So these days I’ve been taking care of my step-mother’s cat while she is out of the province. The cat is a female of the grey and white variety whose only passion in life is aquiring cardboard boxes for her own inscrutable reasons.

Hank, the cat, has not run away. It has apparently been in the house all along, hiding out somewhere. This still does not explain why it has not eaten its food, or more importantly, why the kitty-litter has not been used recently. These are questions for an inquiring mind, and as such I will have nothing to do with them.

Much like Hank, I have not run away. I’ve been on AOV all along. The explanation for the lack of posts is simple: I haven’t been interested in writing anything that fits with AOV, and writing something just to fill a space is bad form. But I have been writing.

Recently:

Continuining coverage of the CFL on Forget
“If you don’t like what you got, why don’t you change it?”
Are You Watching The CanadianFootball League?br /
The still beta Five Feet of Dirt: all original content by myself and Kent Bruyneel, featuring:
31 Days of Kelly Gruber*

* If anyone has, or knows the whereabouts of, a few decent pictures of Kelly Gruber, send them in this direction. And no, I’m not going to add a link to my email address here, because frankly, I think you’ve been coddled enough.

… is what millions of preteens and teenyboppers are asking themselves as the poor Backstreet Boys seem to be having some problems according to Salon.

As far as I can tell as an innocent bystander, boybands (unlike the Moffats) are still all that and a bag of chips among hip young people and I know that genres don’t just vanish, but, could this indicate the beginning of the end of the boyband era? Or are the Backstreet boys getting too old and ugly?

There once was a man from Chicoutimi
Who was kind enough to lend his canoe to me
But when I fell in
I couldn’t swim
Because canoeing was new to me

I have recently been informed by an avid AOV reader that for some reason (no doubt chemical or theological) when you burn a cup from McDonalds, you get a greenish blue flame.

I anxiously await my next campfire experience.

While summer doesn’t officially start for seven days, it may as well have. It is beautiful where I live. While Matt from MetaFilter plays in the sun, I’ll toil in a stuffy basement (I love it here).

Nothing marks a beautiful pre-summer day like a set of random links. Enjoy:

• Kirby Ferguson, formerly of IslandEdition.com fame has a new site brewing at KirbyFerguson.com
• Signal vs. Noise links to an astounding satellite photo gallery
• Slashdot links to SPACE BLIMPS! Didn’t they lose one of these on Mars?
• One of the coolest websites in the world (explodingdog.com) linked to us when their Red Robot showed up on our site.
• The same guys who did the satellite photos did this very cool MegaPenny Project (click all the way through, it’s worth it).

A friend of mine recently cast off his American birthright to become a Canadian citizen (actually, he just became a dual citizen, but casting off birthright sounds very cool). He was given the choice of either swearing or affirming the oath of citizenship. He was told that “you are encouraged to bring the holy book of your choice”.

He put it nicely: So politically correct, it offends everyone. Does this not seem a little odd? Mind you, I don’t have any better suggestions. It’s just interesting to see that we have no universal standard to hold each other too.

In the same super-politically-correct, you have to pledge allegiance to the Queen of England!? It is just plain bizarre. I was born in Canada and have apparently tacitly agreed to all of these things.

Swear to your god. If you do not have a god, just promise.

I found this link on Slashdot, and found it interesting.

There is work going on to make our TVs push ads that target us individually. I guess we’ll fill out forms, dial a number when we see something we like, or something like that until the Man figures out what we we’re most likely to buy, then shows it on TV.

At first I didn’t like that concept. But. I realized, commercials are much more tolerable if they are amusing. Could I convince the Man that I’m all about beer and need thier comercials? Could I request commercials, say, by writing them a letter saying “I’d sure love a powerful, singing toaster that can download toast recipes at 128kps” and get the cool commercials?

As long as we have to watch commercials, they might as well be tailored to suit us.

Behold a visual history of Hard Drive icons in the parallel worlds of Windows and Mac. Notice how they get more and more realistic without becoming more meaningful. Personally I prefer the balance between abstraction and a tactile feel found in the Win9x/W2k and MacOS 9 versions.

The old Mac (v6 and before, I think) icon is pretty impressive and to someone who hasn’t opened up their computer, just as meaningful as any of the other icons.

Photorealism is the dumbest idea of all. So that’s what a hard drive looks like.

UPDATE:
Here’s the equivalent chart of folder icons. Very similar parallels, problems, and progression to the hard drive icons.