Being fed up with dealing with the people at the regular store I go to to buy the office lottery tickets I decided, at the urging of some coworkers, to buy the tickets at another store. The conversation went a little something like this:

"Hello. I would like to buy fourteen Lotto 649 QuickPicks, please."

"Okay. Fifteen quickpicks."

"No. Fourteen quickpicks."

"Okay. Lotto 649, right?"

"Yes."

<Cashier walks over to the Lotto machine>

"Fifteen quickpicks?"

"No. Fourteen quickpicks."

"Okay."

<Cashier fiddles with Lotto machine for a while,>

"Uh...how many...?"

"Fourteen quickpicks."

"You want fourteen dollars...?"

"I want fourteen quickpicks. That's twenty-eight dollars worth."

"Okay. Uh..."

<Cashier fiddles with Lotto machine for a while, then comes back with what looks like too many tickets. I shudder at the thought that she may have entered in twenty-eight quickpicks. Fortunately, though the quickpicks were distributed among more tickets than necessary, the correct amount were purchased>

I swear I am going to shoot myself someday. Is it really that hard for someone who works at a store for a living to understand what "X number of Y items" means?

I'm going to have to take a look at one of these lottery machines to see if they really are that complicated to operate.

So, I've taken it upon myself to be in charge of the office Lottery pool. It don't expect to ever win any money on this "fool's investment", but it's all in good fun. Plus it gives me an excuse to write a program to keep track of all the money that's coming and going.

We go with the QuickPicks (wherein the Lottery Commission's computer terminal randomly generates numbers for you) every week for the sake of convenience. They cost $2 per play. Simple enough. However, I've had a strange experience twice now in the four or five times that I've purchased tickets. I would ask for, say, twelve QuickPicks and the person at the cash register would ring up twelve dollars woth of QuickPicks.

Now, maybe there is some special lotto-lingo that I'm not aware of, but I'm pretty sure when a customer asks for 'x' number of Lottery tickets, they mean 'x' number of Lottery tickets, not 'x' dollars worth of Lottery tickets.

The funniest thing was that the first time this happened to me I was asking for an odd number of Lottery tickets, which confused the heck out of the convenience store employee!

I've added the complete soundtrack to the game World of Warcraft to the music section. I've also added one amazing song from the Civilization IV soundtrack called Baba Yetu. It's an incredible musical rendition of the Lord's Prayer in Swahili (which is a bit surprising, given the anti-Christian bent of the past game designers).

I've added a new article to my Religion section entitled The Christian Paradox.

On my way home from the local food jobber I noticed a Plymouth Breeze with 'spinners' (rims with a spinning hub-cap-like component). Thinking this was pretty odd, I took a photo. I mean, who puts spinners on a Plymouth Breeze of all cars. And the car was in no other way "riced up". Usually someone will put some Kanji character decal or lame 'Type-R' sticker on his car or chop the suspension so that a single piece of gravel scrapes the undercarriage before he puts on spinners. At this point, things were already quite surreal.

Only later did I notice something even more strange... veteran plates!

It was at that moment that my brain exploded.

There've been a few articles floating around the internet for quite some time now describing how the life of the Smurfs very closely resembles a communist utopia of sorts (or, perhaps more appropriately, a soviet-style of totalitarian communism as opposed to the classical demcratic communism originally envision by Marx). The pros and cons of communism, it seemed like a somewhat believable concept, however tongue-in-cheek the original articles may have been.

Lately I have taken it upon myself to download as many episodes of these most fondest of memories as I can find. Having nearly completed the entire first season, I began watching a few episodes. Surprisingly the cartoons have held up extremely well and are still as entertaining as they were when I had first watched them. Not many cartoons can say this.

So I make my way to the fourth episode of the first season (St. Smurf And The Dragon) when lo and behold my eyes and ears fall upon this little gem.

For those of you not willing or able to watch the preceeding link, the video clip is a short excerpt of that episode in which Brainy Smurf is attempting to fast talk a hen and her chicks into letting him get away with an egg (the preceeding scene has a small army or Smurfs heading to a chicken coop in order to steal eggs!). Out of Brainy's mouth proceeds this fantastic line of reasoning:

"Now why don't you look at it this way: If you take the long view, you can equate the overall social good with the needs of the many..."

