E-Filler Archives

Hey
If its still May 28th dont forget to wish Dan a happy birthday!

Some of you may recall Alex Chiu and his Immortality Rings from yesteryear...well, I happened to come across his site again recently and noticed he has a fabulous deal going on. If I put his goofy banner on e-filler and get 80 clicks, he'll send me a pair of Immortality Rings for free. Of course, there's one small problem: I'd have to give him my name and mailing address. Fortunately I have good friends and one has volunteered his address and a nom-de-plume for the task. CLICK THIS BANNER NOW PLEASE:

I'll post the status of the rings and my immortality once we get them.

Update: Please don't click more than once, Alex will think we're cheating and not send the rings...

Hello From Holland!
I thought that I saw it all, or at least was prepared to see it all. Then I arrived in to Amsterdam at about midnight and saw prostitutes of every size shape and variety advertising their goods in the door window of their cozy little love cubbies"". The places in the hammer where we threw eggs at the ladies of the night are a petting zoo at a county fair compared to this lions den called Amsterdam.

I know that's a little in-your-face start to the post, but it is truely what struck me first. By far the most surreal experience of my trip. My hostel is literally in the middle of the redlight district. To answer your next question, yes I did visit one of the infamous Amsterdam coffee shops.A little bit of a wierd experience, however I managed to do my best to cope. I was surprised to see how comfortable the gentleman behind the counter was with letting us tourists pick up, hold, and examine the different types of his stash. From what I gather things are a little more expensive over here than back home, I would assume that is because they are taking advantage of the piles of tourists coming this way.

Enough about the sins of Amsterdam, lets talk Paris. It's beautiful! If you can manage to look past or ignore the sometimes awful smell and occasional/common pile of dogpoop you'll say it's beautiful too! Aside from the poop, the country is clean and green. My first night in Paris was spent with a group of 8 Scottish/Irish students on their long weekend vacation. We went by and saw the moulon rouge and some other sites and ended the night drinking cheap wine and playing frisbee under the Eifel tower. I also have acquired a slew of pictures, some actually pretty artsy. The minute I can upload them to the net I will share as many as possible.

Allow me to fill you in on my European diet...
Baguette - It's cheap, about $1.75 canadian for one. You can find them anywhere!
Hommus - Protien- about 4 bucks cdn for a fat tub. hard to come by at times, but way better than canadian hommus.
Peanut butter - more protien, but rare in the UK and France, about 3 bucks, tastes like crap, but for some reason i miss it (even tho I don't eat it at home)
Oranges- Usually about 75 cents for one, necessary because no girls like guys with scurvy
Red wine - in france, like 4.50 cdn a bottle. And even the bad stuff is good!
Bottled water - a buck for a liter and a half

Thank you everone for taking the time to email me. I love to hear whats going on so dont stop sending them. I am sorry if I cannot email back, but time is money in internet cafes and my money is quickly running out already.

Again, I hope to upload pics soon, don't stop the emails!
Brian

Two people are in critical condition after attempting to stage a lightsaber dual with flourescent lightbulbs filled with gasoline. These two apparently decided to leave their common-sense behind this morning before going out to play. I'm not exactly sure what was worse: Using glass lightbulbs as 'swords' or using gasoline for this stunt? Hmmm...probably the gas.

This will finally take some heat off that poor guy, the Star Wars Kid.

Sorry about the downtime...I rebooted this machine today to see what would happen...and it turns out a lot of bad things would happen. Things should be stable now. I had to upgrade to Apache to get PHP to talk to MySQL (don't ask...)

If you find any vulnerabilities with my config, please let me know...(Jason, Mike?)

As Brian travels to Paris on Monday, I make my way to Tokyo for what should be a week-long binge of sushi, sake, and beer. Since last posting, I've been to Nagasaki, Fukoka, Hiroshima, Osaka, Kyoto and Nara. Finally I make my way to Tokyo before heading back to Nagoya where I fly back to Canada on June 2nd.

Any foreigner spending any amount of time in Japan quickly finds themselves in the position of a very clear minority. But the thing is, many of the Japanese love speaking with forigners, so its like any one takes on the air of being a celebrity, being asked for autographs and being poitned at by little kids. Business men buy you drinks to talk to you for a little, and at the bars, girls wanting to practice thier English (and whatever other kinds of skills they may have) with a gaijin (foreigner in Japanese), it makes for a very interesting time out whenever you decide to go out. The natural beauty of the landscape combined with the mania (absolute mania in some cases, like Osaka) provides a very interesting combination and contrast of Japan.

Anyways, here's a picture of me infront of the 'floating tori' - a shinto gate built in the Inland Sea. Have fun where ever you are!

Wow!
I love London. I can't say enough about it. If it were cheaper I would love it even more. But alas it is the most expensive city I've been to in my entire life. For that reason, I am heading to beautiful Paris Monday morning. I have been taking pictures but havnt been able to upload them anywhere, soon I hope (I have one of Big Ben that any Kids in the Hall fan would love). The weather here is fucked. It pisses rain every mornign and then sometime in teh afternoon it decides to get sunny, then it will occasionally cloud over and sprinkle and sunny and so forth.

