Mike DeWolfe : The Daily Edition

Police and Princess Mary Originally uploaded by dewolfe0001 . What's happening in Victoria on a Sunday morning? Brunch? Garage sales? Maybe a speed trap? This police cruiser is part of a huge team of police and forensics people who have descended upon this hill near the Johnson St. Bridge; across the street from a new housing project called, Dockside Green; and Ocean Pointe Resort. It's conjectured that the death is a suspicious death and likely related to the raging drug problem in the downtown core. Just up the road, there is Payless/Shell gas station. Its bathroom is popular place for junkies to shoot up. I know City of Victoria workers and contractors who have had to clean up this hill and the nearby brush. Drifters and neo-anarchists will stash their stuff in his bushes and leave hypodermics pointing out of the shrubs like makeshift pungee sticks. Why not? Three blocks from this site, is AIDS Vancouver Island and its needle exchange. They offer clean rigs to addicts so ...

To-do lists piss me off. Not having them, but keeping items on them. I have all of these great ideas but they come so fast and furious that I can barely get one idea fleshed out before the next idea comes along: tech, art, diabolical plans-- you name it. I have a whole bunch of ideas and I have put a halt on new things until the old stuff is out of the way. Here's the stuff on the go with me now: I got WAPAlerts.com out the door. It's now merrily chugging away sucking down RSS feeds and turning them into posts. All filtered and screened as I set-up. I went to my orientation meeting for Cinevic . Well, I went; I still have to do volunteer hours and then pay up. I posted items to Etsy . They're weird, they're made of sculpey. They're all me. I started playing with AJAX. First thing out the gate: AJAX tie-in of XML to the Google Maps API. I've been actively working up my Linux/Apache skill sets. It's kind of like pulling teeth, but I only have so many teeth t...

I'll have more to report of this later.

On Saturday morning, while we awaited the repair of the van, we went to the Victoria Bug Zoo. It's really swell: a whole of lot cool bugs put into what amounts to a large room with a bunch of aquariums and glass cases. In one part of the zoo, an ant farm is segmented and joined via clear plastic tubes. Over in one corner is a brightly colored emergency exit with a big sign that reads, "Do Not Open Door: Alarm Will Sound." What I found at the zoo was the spectacle of natural selection. Not in the bugs that mimic leaves or the spiders that lay in wait. I saw natural selection practiced in the human species. Take this family. Let's call them the Numptyfochs: Father Numpty . 18" neck with an IQ of 54. Rep dude! Rep! Mother Numpty. Leaning towards athletic, wears a sort of a sash (wait for more on this). School Age Numpty #1 and #2. Boys about 7 or 8. Mother's hair and someone's brains (maybe recessive genes surfaced.) Toddler Numpty. This boy looks like a ...

Old businesses aren't wising up like new business. This is nowhere more prominent that in the industry of turning out merchandise based around intellectual property: books, software, movies, music. IP Manufacturing. Someone dreams it up. But an industry pipes it to consumers. A friend of mine is a Baen Books online subscriber. For a small fee (about the price of two books), he has access to new books published electronically and access to old books that may be hard to find. For a voracious reader like my friend, it's a good deal. Other publishers haven't figured it out. Here's some publication math-- some math that the publishers have forgotten: $20.00 - The cost of a book $11.00 - The price the book seller pays (they sometimes pay more with a guarantee of being to return unsold copies. $10.00 - The price the publisher charges the book distributor. $4.00 - The price to print the book (to fire blank sheets through a machine and have it come out full o' words) $1.20 -...

