October 2003 Archives

For a while now I've had a plan to aquire dual citizenship. If I could gain citizenship in canada, and then have a canadian passport, it's much easier for me to travel to & work in any other former british territory (australia most notably).

To become a canadian citizen, you must reside in canada for 4 years, then take a test and espouse the virtues of being a canadian. To gain entry into canada for that long of a period you have to be a skilled worker which consists largely of having gone to college and not falling down easily. You also have to prove that you have the funds to establish a life in canada (presumably that means rent a house until you get a job). And finally you have to learn french. Seems a little complicated.

In contrast, chad had me look up the requirements to become a jamaican citizen; live there for 5 years and show up with two passport size photos and you're in.

Hmm frozen north or white sand beaches, tough call.

One of the duffman threads seems to have become a place for people to share links and info, so I've created a quick link to the comments section on the right. Anyway.

Movies seem to inspire my travel desires more than they probably should. A brief cameo in The Bourne Identity makes me want to see greece. The recent aquisition of the Indiana Jones trilogy renews my interest in Egypt and the Morocco (oddly skipping Tunisia, but no matter). Others, but that's boring. Instead I've come up with a goal.

Shy of a vow - which should be kept at all costs - but more than a resoultion since every new year everyone makes them and by ever february everyone's broken them :) From the moment of my next employment for the length of a year I'm going to force a waiting period on my purchases, a week perhaps, enough time to make certain I won't better enjoy the capacity to travel than I would whatever I'm planning on buying. I doubt very much it'll stop every purchase I plan to make - I do have a pention for gizmos - but maybe it'll help. My camera craves desert.

Just thinking aloud, in a manner of speaking.

Three things. tre. a trifecta...

Traffic court again today; no murderous trio in orange jumpsuits chained together, but certainly a fair share of lawyers. I was too worried about the outcome of my ticket the first time to fully appreciate the process. Nearly everything was decided between the lawyers before the judge even entered the room. I commented on this to my attorney, he sort of chuckled and said that, "yeah, it really is a horse trade"... whatever exactly that means.

Unemployment in two weeks, it'll be nice to be able to collect. That may be difficult to do, however, if people keep calling me from out of the blue to offer me full time jobs. I ruled this first one out pretty quickly since they hadn't yet grasped the concept of leaving all 7 digits of their phone number when asking me to call back.

Lastly, may as well abuse this site's temporary popularity (hooray for duffman). I think I've translated this correctly, but to make sure, does the following latin mean what I think it means?:
Viator Terra. Petitor Veritas. Amator.

There appears to be quite a few people actively creating duffman costumes, a couple had questions and took various means to contact me about them, so I figured I'd make things easier.

If you have any questions or want pointers or wonder where I bought something, just email me at duffman at this domain (sorry, no link, spammers and all that). I'll be happy to share anything I can.

In return, or even if you just want to, I'd like to see how any of the costumes you made turned out. So if you feel like sending a digital pic of you at the party, or steps during creation, or whatever - it would be cool to see them. If I get enough (or any really) and you don't mind, I'll post them.

Wow, two posts in one day when I'm not traveling, do I hear the sound of four horsemen approaching?

I think I need to start a gallery of some of the spam I get - the few that manage to make it through both sets of filters that is. Already discussed was the Karmic spam, but I got another last night that's just sort of baffling. I'm really certain what, if anything, they're trying to sell; but the english is just so butchered that it sort of resembles bad haiku. It's certainly poetic.

Hello lovely Drhobbes!
I believe you tired today from innumerable stupid and silly letters?
I'm fully confident its correct? First-rate and unbelievable gossip for you now!
Open this link to stop from this outstanding, slow and foolish letters forever!

The funny thing is, given some of the work related email I got that day, I really had tired from the innumerable stupid and silly letters :)

And now Zack presents a short list of things to do on a 40 minute commute.

1. Listen to the radio
2. Get bored with the radio and turn it off
3. Take spare bungy cords you happen to have lying in the passenger seat, attach them to your stearing wheel and drive the entire way to work maneuvering your car with a pair of elastic reigns.
4. Try to resist the urge to yell "hiyah" and flick the reigns.
5. Fail at that.
6. Don't try to park using the reigns.

It was probably more amusing than it should have been.

Okay, I've gotten quite a few emails over the last week reguarding the duffman costume - no surprise really given the impending halloween (interesting what email addresses people guess at to contact me though :) ). Anyway, by far the most requested item is the Duff logo. I got mine via a Google image search and a little time with Paint Shop Pro, but to make life easier on the next generation of duff, I'm posting a word document with the images in it. It's the word document I used to print the labels so everything is all sized correctly for 2x4 labels (at least I think that's the size). The image should be pretty easily extracted for the hat and shirt - if not, well, it's not exactly a high definition image anyway so you can probably just fake it.

Anyway, download the document (559 k).

And for all of you duff costume makers, it only took me about a weekend, the hardest part is probably going to be finding the gloves and boots. For the boots, white spray paint definately flakes so try white shoe polish, for the gloves I just used a pair of cheapy fake fleece gloves which still allowed me to grab things but didn't make your hands stink like rubber gloves.