Today I ran across a blog post written by an old friend who I haven’t spoken to in a number of months about the death of his beloved dog. As soon as I read about it, I knew he would be completely devastated. Many of us know the pain of losing a treasured non-human companion, and I am no different. His post inspired me to write a proper eulogy to my Bill, the cat I lost two years ago. A few weeks ago, talking about him to B., I was reduced to tears thinking about him and I feel compelled to memorialize him.

Our family first got Bill when I was 16. Several months earlier, we had to put down our family cat of 15 years, Leo, because he was very sick and it would have been cruel to keep him in so much pain. One day, the following fall, my mother suggested we take a trip to the SPCA if we felt ready for another pet. So my brother, my mom and I went to the SPCA to seek out the newest addition to our family. As soon as we walked in and saw the animals, I spotted Bill. He was just a baby, about six weeks old, and a big ball of fluff with the cutest kitten face you ever saw. The SPCA worker lifted him out of his cage and placed him in my arms and I was in love. I knew at that moment that Bill and I would not be separated. I remember a young girl, about 6 or 7 years old, approaching me and asking timidly if she could hold him. I looked at her and flatly refused. I knew that if I let him go, this little girl’s mom or dad would tell her she could keep him and then he would be gone. So I just never let go of him myself. In the meantime, my brother had found himself a friend as well — an exceptionally beautiful kitten with a white belly, pearl-pink nose and bold striped colouring across her back. So we went home with two kittens that day, Bill and Ruby.

Getting Bill and Ruby happened during a very sad and tumultuous time in my adolescence. The way I saw it at the time, there was not a lot going right with my life and those two cats (but especially Bill) brought me so much companionship and comfort during that time.

As they grew, Bill and Ruby were both precocious. Bill liked to run at top speed toward the house plants and then just as he was about to reach them, he would jump into the air and put all four paws straight head, flying into the plants and hugging them. It drove us nuts because more often than not, he’d knock the plants over, but it was so funny and cute. Bill liked to roll around in people’s hair, especially Robyn’s. If you had long hair and laid on the floor with your hair fanned out, Bill would wander over and roll around in it. This was also unbelievably cute.

Where Ruby was lithe and graceful, ruthless and precise (when it came to hunting birds), Bill was well-intentioned but the most uncoordinated and clumsy cat you’ve ever met. It would be so funny to watch him try to sneak up on his prey, thinking he was being so stealthy even as his enormous bushy tail was wagging back and forth in excitement like a big red warning flag the whole time. Just as he would get close enough to pounce, the bird he was stalking would leisurely fly away, and he would just stare after it in frustration and bewilderment.

Bill loved rolling around in the dirt and playing in vegetation. He had very soft, very bushy fur (we think he was a cross between a Tabby and a Mancun) and he always used to get burrs and thorns caught in his fur. These burrs would stick and grow and eventually get so ridiculous that we had to cut them out of his coat.

Bill was the handsomest cat I ever did see. All cats are ultra cute as kittens, but Bill remained ultra cute into adulthood. His face never really “matured” into that longer-nosed adult cat look, but remained always a little bit pushed in looking and short-nosed, which made him look like a really big kitten even after he was fully grown. He was also fun-loving and such a gentle, sensitive soul. He never hissed (unless another cat threatened Ruby or tried to invade his territory), he never scratched. He loved to rub his face up against my skin and was always so sweet and friendly. He could tell if I was sad and would plop himself in my lap and purr. Sometimes when you’d be watching TV and he’d be sitting in my lap or on your chest, he’d just stand up and stick his ass right in your face, which was stinky but hilarious. When he and Ruby would get rowdy and start chasing each other around, he’d get over-excited and not know his own strength. If he pounced on you in the midst of one of the rambunctious sessions, it was an experience you’d never forget, especially if you were male and Bill landed right on your package.

Bill was a big, furry, gentle beast and I loved him very much. When I moved out of my mom’s house, Bill stayed behind with Ruby, his life partner. It wasn’t long after that my mother moved into a different house, which I think was a bit hard on the cats. The house I grew up in backed onto a fairly large wooded area with a big clearing in the middle of it and the cats came and went outdoors as the pleased, hunting, frolicking, enjoying the landscape. When my mother moved, they were still allowed outside at their pleasure, but there were no good forests or wooded areas literally right outside their door. But I’m sure they still found plenty of ways to amuse themselves. I remember during the move, my mom and brother got all freaked out because they couldn’t find Bill for like 2 days. Turns out, he was freaked out too and he’d found a hiding place in the air ducts to come to terms with his change in venue.

