing vowels.

The text and what it revealed to me really strengthens my position and aspirations as a web developer, but at the same time it really shows me how I don’t think I can rely to live off small contracts on my own. I’m really fascinated with the development aspect of building web applications such as Wordpress, Google documents or mySpace. Don’t get me started on mySpace and my inhuman hate for it, but I can see how it really brings people together and that I can respect. (I just wish they didn’t use tables and font tags, I mean… honestly!)

My short experience with Fuzion4, a young budding design & marketing company, showed me exactly what I would love to do and now I’m more motivated than ever to start working on finding ways of making it happen. I had this very long talk with myself about all those dreams when I went to draw in the boiler room. I was supposed to draw but the noises in that room reminded me of a womb and somehow… instead of drawing I ended up writing, which is very weird because writing is a chore to me. I posted them here to keep them as a sort of memento of who I was, but it was far too personal to publish. Maybe I will post a copy with censored bits one day.

Last Friday The Friday before last, I went to see Blood Diamond with Judith at the Taschereau Cinema (yay for free tickets!) and I really liked it. It was a very good story, played by terrific actors who kept me in my seat and the story really made me think. I thought it was really interesting how the story takes place a few years ago. There is a brief flash of the Monica-gate, and thus the story appears to be very close to the present, which makes it very actual, and also old enough to get a reliable archive appearance. I’m pretty sure it doesn’t cover all the horrible actions that can happen during civil war, especially when so much money is at stake. One part f the movie really shocked me, they described how the big diamond companies stock the diamonds to create a rarity in order to sell the rocks for much more money. It makes sense and it’s horrible enough to be true in the wild capitalism of today.

I hate it because I want diamonds too. I don’t want to be a part of the system and pay for those big companies. But they’re soooo pretty. I’ve been dreaming of my perfect diamond ring and draw sketches of it for about 5 years now : a silver ring that looks like twigs around the fingers with very minuscules diamonds hidden in the bark like small mushrooms. It was just so weird to see the movie and discuss engagement rings with Mike in the same week. I think I showed him a really pretty one from Birks. It’s really special because it has a small Sapphire on the side. Looking at the price though (and those are the really affordable ones) I think I will enjoy my laptop much more… for the time being. When I get a real good reliable job, I’ll splurge a little and get a pretty right-hand ring. Now I’ll definitely demand to have Canadian diamonds. I’m sure it will not come from warring countries and I will fund my own country’s economy

Since last summer I’ve been slowly interested in all things Apple because the more I think about it, the more I realize that their products really satisfies my needs and it does it in a way that simplifies my life. I’m also not really looking forward to using Vista, but that’s only part of the reason. I decided to write about my new fanaticism (as my dad calls it) as a way to understand more rationally why I decided to switch when Leopard comes out.

My first contact with Macs was in College, I was under shock that a computer could have a single button mouse but once the teacher showed us how to connect to the server and how to display the contextual menu everything was fine and clear and really easy to use and I had no trouble adapting to this new OS. Sadly, the computers were very cranky G3 that were running far too many high-tech softwares. They had software crashes (”L’application a quitté inopinément” is now a running joke among my TIM friends) and it became hell to see how often we could have them display the reboot OS error message written in 12+ languages. The computers were also used by students who hid their homework video source files maliciously all over the hard drive so as to not loose them. In retrospect, I can see that it was a fatal association. If only the computers were ghosted (is that a verb?) the way the PCs were. I’m guessing the IT guys weren’t too handy with anything other than Windows.

Then at my job I have a sort of dual desk shaped like a boomerang with a PC at one end and a Mac at the other. I’ve seen first hand how stable Macs can be in normal settings and how little maintenance I need to do compared to its neighbour. And saying it’s a normal setting is really not realistic. The mac runs hacked software that was installed before I arrived there and for it to run normally, the clock as to be set at a pre-1970 date! Yet it still works almost perfectly. And for me that’s really where it solves it : it works.

As for the disadvantages of owning I Mac, I find that most of them don’t apply much to me. I know I won’t be able to upgrade every single detail of my machine. But looking back, I never did before. I don’t even know what a motherboard looks like. Besides, I will be getting a laptop. It’s pretty hard to upgrade a laptop at home because of how everything is so snug. I also know that there will be few computer games that will run… but that is why I bought my playstation. I want to play on my console so that my computer can offer me less distractions when I work. Besides, Mac runs TONS of video games if I ever change my mind, including Diablo II the bane of my university existence. All of the softwares I use are platform compatible so that shouldn’t be a problem either. The price is a bit steep but I’m aiming for good specs that should age well. That is also something I noticed about the macs I saw around me : they work perfectly fine longer than equivalent PCs. And finally, it looks pretty dammit. It is a factor even if it’s not at the top of the list. I like things that work well primarily. If they also happen to look good, they totally win over something that also works yet looks ordinary.

EDIT : I forgot another disadvantage : the difficulty of finding hacks for very expensive softwares that I use such as Photoshop, Flash or Maya… Well I found the Student licensing program at university which lets me have the whole Creative Suite/Studio whatever for around 400$ which can then be updated for cheap when the new version comes out. It’s been a year now that I stopped downloading illegally and I really like it. I end up with only music I really like and I never have to search for super foreign codecs and players which keeps my computer faster. As for software I only update when my classes require me to (maya 7.5… thanks Lorien & Guillaume!) and you have to admit that nothing has dramatically changed in photoshop for a few years now. The only software I won’t be getting is Maya, because I plan on never using it again in my whole life, and if I do need to, it will still be on my old PC.

Finally, I’m impatiently waiting for the latest version of the operating system to come out. In the last years, a new version came out every year and now it will have been almost 2 years. It smells like major overhaul. It smells like it will be worth the wait. It also smells like Steve Jobs has a big surprise in his pocket. Leopard could actually be a fully fashioned OS XI and not some small upgrade. They managed to surprise the world with the iPhone, maybe leopard will also bring a lot of surprises. That would explain the deep mysteries shrouding the new apps. And seeing how most macs now come with a camera by default.. it makes me have insane dreams of waving my hands in front of the screen and the motion detecting would be used as an input to navigate just like the mouse. This is 2014 right? ;)