Staff Blog

No, we’re not running a contest on Dontmindme, although that might not be a bad idea sometime. And I haven’t entered a contest, at least not directly. My wife Laura has entered a contest, however, and the prize is dinner for two at the restaurant of our choice, which would be rather sweet. To win we need your help. If you go to the site where the contest is running, specifically to Laura’s story of how we met, and post a comment, that counts as a ‘vote’ for us to win. Or go to Laura’s blog and read her posting on this contest. Right now her story is in the top three, so we can totally win this thing! Please help!

It looks like I missed a week. Thing is, I have new content all but ready to go , but wasn’t ready for Monday, and now that it is 95% done, it seems more sensible to save it for the weekend, which is almost here.

And now for something completely different and utterly unrelated. We have a couple of fairly new radio stations in Charlottetown, one of which claims to play ‘everything.’ And while I have yet to hear a Wagner opera or anything by Andrew W.K., they do play an exceedingly wide variety of music. This does however sometimes give the feeling that you are listening to someone’s well-stocked iPod on full random. Such as happened to me the other day, when I heard Rick Astley “Together Forever” back to back with The Tragically Hip “Thirty Eight Years Old.” I was almost expecting some Run DMC after that, but no, it was time for the weather. Oh well.

So only a few weeks into putting up new content every week, and there is no new content for Monday morning. However, a speed rating of the Academy Awards is on the way, the show is just running far too late for me to finish watching, much less type up the rating. Look for that to appear Monday evening sometime.

In retrospect, I probably should have posted this three or four weeks ago, but I decided to take the month of January off from updating Dontmindme. The single biggest reason was the birth of my second child, Emma-Lyn Hope Peric, which happened back on the 16th of the month. Go and see some cute pictures and read the whole story over at lauraperic.blogspot.com.

So while things have been busy, I have decided to make a real effort to post new content  every week starting in February. Posts will be going up over the weekend,  so look for new articles and pictures and general fun starting February 4.

Today at work one of my co-workers unintentionally gave me a bit of a scare. My wife (whose blog you can read here) is 9 months pregnant, and in fact her due date was two days ago. So when I was asked “Hey Marko, how long does it take you to get to town from here?” my immediate response was to look up from the machine I was working on and ask “Do you have news for me?”

Turns out it was completely a false alert, he needed to pick up something at a store that closed at 5 pm and he wanted to figure out if he had to leave early or not to get there. But I was all ready to drop everything and rush home (or possibly right to the hospital).

On our way back from visiting my grandmother this afternoon we decided to take a look for Christmas light displays. Not just any lights, mind you, but the most impressive light display ever in Charlottetown. It features a private FM broadcast of Christmas music and the lights are perfectly synchronized with the music. And it’s not just a business, it’s a private home.

Below is a map to find the place. It’s on Cannon Drive, not far from the Charlottetown airport. If you go, and you should if you at all can, do be respectful of the neighbours and don’t block the road or any driveways.

We’ve been running A Thousand Words on this site since 2001. The idea features funny pictures with funny captions. Now, Mike over at Brannigan’s Law is running a contest where you can submit your own funny picture with a caption, and he’ll post them. There’s already a few up there. I think he might have a prize for the best. . .

I am a nerd. I am not ashamed of this title, no, I embrace it. I should point out that a Nerd is best defined as a person who enjoys the pursuit of knowledge merely for the sake of knowledge, and is not particularly concerned with being fashionable, social or athletic. And while I’m not overly athletic, I can do 20 pushups and can carry a 150 pound adult on my shoulders for 100 feet. I don’t consider myself particularly antisocial, and neither do my friends and family members. As far as fashionable goes, well, I’m going to plead the fifth on this one.

But there is no doubt that I’m a nerd, because today at work I came up with the nerdiest idea for a game anyone has ever come up with. Think of a seemingly random number (or better yet, alphanumeric sequence) which does actually have a meaning. Announce your number (or sequence) to the room and see if anyone can figure out what it means. This is guaranteed to aggravate any non-nerds in the vicinity.

Recently it has been announced that several big name bands will play in Charlottetown this summer. Aerosmith was scheduled some weeks ago, and just this week the White Stripes and Nickelback were announced. While I’m not really a fan of the first two, and my hatred for Nickelback burns with the fire of a thousand suns, it is kinda cool to see big name bands play in little old Prince Edward Island.

But that’s not what this post is about.

Hearing about all these concerts reminded me about a conversation I had with a coworker a little while ago. While we were driving home from work, we were talking about excessively expensive concert tickets. He admitted that he would potentially spend $500 for tickets to see Supertramp. I consider $500 to be way too much for a concert ticket, but I suggested that I might spend $500 to see U2, provided that the bandmembers were all riding on dinosaurs.

Got five minutes to kill and feel like a laugh? Visit Google maps, and click the Get Directions link. In the first box, put in the name of any city in North America. In the second box, put in a major city in Europe. It really doesn’t matter what cities you pick, so long as they are on opposite sides of the Atlantic (and keep in mind that Google maps doesn’t seem to do directions for Africa, South America, or Asia). Click the button to get the directions, then scroll down, and look for Massachusetts. Read through the directions for that leg of your trip, and be prepared to chuckle.