Two years ago, my mom called me and told me that she couldn’t find Bill. He hadn’t come home in a few days and she was starting to worry. Although there had been times in the past when Both Bill and Ruby has stayed away from the house overnight, it was unlike him not to come home for food and snuggles after 2 days. She and my brother started trolling the neighbourhood and they put out an ad in the local paper with his picture. She called me soon after to tell me that a woman had called the house thinking she’d seen Bill. Alex and I went right over, but by that time the cat she thought was Bill was nowhere to be found. We wandered around the area calling his name. I kept expecting him to come bounding out from behind a bush, lumbering clumsily as he always did, to greet the familiar sounds of our voices, but he never did.

By this point he’d been missing nearly a week and we’d all started to fear the worst — the worst being that Bill had sensed it was his time to go and had wandered away to die alone in privacy. Apparently, this is something cats are prone to do. He never returned. Though I know in my heart that Bill is probably dead, sometimes I think maybe he wandered too far away from my mom’s to find his way back and some other family took him in, and that maybe one day he’ll once again find his way back to my mom’s house and just show up.

Wandering off the way he did, I feel as though I never got “closure.” I would give almost anything to snuggle his soft fur, to stroke him, to tell him I loved him, one last time. I feel guilty that in the last year or two of his life, I was not more attentive and affectionate towards him when I visited my mom’s house. I regret all the times I could have petted him and didn’t or could have snuggled him and didn’t because I was too busy playing Scrabble or drinking wine or whatever. I’m sure Bill knew I loved him very much, but nonetheless, I have these regrets.

Since Bill’s been gone, Ruby hasn’t been the same. She’s an old lady now and has 2 young hyperactive dogs to contend with, which I’m sure is part of it. But sometimes it really feels like she misses Bill, the way an elderly widow misses her late husband. She’s been so used to him being there by her side, and suddenly she’s alone.

I’m not a religious person, but I imagine Bill looking down from cat heaven. In cat heaven, Bill has his testicles back. In cat heaven, he’ll be stealthy enough to catch those birds once in awhile. In cat heaven, he’ll be able to eat all the wet food and fresh fish and tasty turkey he wants without ever puking because he gorged himself too much.

Bill, you were a wonderful pet. I probably didn’t tell you enough how much you meant to me, but you are in my heart.

As roommates, my brother and I have a few weekly rituals and one of them is watching “Prison Break” together on Monday nights (at least, when his work schedule permits). This evening, during our viewing of “Prison Break”, he was “flicking” during the commercial breaks and landed on “The Score” (a cable sports channel here in Canada). They were showing WWE.

I oft hear the WWE described as “a soap opera for men” and in many ways it is — it’s completely contrived, badly acted and there are ongoing serialized storylines involving the “characters” but it also involves lots of (simulated) violence and testosterone-hyped posturing, which is I guess where the “for men” part comes in. There is little, if any, actual athleticism or real wrestling skill involved.

What I saw on the screen was this: an enormous man dressed in a black speedo choking (or pretending to choke) a blonde woman in a tight pink bathing suit who was maybe a third of his size. The woman was ostensibly one of the female “wrestlers.” What she was doing “competing” against a man who was clearly much stronger and bigger than she is beyond me. I remarked disgustedly “what the hell is this?” “It’s wrestling,” my brother replied. “Funny,” I replied to him, “but to me that doesn’t look like wrestling. It just looks like a man choking a woman.” Shortly thereafter, a squat older man in regular clothes, whom I assumed was supposed to be “Ashley’s” (the woman who was being choked) manager jumped on top of the other man who was choking her. The larger man threw the manager off of him in a huge body slam onto the mat as the announcer’s voiceover remarked “That’s what he gets for messing with [????] (name of large male wrestler who was choking Ashley).” Thankfully, at this point my brother flicked back to “Prison Break.”

Now, it’s not that I think Ashley was in any actual danger. It is clear that the choking was part of a choreographed performance. But seriously! Has “fake sports entertainment” honestly degenerated to this? Exaggerated body slams between performers of the same gender who are of comparable size and strength and, if the wrestling they were doing was actually real would compete in the same weight class, for the entertainment of a crowd are one thing. Simulated strangulation of a woman who was clearly physically overpowered is something else. That something else being highly disturbing.

Once upon a time in the late 80s, before “professional wrestling” not only openly admitted that it was not really a sport so much as a performance but also actively exploited that fact to make it even more outrageous, there were still soap-y storylines. Mostly they involved Randy “Macho Man” Savage trying to steal George “The Animal” Steel’s girlfriend, Elizabeth. This seems almost quaint now.

