A Few Quick Notes 458

-Though today was mostly nice, we did have a brief period of heavy rain. Fortunately, this period of rain was brief and to the point.

-We had our first Fall Ultimate game this evening. Somehow we managed to tie the game. For most of the game it felt as though we were being smoked. At least this brings our undefeated streak to eight, a number that is surely a person record for both Neil and I.

-My Eight Treasure Porridge seemed to turn out pretty well. Not surprisingly, given the relatively short cooking time, the beans were quite undercooked and a little crunchy. I think that if I made it again I might try to soak everything overnight and then cook it in my pressure cooker for about an hour.

-At some point today Neil and Rebecca discovered a hole in the wall in our apartment. They suspect that this was one point of entry for mice, and I happen to think that they are likely right. Hopefully the plugging of this hole will lead to a diminishing of the mouse population in our apartment.

-Jeannette, much to my surprise, cancelled her Empire Avenue account cold turkey. I suspect the whole thing will be less fun if I don't have people to engage with in-person on related matters. Maybe I too will have to give things up in the near future as I really can't afford to spend much time engaging in such activities.

A Few Quick Notes 452

-Though today was somewhat overcast, it really wasn't all that bad of a day. Actually, I found today to be quite relaxing and pleasant.

-We have had an unusually large volume of mouse related activity recently. This is rather unfortunate as it is both distracting and time-consuming. Recently, Neil and I had to move and re-arrange most of our bulk foods so that they are now all in large plastic containers.

Hopefully the level of activity that we are experiencing presently isn't a sign of worse to come once things actually start to get cold and autumnal.

-Tonight, while I was sitting at my desk studying, I heard someone yell "Hey, get your hands off that or I'll call the cops right now." Unfortunately, I don't know what they were talking about or how the situation was resolved.

-Today, as a gift, I received a 4 GB flash drive from the Globe and Mail. Unfortunately, the flash drive doesn't seem to fit in my computer's USB ports.

-An uncle of ours will be arriving, via cruise ship, tomorrow for a single-day visit. As of yet I don't exactly know what we will be doing. Unfortunately, it look as though the weather won't likely be cooperating.

-I made good progress reading today, something I am sure that you all wanted to hear.

-We have had a strange burst in traffic at Montifax recently. I suspect that our recent involvement in Empire Avenue and our Hurricane Earl coverage are the main drivers of this sudden surge.

A Few Quick Notes 451

-Today, even though we are less than two days away from Earl, was beautiful. Actually, I might go so far as to suggest that it was verging on perfection. The temperature was in the mid-twenties with non-blistering sun and a slight breeze. Now that the sun has set the temperatures have dropped slightly, just enough to merit a jacket if one decided to go on a late night stroll.

-I seem to have managed to temper my Empire Avenue activity, which is a skill that is important considering the onset of the new school year. For better or worse, some acquaintances of mine seem not to have yet developed this skill.

-We made a return trip to the Oaklawn Farm Zoo today. We took this trip so that Rebecca's brother could have a chance to visit the zoo for the first time. I think he, like the rest of us, was quite impressed with what he saw. I know that even though we told him about many of the animals that he could expect to see he still under-estimated the breadth of the zoo's holdings.



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The gibbons were particularly active today. Jeannette was able to capture some of this activity in the video posted above.

-On a related note, we finally took the time to ask a staff member about the origin story of the zoo's zonkey (donkey-zebra hybrid).



Apparently, as I suspected, the zonkey has a zebra mother and donkey father. Apparently the zebra was impregnated by the donkey, a pygmy donkey, during the brief period of time during which the two types of animals were housed together. They put the donkey in with the zebras because it was a pygmy, and, they thought, not tall enough to mate with the zebras. As it turns out, even a pygmy donkey is tall enough to mate with a zebra. Un/fortunately, this pairing did not result in a pygmy zonkey.

-My friend Peter returned to Halifax today and moved into an apartment a block away from my apartment. I am looking forward to having another friend in the neighbourood.

New Blogs

It seems that Empire Avenue parameters have encouraged the creation of a few new blogs today.

This afternoon Jeannette decided to create a blog for herself. Her new blog, Little Trouble in Big Chinafax, will deal with something or other. I am not sure that much thought has yet been put into what type of content the blog will eventually contain. Nonetheless, check it out, if only to see what Empire Avenue activity can get a person to do.

Because of all of this blog creation activity, I decided to create a new blog for myself. Due to typos and screw ups I ended up creating three new blogs, all of which focus on the same theme: non sequiturs.

Anyway, my new blogs are, in alphabetical order:

Free Non Sequiturs

Green Non Sequiturs

Red Non Sequiturs

Nothing says productivity like the creation of three new blogs.

Anyway, check these new blogs out, drive up the traffic numbers (if only to give me a strange sense of satisfaction), and subscribe in your favourite RSS feeder (for your own benefit, as you won't want to miss out on this top rate content).

