A Few Quick Notes 265

-Today was a pretty standard winter day, not particularly great, but not bad either. Temperatures rose to about zero, and then dropped to a few degrees below freezing as the afternoon progressed. We now seem to have settled in to a nice equilibrium at about -7 (it doesn't take to long for me to assert that we have reached a temperature equilibrium).

-As some of you may have noticed, Neil doesn't tend to post all that frequently. I find this somewhat bothersome because the idea behind Montifax was that it would be a joint venture, not simply a blog that Neil started and that I continued.

Anyway, over the past number of years I have tried to get Neil to post more frequently through a number of means. Of course I started by asking him nicely, and occasionally dropping hints as post scripts to email. More recently I have just been telling him that he should be posting more (using 'please' didn't seem to work so I dropped it from the routine to conserve energy). It seems that none of the methods I have tried so far have had any noticeable effect.

Just this evening I think that I may have come up with something that might get him to post a little more. Not only did I suggest that his lack of posting indicated that he was yellow (though I didn't use those words), I decided to challenge him to a blog-off, a competition to see who could post more in a given period of time. I thought that I turned it into a game and added points I might be able to get him to post more (he has such a hard time resisting games).

Anyway, after a few brief negotiations we seem to have preliminarily settled on a few ground rules and parameters.

Neil gets 5 points for each post he makes while I only get 1, he seemed unwilling to participate without me handicapping myself.

Each post, to qualify for the blog-off, must be at least 30 words long and tagged (within reason). I also feel that there should be at least some content, though who am I to talk, I post content-free crap all the time.

The event will run for the duration of February, so he has a few hours to mentally prepare himself.

An additional condition that I think that we should add is that for a post to count a tally of the score must be included (though this wouldn't count towards the word total).

Hopefully I will have a few more details in the coming hours or days.

-For those of you interested in learning a little more about the video New Townie Man that I posted yesterday you can listen to this CBC Morning Show interview with Roger Maunder and Colleen Power, the makers of the video.

-Today is a big day for me, I have consumed what may be my last Flintstones multivitamin tablet. While these are targeted at children, I have continued to consume them for years. Then, all of a sudden a few weeks ago, I just became sick of having my mouth filled with a sugary substance every time I had a vitamin and consequently decided to finish off the bottle and move on to swallowable multivitamins. Now I have to finish my chewable vitamin C so that I can go all swallowable and not taint my mouth with vitamin flavour.

-I baked a Texas Sheet Cake this evening. The downside of the decision to undertake this task was that it meant I had to head out to the grocery store to pick up some icing sugar. Only after I returned from the store did I realize that I also needed some milk, causing me to return to the store for a third time today.

-Though I have a fair bit of work that I should be doing, I don't seem to be doing a very good job at focusing on it. Maybe once I get this post off my chest I can hit the books hard for a few hours before going to bed.

A Few Quick Notes 263

-For the past few days it has been on the cold side, some days going as low as -21 (maybe even colder). Today was a bit warmer, and it is forecast to be warmer still tomorrow. Unfortunately, with the rising temperatures we are supposed to get some snow, rain, and ice pellets, which seems like quite the combination.

-I managed to crank out another two loaves of bread this morning while preparing breakfast and working on school related things. It seems that Wednesday morning is a good day for me to do some bread baking.

-Today I had the opportunity to do some poking around in the Novanet catalogue (the union catalogue for Nova Scotia post-secondary institutions). The more I use this catalogue the more I think that it was designed to prevent access to materials. Not only are there all kinds of duplicate, and confusing, records, in many cases the records don't reflect what is actually available in the library (particularly when it comes to electronic journal access). I really don't understand how such a catalogue could have ever been deemed acceptable by any of the participating institutions.

-Recently I have been thinking that what we consider to be our tastes/preferences are really just functions of availability (mark another one up in the original thought tally).

-A few days ago I started using Google Reader. While I don't like everything about the service, I am generally pretty satisfied. I am somewhat amazed that it took me this long to start using a feed aggregator of some sort, particularly as there are a number of blogs that I check on a regular basis.

-I have to give my second round of lectures starting next week. Again I seem to have lucked out and picked a topic that I am familiar with and that relates to topics I have been reading about already this term. Hopefully they go a little more smoothly that some of my first lectures.

-We will be having a pot roast for dinner. Actually, I should consider taking things out of the oven in the very near future.

-A few days ago I came across the video for Colleen Power's new song New Townie Man. I was immediately taken with the piece, but that is likely only because I am townie male, and they tend to do pretty well in this piece.



Yesterday I was talking to a friend, who happens to be a 'bayman,' about this song and he expects that several responses to this song will be drafted and posted in the coming days and weeks. I really hope he is right, adding a Compton and Juice vs. Gazeebow Unit feel to this video and the resulting discourse would be great.