There is plenty of evidence of sexism running rampant in the WWE, though oddly enough, there is probably a bit more of a power balance here than in other venues. The female performers do wear outfits that scream out “objectify me!!!” but then again, so do the men. They’re also running around in skintight briefs that leave little to the imagination. And while I personally don’t consider watching grown men in skimpy attire running around in a rubber ring pretending to choke each other and throw each other to the floor to be particularly entertaining, it’s difficult to critique the inherent violence in it with anything other than hypocrisy, considering that some of my favourite television shows and movies are extremely violent and the violence in sports entertainment like the WWE is no less pretend than the violence in “24″ or “GoodFellas”. If anything, it’s such an over the top caricature that it seems almost impossible to take it seriously. And the women beat the crap out of each other too, so I can’t really say that the WWE is promoting the view that violent behaviour is a strict tenet of masculinity. Rather than being sexist, I think the WWE is more misanthropic as a whole.

But it still bothered me to see this simulated choking being portrayed as “harmless entertainment, all in good fun.” Maybe it’s a little too close to the same kind of violence-infused power imbalance that is a staple of mainstream pornography — a man physically dominates a woman and perhaps even hurts her, and this depiction is somehow supposed to be inherently titillating. I mean, I suppose the whole choking thing was a pretext so that her manager could jump in and “defend her honour” or whatever, but nonetheless, the image is sticking in my mind. And not in a good way.

Just won another 45 person SnG on fulltilt. Damn, winning is awesome. When the tournament first started at the first table, the following exchange took place between two of the players (I’m paraphrasing somewhat because I can’t recall it verbatim):

Player 1: I’m going to win because I’m so good!
Player 2: I’m good too, but not as good as my mom. She plays in casinos.
Player 1: Maybe she’s good at poker, but not as good as she was in bed with me last night.

Gwah, I hate this bullshit. The literal “mother fucking” baits. Once we got down to the final six players, I noticed this jerk still hanging around. I wanted to be the one to bust him, but someone else had the honour. I was just glad he didn’t win!

In June of 2005, KRC Research (an American firm) asked 301 online interviewees of both sexes to answer questions about how they play The Game. I read through the summary of the results posted at PokerPlayerNewspaper.com and it contains some interesting statistics related to the difference between men and womens’ poker styles and habits. Obviously, an online study of 301 respondents is certainly not indicative of the poker playing habits of all poker players worldwide, or even within the United States. For one thing, the very fact that the survey was an online survey already predisposes the respondents to being likely to play in online poker rooms, which probably explains the strong numbers for online poker players.

The PPN.com article states that “Given a choice, nearly half of poker players (45 percent) want to play online, and the same amount (45 percent) prefer playing face-to-face with friends.” Personally, I don’t even know if I could assert a distinct preference in terms of either enjoyment or success between online play and home-game play with friends/family. I enjoy them both equally and will usually jump at the chance to participate in either one. I certainly play online a lot more than I play in home games with friends, mostly because my computer is always accessible whenever I want it and there’s always a game going on no matter what the time of day, so I can play whenever I want. Cash-wise, though, I’ve won a lot more in home games. I’ve only won 2 home games in all the home games I’ve played (and I’ll be honest, all of those were at my mom’s house against people who, with the exception of my brother, I would not consider serious players), but those two home games combined were worth about $120. So even though I’ve won and placed in the money in a lot more online tournaments, I play for extremely low stakes online and so the wins don’t add up to as much. Online my ratio of play to place is probably about 1 to 5 or 6, and my ratio of play to almost-place or place (final twelve or better) is likely about 1 to 3 or 4.

Home-games with friends are a different type of play, the social aspect is a lot more prevalent and it’s as much about the process as it is about winning (if not more). Online, you’ve got your eye on the prize at all times, which makes it more like casino play in that particular respect. Online is a good place to practice the numerical and positional aspects of the game, but it’s just plain not as much fun and removes much of the intuitive aspect to winning poker play. I like home-game play and online play equally, but for very different reasons.

According to the survey, women are six times more likely than men to prefer online play to casino play. Only 8 percent of female respondents prefer casino play to online play, compared to 48% of male respondents! One obvious conclusion we could draw from this is that women are intimidated by the environment in a casino, and instead prefer the anonymity and more relaxed atmosphere of online poker. A casino could be intimidating for women for a number of reasons. The most obvious one is that since the majority of poker players are male, chances are that if a girl sits down in a casino poker room, she’ll be literally surrounded by a table of men, which might be a situation some women would prefer to avoid. It’s easy to sit down in front of your computer and play against a bunch of guys who can’t see you, talk to you or use their physical presence to intimidate you. In a casino, not so much. Women might be worried about playing badly and looking stupid in front of a table full of men.

