The owners of Cafe Press have a really cool thing going.

Provide them with some graphics, and they’ll produce and sell t-shirts and all kinds of other stuff at a “store” they set up for you on their website.

You design graphics, and set the price of your items (above a base price that covers their costs). They take orders, and ship items, and send you your profits by cheque.

There are no minimums, and if you want to create a “secret” store to order one shirt that you design for yourself, you can!

You can even print a book! 3¢ per page, plus $7 for a “perfect binding” (real book binding). Quantity: 1 book or more!

 › cool     2004-04-20 15:03   ...1 comment

Thought you might like to know that my running clinic is still going well. This week I got both practise runs in; I ran on Monday at the course as well as on my own on Wednesday and Saturday.

Doing the practise runs really helps. This week was 3 minutes running followed by one minute walking, all repeated 5 times. On Monday it was quite a lot of hard work. Wednesday was much easier until the last repeat. Today was quite easy… I even ran 4 minutes on one of the repeats by accident, and was fine. So practise really helps!

One thing I really like about running is that if you can stick with it the improvement is really dramatic. Like you’re panting crazily after running 2 minutes one week, and two weeks later you’ve doubled the amount of running you’re doing and feeling great. The clinic is cool because you’re out for a fixed time (20 mins or so) each week; slowly but surely the 20 minutes becomes more running and less walking.

Anyway, all this running is covering a lot of ground… To give you some idea of distance, it’s from our place across Bronson and along the canal to Mexi’s at Dow’s Lake, and then back again.

 › sports     2004-04-17 23:12   ...0 comments

“The Battle of Hastings never took place and Adolf Hitler is a fictional character. Robin Hood really existed, Harold Wilson saved Britain during the Second World War and Conan the Barbarian is a bona fide figure from early Nordic history.”

This from the Independent article titled 1066 and all that: How Hollywood is giving Britain a false sense of history

 › normative     2004-04-10 14:58   ...0 comments

Well, after all these entries where I make you work, it seems only fair to stray back into content providing mode.

Yesterday we went hiking in Gatineau Park. It was still very muddy underfoot, but it was lovely and warm. One thing about this time of year that I love is the number of babbling and chattering little streams that run through the forest. Some have official bridges over them, but others have little more than stumps and stepping stones.

We went about 4:30, after I’d met with my supervisor and after I spent some nice time with my parents. The drive out along Meech Lake (yes… the Meech Lake) was scenic, although we did wind up behind some people who were driving at like 25 km/h, so let’s just say we had time to truly appreciate the surroundings during the trip from Chelsea to the trail.

Click below for more photos.

Read the Complete Entry

 › sports     2004-04-10 11:12   ...2 comments

There just seem to be piles of these personality inventories cropping up all over the net these days. Many of these tests are probably knockoffs of the established copyrighted ones, but I’m having fun with them.

Read the Complete Entry

 › cool     2004-04-10 10:00   ...1 comment

I know most of you are groaning to find yet another blog entry about OKCupid, but I had a thought about it this aft, and - well - you’re a captive audience, right?

So, it’s a bit late to be making new year’s resolutions (since Q1 2004 has just expired) but in the spirit of self-improvement I offer the following. Select the trait from your profile - one that you feel is accurate for you - that you’d like to work to change (or at least alter). I put the question to you: which would you change, and why?

Now, I’m not so much interested in what overall personality description you’d most like to be, but rather which of Deliberate, Gentle, Love, Master (in my case) you’d like to change a bit.

In my case, I think I’d like to work on Deliberate vs. Random. I think I can get overly caught up in the process of being Deliberate, and it can affect me actually just living my life and being happy about things. If I was less deliberate then I think I might be better at stopping and smelling the roses, and letting the highs and lows of life have an impact on me.

At present (and some of you have talked to me about this) I think I can over-intellectualize my emotions. This can be a good coping strategy for negative emotions, as squelching the emotional part and dealing with the intellectual fallout rationally keeps me on an even keel. On the other hand, if a good emotion comes up I tend to deal with it the same way: squelch the goodness and intellectualize it. That is too much of an even keel. So… I think that if I were a bit more random, and didn’t think things through quite as much, I could just live it up a bit more.

Of course, that would make me the Loverboy, which sounds a bit racy, but maybe I could use a dose of that, even if not the whole kettle of fish, as it were.

Keen to hear your thoughts about this… and about your profile.

 › cool     2004-04-04 20:19   ...9 comments

Went out last night to Cafe Baci in the market. The food was very tasty, but the enjoyment did not last. When we went home with Kevin and Carrie to watch a movie I got the world’s worst stomach (and other) cramps that would not go away.

Now, I have a bit of a ‘sensitive system’ at the best of times, so I am used to discomfort that clears itself up rapidly, but this was pain for like an hour or something. It was bad.

Kevin also felt not great. Since he and I were the primary consumers of the Antipasto plate, I feel it is likely that it was the culprit. I had most of the salami, and he had only a little, so I feel that it is the salami. Very bad salami. Evil salami.

I am feeling much better this morning, but damn, that was evil.

 › health     2004-04-03 10:42   ...2 comments