I am staying in an area named Camden. There is a huge market here similar to kensington market but about 5 times bigger at least. Its pretty cool. I just watched the FA cup (soccer) final this afternoon. Arsenal, a team from London won, so I look forward to tonights night life !!!I met up with an Aussie girl who is about to start working here, she has us on some 'A list' for a big club tonight which could prove to be exciting.

I must say, while travelling it is harder to not make friend than it is to make friends. I know it might seem like I only run into girls, but I have managed to befriend a few dudes. However, its much more fun to go out with girls as they can scam alot more freebies than guys can. Not to mention that I can't help but woo them with my charm.

I really hope that I can upload some pictures soon. At the least I will post again once I arrive in paris. I'm excited for some warmer and more consistantly sunnier weather.

Brian

Good Morning!
So, two nights in England and twice I have gone to bed when the morning light was peaking thru my window, awesome.

I had a great day and night in Manchester, it's a pretty cool student city. It has lots of cool deals for students (at least as far as England goes), especially at the local watering holes. But in general, this place is pretty friggin' expensive, most notably London where I am now. Last night I stayed at some crazy hostel named The Generator. It reminded me much like Molson res at McGill for those of you who have been there.It's a little dirty, but loud, busy, and fun.

Meeting people has been rather easy here I am somewhat surprised. I have noticed that my knowlege for sports has abled me to strike up conversations with guys and my charm and good looks lets me move in and mack up their ladies. Last night I hung out with some cool Amercan girls (yes I know... Americans). However one had family from Canada (Winnepeg of all places), so they were a little more in the loop about us friendly nieghbours of the north.

I think I'll be staying another night in London because I could not possibly see all this huge city has to offer in one day, its just not possible. From here I think I'll be heading over to Dover for a night and to catch the FA Cup final at a local pub and get 'right pissed'.

For now, I bid you adieu. Hopefully I will have some pictures to show you soon. Don't forget to email.
Brian

Palm has done it again: They've created a fantastic new product, and then crippled it just enough to make it not a must-have.

The Life Drive contains all sorts of goodies; a built in hard drive, WiFi (finally), Bluetooth, MP3/video playback, etc. All the stuff you'd expect from a modern handheld device. The idea behind the life drive is that you can put all your data on it, and take it with you when you go. What a great idea right? Well, don't get too excited...with a meager 4GB capacity you won't be taking too much stuff with you. In the age of 40-60GB iPods, why would Palm put as much capacity in this thing as an iPod mini? (And the iPod is for music only...this device is for your digital photos, email, etc.) I'll never know what they're thinking...

Belinda crossed the floor today. Of course this has huge implications for the vote on the budget and all that crap. I wonder if it also has implications for her personal life.

A Tory and Grit as a couple. That's pretty hot.

Hey,
If you havn't heard already, I am on my way to Europe tomorrow. I will do my best to acquire many good pictures and an even larger amount of stories and share them with those of you E-filler visitors. Below I attached a rough map outline of my trip over the next three months. The dates mentioned in the below map are the only solid dates I have booked on my trip as I want to respect the spontaneity of what a Euro trip should include. I know that it looks like my trp ends in Lisbon, it doesn't. Ideally I will be making my way from Lisbon or somewhere around Portugal or Spain to Edinburgh Scotland for the fringe festival for a few days before heading home from Manchester on the 22nd of August. How I will travel that route is still up in the air so I decided to leave it out of the map.

If anyone has any suggestions or places to go or people to see, please feel free to respond to this post or email me with details.



Have a great summer everyone!
Brian

As you may recall, Western announced that one of this year's honorary degree recipients would be Henry Morgentaler. As an abortionist he's a highly controversial figure, and the decision to give him a degree has left the UWO community polarized.

I hadn't heard much on the issue recently, so I set out to find some more information on the latest developments when I stumbled across this page (www.uwoprotest.com). The site is updated almost daily, and contains some interesting information. (Kudos to the site creators for keeping it up to date.)

Some text from the site:
So far the Davenport - Morgentaler team's response has been that the Morgentaler decision has gained Western a $10,000 donation. Thankfully Davenport doesn't teach at Ivey. Considering it an achievement to gain $10,000 while losing $2,000,000 is bizarre enough in itself. The government matching bringing the $2,000,000 to $4,000,000 makes the particular instance of comparison to a $10,000 donation even more ridiculous. The university administration has tried to deflect the reality of financial haemorrhage by stating that it has just completed a $327 million fundraising drive. The reality is this was a four year drive, and when the numbers are broken down in terms of actual receipts, government matching programs, etc., one $2,000,000 donation looms substantially larger.

Is this really true? Has this decision cost UWO millions in donations? Or is this just a one-sided view of the argument. With a controversial issue like this one, it's hard to find the facts in a sea of opinions.