Another intimidating aspect of casino play is “poker etiquette.” Casinos and the people who play in them are fairly strict about unwritten rules of player conduct and if you commit a faux pas at the table, you look like a stupid amateur. Given than, on average, men have been playing poker longer and have more experience, both in a casino and in general, they are probably more well-versed on how to behave at the table.

I’ll admit that I personally have never played in a casino before, which is pretty pathetic considering that I mostly like to think of myself as a serious player. But the reason why really doesn’t have a lot to do with being intimidated or being afraid to play at a table with lots of men. I’m at a point where I believe that I could take on any man I might encounter at the poker table in this city and stand as much a chance at beating him as anyone else. The reason I haven’t gotten too involved in casino play is because of the stakes. 3/6 limit or 1/2 no limit are the cash games typically available here, and even though it’s not huge stakes, those 6 dollar bets and raises add up really quickly. I like online play because I can play for hours on a very small amount of money. Sure, the wins aren’t as impressive cash-wise, but given how much I love to play, I can’t afford to be losing that kind of cash on a regular basis either. Because if I’ve learned anything about poker, it’s that no one can win every time. Successful players can do a lot to minimize their losses and maximize their wins, but no one is immune to a nasty bust.

Besides which, I much prefer tournament style play than cash games, and that’s where I’ve been most successful. Casino tournaments are usually a minimum of $50 buy-in. Online, I can sit down and play 4 low-stakes tournaments in a night for $5 and stay busy at the table for 4 or 5 hours if I want.

The study also notes that while men and women, on average, play poker the same amount of time (60% of men and 62% of women play poker up to 4 times a month — what??? Most people don’t play 4 times a day like me????) twice as many men as women consider themselves “serious players.” Twice as many women as men reported themselves as a “social player.” Almost twice as many men as women (35 versus 18 percent) play poker for money. So is this because women are more sociable and are therefore drawn more to poker for its social aspect, whereas men are more serious and are more drawn to the competitive aspect of the game? I find this doubtful, considering that if given the option to play in a casino where you can interact with others versus online where you’re home alone, women vastly prefer to play online according to the study. My guess is that men just generally takes themselves and their poker more seriously. Poker is dominated by men, and has the image of a “man’s domain” (though this is slowly starting to change), so it is probably natural that men more than women consider themselves to be serious players.

But guess what ladies? All is not lost! 49% of men think it’s sexy when a woman plays poker! Because, you know, being sexy is so damn all-important, so we can all sleep easy knowing that we’re still fuckable even if we play cards. Until we’ve taken their money, that is

80% of female respondents said that “gender is of no consequence in poker.” In terms of a player’s ability to win or aptitude for the game, I agree that being male or female isn’t really of much if any consequence. I think it is of even less consequence online than it is in a casino. But I can’t say I agree that it is of absolutely no consequence. Poker is still a social game that involves a human element, after all, and the current social order as it applies to gender still matters. I think some men may be prone to underestimate the skills and the toughness of female players, assuming they can be pushed around by aggressive betting. If a female player wants to exploit that assumption, it’s not a bad strategy because if she rolls over like a good girl for awhile, watches the boys get into it and picks her spot, she can take some really big pots. If they choose to, female players can exploit the sexual dynamic to gain an edge. I personally think this strategy is cheap, because if I take a bunch of money from men playing poker, I want it to be because I outplayed them, not because I outbreasted them! But in an environment where men are the majority, an attractive woman who is wearing revealing clothing can be a distraction, and some women will take any edge they can get to have a leg up on their opponents. Sexual distraction is a strategy that men simply cannot employ in today’s poker world.

So, what does all this mean? Well, probably not all THAT much. As I mentioned before, this study is hardly a completely random or conclusively representative sample. But that being said, it raises some interesting questions with regard to the future of women’s place in poker, literally. Namely, that we need to start getting out into the casinos, so we can further hone our game, cross that barrier of intimidation and get into where the REAL SERIOUS poker is played and play against EACH OTHER more often!

Actually, in all seriousness, casino play is a goal I have for this year, but until I become gainfully employed again, it’s not really an option. But I need to get some live casino practice in before I enter the Ladies’ Open in Red Deer this fall!

I just won ANOTHER 45-person Sit and Go Tournament on fulltiltpoker.com. I’m on a roll. Hopefully this positive run of luck will extend to the job I interviewed for today.