A Few Quick Notes 449

-As regular readers will already know, we are still in the midst of a heat wave in Halifax. For the past few hours it has been about 33 degrees, though it feels more like it is 40. This, as you might imagine, has been incredibly unpleasant. Fortunately, it is supposed to drop a little tomorrow, though this drop will be brought about because of the arrival of a hurricane, Hurricane Earl.

-I was finally able to harvest a few cherry tomatoes yesterday.



I was able to harvest a few more tomatoes from Andrew's plants, which have now been transferred to our balcony. These new plants also have a few more tomatoes that should soon be ripe, really upping my level of production for the summer.

-Yesterday's move went well, though it was as sweaty as one would expect. Within moments we were all dripping with sweat, something that wasn't as fun as it might sound.

-Our Empire Avenue activities have also continued today, though at a somewhat slower pace than a few days ago. As expected, we have now added a fifth person to our feeding frenzy, which means that we can really get things going if we want to.

-I have now officially engaged in some Hurricane Bill preparations, though I can't say that I have yet done much to prepare. Thus far all I have done is to buy a 3 liter bottle of water, one of the few remaining such bottles at the grocery store. Hopefully not much more preparation will be required.

A Few Quick Notes 448

-Today has been one of the hottest days I have experienced in years, or at least that is how it feels. The temperatures exceeded 30, a situation that was made worse by relatively high humidity. Even when it became a little overcast this afternoon it stayed hot and unpleasant.

-Actually, it is so hot and sticky that as I sit writing this I am dripping sweat, a rather unpleasant image I know (and this is with a fan on). I am a little concerned that the current weather conditions may make sleeping difficult.

-Our apartment's Empire Avenue feeding frenzy has continued, somewhat abated, today.

I should first note, before forgetting, that Neil, Rebecca, Jeannette, and I achieved some success as a result of our actions yesterday. Neil, Rebecca, Jeannette, and I all made the list for participants with the greatest single day value increases (I was 1, Neil was 2, Jeannette was 6, and Rebecca was 8). Rebecca, Jeannette, and I were also near the top of another list of that day's achievers.

Things did slow down a little today. One of the first reasons for the slow down was that I realized that I actually had some work to do and observed that it was not possible for me to play an online game and work at the same time. Neil and Jeannette were later held up by the system itself as they both reached their daily transaction limits and thus had an enforced break.

That being said, today was definitely another heavy Empire Avenue day for our apartment. Actually, we even added a new person to the mix, Nick, Rebecca's brother. Nick signed up for an account today and will be coming to stay with us for a few days as of tomorrow, so if we are lucky we might be able to have five people online and circle buying in the same room (what fun!).

-Wow, it is hot. I really hope it isn't this hot tomorrow as I have agreed to help a few friends move.

The Valley

Today Jeannette and I took a quick trip to the Annapolis Valley and surrounding areas.

After getting some coffee in Wolfville, we made our way to Blomidon park mud flats. While we were there the started to come in quite quickly.



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Later in the day we made our way to the Oaklawn Farm Zoo. I was generally quite impressed with the experience. Not only did the zoo have quite a range of animals, they were animals I was interested in seeing.

They had quite a number of tortoises, at least one of which was quite spiny.



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Apparently the Savannah Monitor wasn't too interested in hanging around, though in the end it did.



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After a full day we made our way back to Halifax.



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Of course, we celebrated the excitement and successful trip with some more Empire Avenue.

The Frenzy Continues

The Empire Avenue feeding frenzy is continuing, the intervening night seems to have done nothing to slow us down. Actually, it is possible that our successes of yesterday have encouraged us to continue spending even more time there than we were before.

I think that part of the blame must fall on my shoulders. Not only did I introduce and encourage them to join and be active, I provided them with a target.

Our incredible level of activity was, at least, met with a few rewards (though they are all of the non-monetary kind). Rebecca (#3) and Jeannette (#1) both made the top share price list for people with their level of experience. I made a similar list (#3). I also made the list for those with the greatest increase in share prices, though I wasn't really that close to #1.

Anyway, I know at least a few of us are hoping to drag ourselves away from this internet heroin for at least part of the day. Presumably, as is the case with all good addictions, we will be back it before you know it.

Feeding Frenzy

B'ys, at the moment we're going half mad with various Empire Avenue related activities in our apartment. Aside from having two new members sign up, we are presently monitoring activities on four different computers.

It seems to be as addictive and potentially time-consuming as I feared.

A Few Quick Notes 447

-We are in the midst of another nice day in Halifax. Actually, it is pretty warm right now, almost a little too warm.

-This evening we have our second last Ultimate game of the regular season. As it stands now, my main worry is that it will be too hot to comfortably play. I guess things are likely to cool down by this evening, particularly by the latter portion of the game.

