I bought a new cellphone about a year and a half ago from Telus and it worked really well, except it had a bad habit of refusing to boot up if I ever turned it off or the battery was allowed to die. As a result, I always had to make sure it stayed on and the battery had at least 25% charge left, just to be safe.

A few weeks ago, I went to Calgary for a NIN concert and I took a few photos when my phone was already dangerously low on battery life. Sure enough, before the night was over, my phone was completely dead and it wouldn't turn back on, even if I plugged it in.

After some googling, I found out this is a pretty common problem with this particular model of phone, and apparently Telus offers an extended warranty for this specific problem that will last until October or November 2008. The only catch is that they can't do the service locally, and I have to mail my phone away for 2-3 weeks.

So after some more searching I found that you can force a reboot if you plug the phone into your computer via USB if you have the proper cable (CA-53), which I had, but threw away a couple months ago while thinking "I'll never use this".

So it's been 2-3 weeks since I had a working phone, and I could have shipped it to Telus and gotten it back by now, but I am too stubborn to do something like that. And in this time, I've realized that apart from the occasional text message I don't really use my phone very often. It's just sitting on my desk collecting dust. One less uncomfortable brick in my pocket.

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I used to be a fan of the webcomic Spamusement, until the writer eventually ran out of motivation and gave up (it's also kind of ironic, the website is now completely filled with ads). The comic took regular spam email subject lines and turned them into hilarious single-panel comics. Some were pretty funny. I don't get a whole lot of spam myself, but a couple months ago I started receiving some pretty awesome ones. This is the one that started it all:

Sweet! It didn't take long before even more gems found their way into my inbox:

And finally...

Usually they didn't even contain any links, just a nice little message for me to read every day. It got to the point where I was actually disappointed when my inbox didn't contain any spam that day. Unfortunately, I haven't received any funny ones in a while, but I'll share them when I do.

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I was looking at websites in the wayback machine and I decided to dig up some of my older projects from when I went to NAIT in 2004. I found this flash game that I used as one of my final projects. Play it here. It's basically like lunar lander, except you have to dodge asteroids while collecting fuel. It's actually incredibly difficult and everyone complained how impossible it was. But if you try really hard, there is an ending. It's even still on Newgrounds. It originally had a scoreboard, but it no longer works.

I also made a 3D render of some kind of tentacle monster in a dumpster of a dark alley. It was originally animated with falling rain and a flaming trashcan next to the dumpster, but I can't find those original files anymore. This is the only thing that remains.

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I came up with an idea for a website. It is a really good idea. This is the idea: The idea is somebody sends you to www.jerktowne.com if they think you are a jerk, and in doing so, your IP address is collected and you are forever labeled as a jerk. Forever. Except if your IP address changes, of course. I wish there was some way to uniquely and permanently identify every single user on the internet, just so my website idea will work better.

Eventually the dream is that there will be a single database of all the jerks on the internet, and any website owners out there will be able to access my database and restrict jerks from viewing all their cool content.

Jan 17, 2010 Update: Links removed because Jerktowne is no more :(

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That's right. I know I'm a little late on the blog bandwagon, but I am proud to say that I can now publish my inner most thoughts and feelings on the internet.

This is also kind of an experiment of my own to see just how long I can keep it going. I am going to try to keep things lighthearted and whimsical, and try not to regurgitate stuff I find on digg or spiral into ridiculous rants. That way, I won't find myself looking back a year from now and sneakily editing old posts so that I don't look like a huge jerk.

So try to check back every so often. I will be monitoring my traffic, and if it's really low I'll get sad.

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