So today is “Blog Against Sexism” day, and I figured I should get off my ass to write something for the occasion. I’ve had this post brewing in my head since way back in the summer when I was on blogging hiatus due to medical reasons. My health issues were a nightmare, to be sure, but the one positive thing that came out of them was a new insight into my body’s place in my life.

Western culture is completely and undeniably obsessed with the female body: how it looks, what it weighs, its size, its shape, its potential for sexual gratification (of others and of its owner), the ways it can be adorned, sliced, diced and decorated to make it more attractive and more useful as an object of lust or adoration, how much and what parts of it are acceptable for public consumption, its reproductive organs and most of all, the myriad of ways it can be exploited to make money. Ironically, the one aspect of the female body that our society doesn’t really care about – at least not in any kind of relevant public way – is its role as a vessel for the meaningful, fulfilling and productive lives of women. This is a role that every woman relies on her body to perform every single day of her life, but a role that few women spend enough time nurturing or appreciating.

The closest we ever come to appreciating the female body in this context is admiring certain women for what their bodies can do. For example, we admire female athletes for the way their bodies perform impressive feats of physical strength, endurance and agility. Unfortunately, even in this context, the actual athletic accomplishments of these women are often minimized by the public in favour of a focus on their physical beauty and the ways their athletic pursuits have caused their bodies to look good and be more sexually appealing. This is exemplified by magazines like Sports Illustrated, Maxim and Playboy, who regularly feature swimsuit, lingerie, near-nude or nude pictorials of high-profile female athletes. You can bet neither the editors of these magazines nor their readership are ultimately interested in these women for their accomplishments.

While I’ve always recognized this at an objective level, it never really hit home for me in a tangible way or became personal until I became a chronic pain sufferer. Like most women, I took for granted my body as a vessel for my meaningful, fulfilling and productive existence. Instead, despite my recent feminist consciousness and efforts to break this cycle, my thoughts about my body (which have been, like many [most?] women’s, a virtually unrelenting presence at some level of my internal monologue in every minute of every day) were primarily centered on the ways in which it either did or didn’t live up to our cultural standard of beauty. And we all know that how successfully a woman’s body achieves beauty or sexiness or appeal strongly influences almost every other aspect of her life in the public sphere.

When I first became ill, I spent a lot of time worrying about how my physical limitations would impact the way my body looked. While I was constipated from heavy pain medications and spent too many days laying on the couch or in bed with tears streaming down my face, I was obsessed with the fact that I was too weak and in too much pain to exercise. I agonized over the mild weight gain I experienced due to this and also to the medications I was taking. At first, this caused me an almost equal amount of emotional stress as the actual pain. I also worried about the fact that my constant pain and fatigue had all but killed my sex drive, and about how my physical and emotional misery was eroding my partner’s attraction to me little by little.

I was in a situation where I could not work, I could not do many of the activities I enjoyed, where I was putting harsh chemicals into my body to deal with my condition, where I withdrew socially from family and friends because I could not function in daily life without at least one crying freak out every day. And all I could do was obsess about how my ass was getting big and I was losing progress in my workout routine. Sad, right?

Very. But eventually I realized that in a way, this reaction could easily be considered completely normal. After all, we are socialized to view the roles of women’s bodies (including our own) in a certain hierarchical structure of importance that goes something like this:

#1, first and foremost, is the role of a woman’s body as a sexual object. It’s not hard to figure this out considering how a sexualized view of the female body is ubiquitous in our society. In fact, as far as the public sphere is concerned, a view of the female body in anything OTHER than a sexualized context (the first question we ask is “would I/you/we/they fuck her?” Whether the answer is yes or no, we can’t move on until this question is answered) is completely marginalized. Unless, of course, it is functioning in the context of the second level of the hierarchy …

#2. The role of the female body as a vessel of motherhood. Here we have the snakepit that is the madonna/whore dichotomy. If your body isn’t being used to fuck, it damn well better be used to pop out some offspring. Not to mention the battle over reproductive rights.

And finally, coming in a distant third …

#3. The role of the female body as a vessel for the actual lives of women. This is not to say that a woman’s bodily sexuality or a woman’s role as a mother is not part of her actual, whole, fulfilling life. But our culture has so compartmentalized and dichotomized these two roles that the third is barely even acknowledged, let alone considered of equal importance.