Microsoft recently unveiled some new specs for it's next generation game console (sucessor to the Xbox), the Xbox 360. It looks good and the specs are even more impressive. Much like Sony's PS3, the Xbox 360 contains multiple CPUs in an effort to create even more stunning graphics, physics, etc. The unit is sporting 3x3.2Ghz IBM PowerPC chips (each of which can execute 2 threads...I guess this is like Hyper-threading? I haven't found many details). Not too shabby...



I wonder how much this thing is going to cost? And will I be able (with some technical hokus-pokus) to use one of these units as a regular desktop PC? I wouldn't mind a nice SMP system on my desk, if the price is right.

More pictures here. Want more details? Search on Google...they're everywhere.

This article from the BBC says that 1/4 of Iraqi children (under 5) are suffering from chronic malnutrition and "It is highly likely that most households now have a lower real income than almost 25 years ago".

The question I'm wondering is what's worse: Saddam's rule or today's chaos?

This story about how the 93-year old was able to "out message" a 13-year old girl and her cell phone with a 150+ year old mode of communiciation has been posted on a few sites, but I figured I'd mention it here.

Aside from the obvious conclusion (that typing on a cellphone sucks, cool solution here) it's really sad to see what English is slowly (but surly) becoming. More and more I get e-mails like this:
I need help with ______, I know ur in comp sci. but maybe if u look at the
course website u might find it easy to understand, I attached the website with
this email, could u pls let me know if u can help me.

And this message was typed (I assume) on a 104-button keyboard...how lazy can you be? Mrs. Black would be rolling over in her grave (if she was dead).

Update: Fixed link.

Well, the VE-Day celebrations are over and the Canadian government seems to have dropped the ball. Paul Martin missed basically everything. There were different events all week long and the PM did not attend (nor did any of the other party leaders). The PM was supposed to be in attendance for the final parade, but wasn't there for that either. So whose fault is this? The PMs? The other party leaders? Does it matter?

I would say this is a big deal. I myself was in Holland for the 50th anniversary of the liberation of Holland, and let me say, this was no small deal to them. Not having the leader of our government there to accept their thanks and stand with our veterans is a disgrace.

...don't forget to call your mom today...

I was surprised to see that 2 threads have recently become active again:
Wikipedia
and
Terri Schiavo

I wouldn't have noticed if it weren't for the "Recent Threads" list in the top right hand corner of the main page. Should I sort the articles on the main page by comment date rather then post date? (Thereby making the most recently commented post appear at the top of the main page regardless of when it was posted.) That might make things more confusing...

I was just reading this CBC article on how the Conservatives this and the Liberals that. The part that caught my eye was that "Gilles Duceppe says he'll ask Gov. Gen. Adrienne Clarkson to intervene if the government loses a confidence vote and refuses to step down." Hold on a minute there, Adrienne Clarkson can actually do something meaningful?? What is the Governor General's job away? This political newbie is confused.

I would just like to say; happy Star Wars Day everyone.

That is all.

As Mike mentioned in the comments a few articles ago, he was on the news here in London. Here's the segment.

"I swear I didn't know she was a hooker."

I think it's in DivX format or something like that.

Hey everyone,

There's this new place in Nagoya called Oasis 21, and its sort of the focal point of a massive underground shopping complex that Nagoya is well-known for. It also serves as the roof for this big open area beneath, that has a massive food court, stage for events, and things like that. The scale of all this is pretty unreal. And the staircases on this thing all have these 'shock absorption' systems designed to better handle earthquakes. Unreal.



Nagoya is home of the 2005 World Expo, so I think they've gone all out to showcase Japanese know-how and excessiveness.

I'm sure many of you (who live on this side of the boarder) have read about the 14 year old Jehovah's Witness girl who has been fighting to refuse a blood transfusion. The girl has her parents' support...but the courts have ordered her to receive it, despite the fact that it is not allowed by her religion. First off, why do the courts care if she's refusing medical attention? Isn't that your right? Second, since when does the government go against personal religious beliefs? I could understand if the girl's actions (or inaction) were bringing harm to someone else, but this doesn't seem to be the case here.

On November 18th the 4th Harry Potter movie will hit the big screen. Will it be the last film from the popular series? I doubt it. But the producers will have to face the tough reality, Harry Potter (or at least that kid who plays him) isn't going to stay young forever. Will they replace Harry in the way that the James Bond actors have been, or just throw in the towel?

Hey fellow E-fillers.

I thought I'd post this pic of me enjoying some publically-sold beer at the Nagoya castle, here in the Aichi prefecture in Japan. Good times drinking by myself and in public, let me tell you. The Japanese know how to have a good time.



Aside from getting wierd stares from little children, the random "hello" from groups of school girls, and giving blank stares at people when they approach you in Japanese, things are going well.

Tonight (9PM EST) is the return of Family Guy. I would said there's high expectations for these new episodes given the popularity of the re-runs. Only time will tell if the writers can deliver. Let's just hope they doesn't disappoint and leave Family Guy fans with a bad taste in their mouths.