Month: October 2005

Halloween Content

Last year the folks over at Oddio Overplay put together a two-CD set of Halloween novelty tracks, Ghouls With Attitude. While it’s probably too late to fully enjoy them this year, I recommend pulling them down and burning the discs, so that you have them around for next year. (In particular, I recommend to you track 8 on CD 2,… Read more →

Expand Your Word Power

While having discussions about how my work life may have changed now that the company I worked for was acquired by a very large company, I learned a new word from some people with more time in the very large company environment: bureaumancer. Bureaumancer n. One with a mastery of the arcane skills required to manipulate the bureaucracy (as of… Read more →

Home Again

Safe back in Halifax. Wife and baby already in bed when I got home–might as well catch up on Rome. Normally I would read at this point, but since I already went through two books at the airport–Westerfeld‘s Pretties and the Gischler debut Gun Monkeys)–I think I’m justified in spending an hour or two catching up with Vorenus and Pullo.… Read more →

What content?

OK, Boston-ness is getting in the way of content. However, in line with the whole “a year has passed thing”, I’ve set up a date reminder system in my sidebar. If you’re not reading this in RSS, you will see the next 5 upcoming things from my date list just under the calendar. Now, I need to amuse myself by… Read more →

Sappy Dad

Wow, I spent a lot of time today looking at the pictures of Sarah I have on the “baby picture blog” I use to keep the family up-to-date with her development. I have never spent as much time on a trip to Boston (and I’ve made a lot of them in the last 10 years) wanting to go home… Read more →

I Am Not Making This Up

You know, this is so silly I would have had to blog it no matter where it had occurred. The fact that it happened in Kentucky (and hence, can be used to get a small dig in at my friends there) is just gravy. Kentucky lands grant to protect bingo halls from terrorists FRANKFORT, Ky. — Kentucky has been awarded… Read more →

Dinner with the boss

Had my (annual) dinner with my boss tonight. Dinner ran for about 4 hours, with around 1 hour of social chit chat and 3 hours of work discussion. I talk to him every couple of weeks normally (I love my job) so this isn’t a “let’s catch up on the year” thing, just a chance to actually talk face-to-face. Still,… Read more →

It’s Not Fair…

Heh. Pun. See, it’s not fair that I am Boston until Friday afternoon, and Friday evening is the beginning of the 2005 Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair. The 2005 Boston International Antiquarian Book Fair, one of the oldest and most respected antiquarian book shows in the country, celebrates twenty-nine years, from October 28 through October 30, 2005, at Boston’s Hynes… Read more →

Dispatches From Boston

..well, not really Boston. Since the last time I visited company HQ lots of interesting things have happened, notably including the purchase of the company by a much bigger company, the closing of the old office and movement of people to a different office in nearby Framingham. (Of course, the “Boston” office is also no longer HQ.) I am somewhat… Read more →

Gah. Please kill me.

Wow. Two days of the brutal stomach flu. Let’s summarize: Didn’t eat anything Friday, was awake maybe 8 hours. Didn’t eat anything Saturday until dinner, slept in quite late, and napped 90 minutes longer than my infant child. Managed to keep down four slices of dull pizza–but am currently awake paying for it with some knotted-gut agony. This is the… Read more →

Why I keep reading Charlie Stross

“Listen, this Bond guy, he’s some kind of commie assassin, isn’t he? I mean, look at the evidence. He works for the state — a socialist state at that. He went to university and worked with those guys Philby and Burgess, that MacLean guy — commie spies to a man. He goes after entrepreneurs who are a threat to the… Read more →

Just back from this…

A 1940’s swing night, full of sophistication and elegance, great music and décor will provide the perfect atmosphere to showcase the quality products at the upcoming Scotch Ceilidh. Come out to the Casino Nova Scotia Schooner Showroom on October 20th and enjoy a number of single malt and premium blend scotch offerings along with classic 1940’s décor and music. Just… Read more →

Three US political stories…

First, a story that is still giving me a happy–perhaps the second happiest U.S. politics story going after Fitzgerald’s perseverence: Texas Court Issues Warrant for DeLay A Texas court issued a warrant Wednesday for former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay to appear for booking, where he is likely to face the fingerprinting and photo mug shot he had hoped to… Read more →

Bookstore splurges

So, while I was in Ontario last month (you remember the 10-day blog blackout?) I did get a chance to take a run into Toronto and visit a couple of my favourite specialty bookstores. The trip started with a visit to Canada’s leading mystery bookstore, The Sleuth of Baker Street, where I primarily was looking for new authors. I then… Read more →

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada
This work by Chris McLaren is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 Canada.