As the weeks went by and I remained unable to fully participate in the life I had known, I came to realize that this third is the most crucial of them all. When a woman’s body is healthy and unhindered, in whatever context is normal for her, even if she is not having sex or having babies, she is still entirely capable of leading a fulfilling life and participating in the activities that satisfy her. But take that away … put her in constant pain, where her body is now her enemy, that makes her crazy and slowly sucks away her will to live … it doesn’t matter how sexy she is or how many children her uterus has incubated. At a fundamental level, her quality of life is degraded and the function of her body in the other two roles can perhaps provide her a degree of satisfaction and fulfillment IN SPITE of her condition, rather than in harmonious conjunction with it.

I find it tragic that as women, we spend so much time denigrating our bodies, punishing them and hating them for not looking a certain way, for not being the perfect sexual object, instead of celebrating every single moment that our bodies enable us to live our lives.

Our bodies are our vessels, our vehicles, for the highways of our existences, and it’s high time that we as individuals, as well as our culture as a whole, stopped compartmentalizing the female body and started celebrating it. I’m not saying that my experience with chronic pain means I don’t still have “fat days” or don’t still struggle with my body image. But what is has done is given me an honest appreciation for how much my body does for me, how important its well-being is to my quality of life and the fact that there is a lot more to its existence than whether men find it attractive or whether it will ever bear children or whether my ass looks fat in those pants.

“Poker is a man’s world. That may not always be the case, but right now, it is.” - Jennifer Harman, whom many regard as the top professional female poker player in the world.

I just won my first 45-person sit and go money tournament on fulltiltpoker.com. I bought in for $1.25, outlasted 44 other players and walked away with $17.00. My previous personal bests in 45pSnG were one 6th place finish and one 3rd place finish. It’s not like it’s even that much of a profit, but I am more pumped about the actual accomplishment of finishing first. I’ve taken some HORRIBLE beats in the last couple of tournaments I played, but today, luck was on my side, I made a couple of ballsy moves to elbow out other people and once I became the chip leader I finished strong and played my stack the way the big stack is meant to be played.

Today is a victory in my poker playing career. I am seriously pumped! I was starting to get discouraged for awhile but now I am filled with a renewed sense of poker playing purpose.

My winning hand was pocket Kings. I caught a set on the flop and the board paired 5s to make the full house. Hurray for Cowboys! Hurray for poker!

It’s 5 o’clock in the fucking morning and all is very far from well in Kiki-land at this present moment. For some reason my computer is no longer recognizing my external hard drive. Yes, folks, this is the same external hard drive that houses MY ENTIRE DIGITAL MUSIC LIBRARY THAT TOOK ME MONTHS TO RIP FROM MY OWN CD COLLECTION / YEARS TO ACCUMULATE THROUGH DOWNLOADS. Not to mention all the music I’ve traded with friends over the last year. It also had important installer files for software programs I need for my freelancing work. If my laptop ever decides to fry or I ever need to completely re-install the operating system from scratch, I NEED THOSE FILES.

I’m in the middle of listening to music from the drive and the next thing I know, the disk won’t mount and it is telling me THAT THE FUCKING DISK ISN’T FORMATTED!!!!! It shows up in the device manager, but it won’t mount the volume information or file structures. Neither data recovery software or backup/restore software WILL EVEN RECOGNIZE THAT THE DISK EXISTS.

I try to update the drivers and it tells me that it can’t FIND the drivers for my hardware EVEN THOUGH I JUST FUCKING DOWNLOADED THEM FROM THE ACOMDATA SITE. I try to uninstall the device and it just keeps reinstalling after each reboot as a generic usb storage device without any manufacturer information, which means that it won’t recognize the appropriate drivers.

And of course I discover all this as I’m on my way to bed after what was quite a productive day in terms of the Rouge project, which is really coming close to the end. All I want to do is put some script files onto my hard drive and BOOM, IT GOES COMPLETELY BESERK.

God dammit, the whole reason why I got an external in the first place was so I would have a safe place to store and back up lots of data without taxing the local disk of my laptop. This is very distressing.

I have contacted the manufacturer, but I don’t exactly have a lot of faith in companies that only offer e-mail tech support. Real time chat tech support is one thing, but when they tell you “3 business days” I start getting worried. So after spending 2.5 hours trying to figure out if there is any way I can fix this problem myself (without any real success), I am wide awake at 5:30 in the morning and MAD AS HELL.

The LAST thing I need is to spend money on data recovery for this problem. GOD I AM SO PISSED OFF.

I have a very ominous feeling about the whole thing. You know the old superstition about trouble coming in threes? Well, in the last 2 months I know of two people who lost crucial data due to weird shit. Michael, my client and friend who is dating my close friend Emily, is a photographer. His external hard drive went beserk and he lost a ton of digital image files, many of which he did not have backup copies of, and was unable to recover any of the data. Then my friend Dave had some weird iPod issues when he plugged it into a computer with an old version of iTunes and lost like 30GB of digital music, including a whole whack of stuff he got from a friend in Vancouver and did not have backed up elsewhere. I think I’m #3 in this latest episode of “six degrees of digital hell”.