-Last night Neil, Jeannette, and I went candlestick bowling with our friends Darryl and Heather. While none of us were particularly great at this form of bowling I definitely had a fair bit of fun. I particularly liked that the pins did not have strings, and thus no string action. Also, the scoring and pin re-setting was done manually, which was actually more fun than I would have imagined.

As you can see, we all took somewhat different approaches to playing the game.



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-Yesterday was a really busy traffic day for Montifax, though I still can't exactly figure out why. I do suspect my mention of Empire Avenue had something to do with it (now it sounds as though I am trying to sell this group as much as I have been trying to sell SodaStream).

A Few Quick Notes 446

-We are presently in the midst of another great day in Halifax. The sun is out and there is a slight, cooling breeze. Unfortunately, I have, as of yet, been largely unable to take advantage of the great weather.

-Our over use of Neil's newly acquired SodaStream machine continues. I have to imagine that we have now consumed more than 20 litres of carbonated water since it was purchased a few days ago.

The more I think about it the more I have come to realize that these comments seem like some kind of advertisement for this product. They are not, or at least they are not paid advertising. These are coming about because I am just quite taken with the contraption and the output.

-This afternoon, while sitting at my desk with my window open, I happened to hear someone giving a tour of the adjacent building's property. While they were directly across from my window they stopped to explain the existence of a lone appearance of graffiti.



According to the gentleman giving the tour, the location on which this graffiti is found is visible at a nearby intersection. Actually, he suggested that it was more than just visible, that vehicles at the intersection would illuminate the graffiti when they stopped. While they removed the graffiti on occassion they have since decided that they might as well just leave it in place given the popularity of the spot and the likelihood that it will be re-tagged if cleaned.

I was glad to catch this snippet of conversation as it provided me with an explanation about the absence of removal attempts since the one that I witnessed a few months after arriving.



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-A few days ago I became aware of a new method for tracking our site visits and usage to complement our use of Google Analytics. While this new method gives us real-time updates, because our blog is relatively unread this hasn't really meant much, at least until today. It seems that my recent post about signing up for an Empire Avenue account has been quite popular, at least for Montifax. The post in question, in just a matter of minutes, received more views than any other posts from the past two months. What was strangest about this is that most of the traffic occurred within just an hour of two of the post first going live.

-Last night, as a follow up to our recent viewing of The Terminator, we sat down to watch Terminator 2 (on Blu-Ray - a completely unnecessary fact). Contrary to opinion of the Video Difference clerk who sold us The Terminator, I think that I preferred the latter to the former, though I guess it is a matter of opinion on both of our parts. Though neither is necessarily a great movie, both continue to stand up amazingly well as action movies. I have to imagine that these two movies are much more watchable than most of their contemporaries.

I am a little worried

A few months ago I heard about something called Empire Avenue. At the time, and maybe even now, I didn't really know what the objective of the site/business was, though I did have the sense that it had something to do with social networking and advertising. What I did know was that the company/venture had strong ties to Newfoundland (as is indicated by its name - a street in St. John's).

While at first I was just aware of this operation's existence, I eventually checked out their website and even their blog. One of the most surprising things that I learned while on their website is that my former roommate, early Montifax reader, Rhodes scholar, and all around good guy Nithum is involved with the project on the research and analytics side of things. Obviously, this news made me somewhat more interested in the project (and hopeful for its eventual success).

As intrigued and pleased as I was to see Nithum's involvement I still limited my involvement with the site to a subscription to their blog. I completely ignored the chance to participate at the early beta testing phases.

Empire Avenue is now several months into the beta testing phase and has opened its doors to the public (meaning that membership is no longer as restricted as it was when they first opened). As a regular reader of their blog posts I was aware of this change, though for some time I seemingly did nothing with this information.

Yesterday, for some reason, though I really don't know what it is, I finally decided to sign up for an account. Much to my surprise, I soon learned that Neil already had an account, which he seems to have had for some number of months. Seems as though we both now engaging in a form of competitive social networking (which still seems a little strange to me).

I guess I should have mentioned this earlier, but Empire Avenue is basically like a stock market, but instead of buying stock in companies with real money users buy 'shares' of people or companies with the site's artificial currency. This, of course, is tied in with user's social networking content. Things like users' overall wealth and share price are then determined by the combination of a number of these factors. If you think of it like a game, which I guess is encouraged, then you might think of one possible goal being to achieve a high share price while another goal might be to amass wealth (which may eventually be exchangeable for real-world rewards/discounts)

Edit: So getting to the title of this post, the thing I am worried about is too much spending time on this site. Even though I have only been a member for about 24 hours I can see that it could be quite addictive, particularly when competing against a particular person or set of people. I guess the only good news is that I know that I won't have the patience to really throw myself into this as some might, though there are a number of dynamics that I really do like.