Are you ready for Coca-Cola Blak? Coca-Cola hopes to win new customers and boost its sagging soft drink revenues by adding fresh-brewed hot coffee to its product line. Last week, I was a grocery store I stood there agog at the variety change in the last 30 years. In 1976 there was Coke. Now there's Coke, C2, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Vanilla Coke, Cherry Coke and some of these variety have caffeine free options. Why? Desperation. From an AFP report: "We are working on a brand called Far Coast which is basically hot beverages. It's part of our innovation pipeline... It's hot teas, lattes, coffees." Coke has leased a 4,000 square feet retail space in Toronto's tony Yorkville district for its first coffee shop, according to reports. There they will test Far Coast's boldness against a dozen coffee chains, including five nearby Starbucks locations, a Second Cup, three Timothy's and two Tim Horton's, as well as several...

Flashback to 2002. I was financially screwed. I was part of a tech co-op. The business was slowly falling apart. I was earning a lofty $6000/year +/-. I had one deadbeat client that owned a hair salon . They owed me like $100 for web hosting. So, I sent them a bill. Then a second bill. Then a third. Then I phoned one of the salons and left a message that if we weren't paid, it would have to go to collections. The manager got all pissy, left this pathetic note but paid. Then two weeks later, I got a call from the provincial sales taxpeople: they wanted to audit my business. Weiner boy called down a PST audit on me. So, they went over my books and found that I forgot to charge some people tax. On some of the equipment that I had yet to paid for, I failed to pay PST. In other words, equipment that I could not pay the seller for, I had to pay the tax for. They handed me an $1100 bill that I had to pay. Yay! Fast forward to today. I am watching the news. There is a woman who was the res...

In the wake of the Tim Horton's suicide immolation on Sunday, I thought I'd make a funny video because I am, well, pathetic. Where to look? The Internet Archive . It has some seriously cool stuff and some of it is issued under Creative Commons. Here's an example of how you could have a "free" night at the movies: Experiments in the Revival of Organisms (1940) - This disturbing film records the successful experiments in the resuscitation of life to dead animals (dogs), as conducted by Dr. S.S. Bryukhonenko at the Institute of Experimental Physiology and Therapy, Voronezh, U.S.S.R. Director: D.I. Yashin. Camera: E.V. Kashina. Narrator: Professor Walter B. Cannon. Introduced by Professor J.B.S. Haldane. Duck and Cover (1951) - Selected for the 2004 National Film Registry of "culturally, historically and aesthetically significant" motion pictures. Famous Civil Defense film for children in which Bert the Turtle shows what to do in case of atomic attack. ...

This is a cool shot of the bottom of the planet Jupiter. If I get a time machine, I might take this back to Galieo and say, "Hah!" tags: astronomy, Jupiter, photos

New from the makers of Operation: Star Wars Edition. Use your laser tweezers on the fallen Jedi Knight and nacent Sith Lord: Darth Vader. This classic Operation game is reborn with the addition of Darth Vader on the table! Dig deep into the Dark Lord of the Sith by removing his symbols of power: he's got Deflecting Palm, Ominous Breathing, Rebel Scum Detector, Deadly Duel, and many more! Don’t set off the buzzer, or the Dark Lord of the Sith's eyes will light up and you will hear him scream in pain! "NNNOOOOOOOOOO!!" I now know why Vader turned evil: he had a TIE fighter wedged in him somewhere.

Victoria has bike lanes all over the place. It's a really bicyclist friendly city. So what do bicyclists do when given all of these bike lanes, bike turn only intersections and all of this? They ignore them. What's worse? Stupid bicyclists actively make it worse for the few responisble ones out there. No? Witness below my photo essay of Victoria bicyclists on a busy Saturday afternoon on the TransCanada Highway (Hwy 1) (see my Flickr slideshow here ) Start with two dumb bicyclists... What happens when they encounter alot of pedestrians plus a bus? After that, they encounter just two pedestrians: How can a bicyclist deal with this problem? Wait? Move across the street to join the rest of the Northbound traffic? Get off his bike? No way! He's going to bike down the oncoming lane along one of the busiest roads in the city on the busiest day of the week. Where were these chuckleheads going? What was so important that they'd risk driving down oncoming traffic like Gene Hack...

This summary is not available. Please click here to view the post.