I’m afraid I will have to bite the bullet and reformat the drive, and hope that it isn’t a physical problem like the drive itself malfunctioning. One positive thing is that my friend Robyn literally copied my entire music library to her external just after Christmas and I think she still has the entire collection on her drive, which means I can reformat and still recover most of my music. I don’t think I have added anything too significant that can’t be easily replaced since I shared the files with her.

The installer files are another story. I might never be able to get that stuff back. Oh, I am going to cry!

There is a new trend happening at nightclubs in Edmonton: selling bottled water from behind the bar and forcing patrons to buy it by refusing to serve them glasses of tap water for free. I admit that I don’t frequent every club in the city, but two of the bars I commonly patronize - New City Suburbs and Purple Onion - have this policy in place. They’re probably not the only ones now, and certainly won’t be in the future once other club owners catch on to this trend. And while it’s unlikely to deter me from continuing to patronize them in the future, it still pisses me off. I’ll tell you why.

For one thing, it’s a blatant rip-off and a grab for even more money from establishments that are already gouging their customers with the mark-up on their product. If the bar is serving you a truly crappy, bottom-of-the-barrel house brand liquor (you know I’m talking to you, PO) at $4.25 an ounce, their markup is about 85% on what the average customer spends per ounce to buy a bottle of that same crappy house brand in a standard retail liquor store. Once you consider that these nightclubs are buying their crappy house liquor wholesale from warehouses at even lower prices per ounce, their markup is more like 90-95%. Even when you’re buying a slightly better, semi-premium brand like the serve at Suburbs, you’re paying $4.75 an ounce for what you could buy retail for about $0.80 an ounce. That’s an 83% markup on retail cost, and again, once you consider wholesale, it’s probably more like 88%-92%.

I know, I know — when you go out drinking at the bar, you EXPECT to pay at least an 80-90% markup on booze. And that’s fine. But since they’re making so much money from selling liquor, IS IT REALLY FUCKING NECESSARY TO CHARGE ME FOR A WATER??????? It just seems so … greedy. Maybe businesses are supposed to be greedy … but I dunno. This whole water thing seems awfully harsh. Especially since they’re marking THAT up like 75% on the retail cost too. While $2 isn’t completely outrageous to pay for bottled water, it still seems utterly ridiculous to me that patrons should have to pay for bottled water at all when tap water is plentiful, easily served and necessary during times of drunken debauchery.

Which brings me to my second point. When you’ve been sucking back overpriced booze and dancing for hours, you get dehydrated. Dehydration is one of the worst side effects of alcohol consumption and it’s really important to stay hydrated while drinking. Not doing so has bad results. It makes people more likely to be sick and do things like vomit or pass out while drinking. Water also mitigates alcohol’s effects and the speed at which the body metabolizes alcohol, which makes it less likely that patrons who are drinking steadily but also well hydrated will become violent, belligerent or lose control of their faculties.

Any establishment which serves alcohol in this province has a legal obligation to offer the purchase of some kind of food to its patrons, even if that is just potato chips, in order to mitigate the effects of alcohol and the speed at which it is metabolized. I believe that they should be similarly obligated to offer free tap water. And even if the government doesn’t think bars should have to serve complimentary tap water to their patrons, it’s still the socially responsible thing to do.

I suppose the argument of establishments who have a “bottled water only” policy is that letting their patrons drink their tap water for free is an unnecessary expense that the bar has to incur. They have to pay for all their water usage, whether that water is being consumed by drunk customers or used to wash glassware, plates and the floor. I suppose this makes sense, although again it seems awfully greedy, given how much water these places use overall and also the huge profit margin they have on alcohol. Is it really such a burden to give a person who’s spent $50 or $60 on liquor a few cents worth of tap water through the course of a night? And if they’re that worried about the effect it has on the bottom line, why not charge customers a more than reasonable 10 or 25 cents to buy a big glass of ice water? I still think charging for tap water is stingy, but if the bar needs to recover any costs incurred by giving free water, then this seems much more fair and affordable for patrons than forcing them to buy bottled water at $2 a pop.

I don’t object to bars selling bottled water at all. Some people prefer bottled water and would still choose to buy it even if tap water was freely available, and its great for a bar to give them that option. But when bars force bottled water on their patrons by being stingy with their tap water, it crosses the line for me from reasonable revenue generating practices (such as marking up booze like crazy) to just plain greedy.

This is my first post in a lonnnngggggg time, and a lot has happened.

My eligibility to collect Employment Insurance for medical reasons expired in November. Thankfully, I discovered IMS therapy about a month prior to that, and for the most part, my back problems are no longer holding me back from working or computer activities. I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my naturopath, Dr. David Richmond at St. Albert Naturopathic Clinic, for his care and attention during my difficult time. Thanks as well to Maloney Chiropractic for referring me to him. There are still times when I experience back pain, mostly after I’ve been working long hours, but it is much more manageable now and I no longer feel held hostage by my pain.

Speaking of working long hours, my other announcement is that I’ve officially launched my own web and media design business! It’s called Code Word Design & Media. My very first client was my friend Emily’s boyfriend Michael, who is a freelance photographer in London. Check out his site! I also snagged my second, local client just before Christmas and am currently in the process of finishing up a large-scale web development project for Rouge Lounge Nightclub & Restaurant. For veteran Edmontonians, Rouge Lounge is the new face of Rose Bowl Pizza, which has been a fixture in Edmonton for almost 30 years.

I’m very excited about the launch of this project, as it it presented many challenges for me that allowed me to expand my skill set and grow as a designer. I did a fair amount of the work in Flash, which is a technology I didn’t have much experience in prior to this project. Last spring, I took a 2 day course at NAIT that taught the basics of Flash (and I do mean the basics), but I haven’t really had much of a chance to flex my new Flash muscles until this project came along. What I discovered is that I LOVE Flash! I’ve really taken to the technology and the foundations I took away from the course were very useful to expand my skills simply by applying them to an actual project. I also did a lot of back-end development work with PHP and mySQL. Although I didn’t write most of the PHP I used from scratch, I heavily modified some free open-source scripts I found online, which also taught me a great deal about those technologies as well.

I’m very proud of the work I’ve done for Rouge Lounge. It’s definitely the most impressive and technically difficult website I’ve ever made. I expect that the official site launch will take place sometime within the next week or week and a half. I think we are planning a launch party at the club for early March, so I will post more details when I have them.

Because I’ve been spending all my time on my client’s site, I haven’t had any time to work on the new website for my new business, but I have a solid prototype worked out and at this point it’s a matter of “filling in the blanks.” But as most people who know me will tell you, I’m a content diva and there’s a LOT of blanks to fill. So I will also post more details on that when I have a better idea of when my new site will be up and running.

As you also may have noticed, I’ve got a new look here at Saucebox as well. I never like my look to get too stale, and this blog was long overdue for a change-up. As you may or may not know, I LOVE pink. When I was 17, I developed an intense love of bright, vibrant pink. This love gradually grew to include pretty much all shades of pink. Ever since I was 19 and first learned how to make websites, my websites have been pink. Because I feel like pink is a part of me, using it in my designs always made me feel like they really expressed who I am. When I first built this blog, believe it or not, I was slightly sick of pink. Every website I’d made for myself for almost ten years has been pink and I felt like I needed to broaden my horizons into other colour palettes. But after having a yellow and red blog for over a year (yellow is not a colour I’m typically fond of, which is strange), I decided that it was high time I re-introduced some pink back into my digital life. Hence, the new Saucebox.

I’m also hoping that the assault of pink may deter some of my more irritating male readers who’ve been sending me tales of and justifications for how much they LOVE to grab random womens’ asses from further visits.

So that’s the update on me. I’m really hopeful for the future of my new business, but unfortunately unless I make some major headway in getting a couple of new clients in the next month, I’m afraid I’m going to have to start looking for a more regular job when the Rouge project is complete. Being unable to work and collecting EI for 4 months left me pretty broke and pretty much all the money I’ve made from the Rouge project is already spoken for. So if any of you fancy taking pity on me and giving me a job, please feel free!!! Job-hunting sucks, especially in my field. The positions are relatively rare and heavily competed for. There are lots of liberal arts grads who are looking for well-paying and secure communications positions and the pickins are kinda slim. If anyone has any good job hunting advice or leads, let me know!!!

OK, I’m done for now. But on a parting note, although I’ve said this before, I’m going to try and make more of an effort to blog regularly now that I’m better. I’ve been focused on Rouge to the exclusion of pretty much everything else, but that project will soon be wrapped up and I think it’s time for me to start making an effort to write every day again, even if every entry is not entirely serious or even interesting. So if I don’t follow through on my plans, I expect all of you to harass me mercilessly and hold me accountable.