At which point Brainy realizes his socialist ruse is ineffective and he runs away, egg in hand. I wouldn't have believed it if I hadn't seen it myself.

And now, here's the original end theme to The Smurfs (1,014 KB), which has been completely eclipsed by the better remembered "La la la la la laaa" version.

The image galleries are working again. I added a few new photos and galleries.

Ugh. My buddy Leo, who hosts this site, has finally got almost everything back up and running. This is what we get for switching from Linux to Windows. After two months without FTP access, I might start putting new stuff up.

The image galleries are back online!

Whew! Leo (the guy who runs the server that hosts my site) has finally finished migrating everything to a Windows machine. Thanks to Microsoft innovation, it only took two months to do. :-P

The image galleries will remain offline for a little while longer. I recently bought a new Kodak EasyShare DX7590 digital camera, so I hope to have a gallery going of photos I have taken myself when the image gallery section comes back online.

Dron has returned to fight for the users.

Added the entire soundtrack to Heroes of Might & Magic IV. Good stuff.

I've added links and mirrors for a couple of new articles, again.

Decided to remove the song Big Star Machine by Superchick because some one kept putting a link to it into his media player's playlist. DOWNLOAD THE SONG IF YOU WANT TO PLAY IT REPEATEDLY, DON'T STREAM IT!

I've added links and mirrors for a couple of new articles.

I've posted music from three different arcade games: Growl, King of the Monsters, and The Ninja Warriors. Head over to the Video Game Music area under my Music section to check them out.

I was wandering around the local Zellers on Saturday when I decided to head over to the toy section and check out the Lego sets. Much to my surprise, I noticed an odd Lego set: Ice Sat V, set #6898 from the Ice Planet 2002 series. This was a set that came out in 1993. As far as I know, the Ice Planet 2002 series was discontinued about a decade ago. What the heck was this thing doing on the shelf?

Of course, I immediately purchased this awesome find and took it home. When I got home, I noticed something odd as I was examining the box. There was a piece of cellophane tape attaching a scrap of gift wrapping to the box.

So, here I am with a Lego set that was discontinued years ago and that was apparently given to someone (or meant to be given to someone) as a gift at one point. I have no idea what to make of it. Oh well, it will soon be assimilated into the Lego horde...

I went to a local comedy club last night with my uncle. The headliner was a comic by the name of Danny Bevins. He was pretty good, as were the three warm up acts who preceeded him. I'll definately go again. There was one group of employees from a local eatery who were there for a birthday celebration who kept talking during the show. Each of the four comedians that night made a comment to them about it, but the headliner got upset the most. Wow, was he angry (and with good cause). All-in-all, it was a great show.

After the show, I realized something: live entertainment is really something special. So many of us get all our entertainment in a prerecorded format, i.e. TV, movies, CDs, etc. There is just something about live entertainment that is missing from that. I think, somehow, it was just more involving. I think I'm going to try to take in more live entertainment.

PS: The public smoking ban is one of the best laws passed ever!

I finally decided to put a link with my email address (see the last link on the left). Here comes the spam.

Created a "religion" section, but haven't put anything in it yet. It will take some time to write articles for this section, but I wanted to put the empty section there so the shame of an unfinished section might spur me toward putting at least something up there.

I finally put something in my 'About Don' section.

I've finished redoing the T.M.N.T. area of the Video Game Adventures section. It is now completely redone.

Added a bunch of H. P. Lovecraft stories and one by John W. Campbell, Jr. to my 'Stories' section.

Finished updating the Wizards & Warriors section under my Video Game Adventures.

Finished updating the Rampage section under my Video Game Adventures.

I added a 'Stories' section with a few good stories to read. Also, the Video Game Adventures section is still undergoing its facelift. I hope to have it done in a week or two.

Things have been going pretty well with the transition to my new site. I'm currently working on redoing the Video Game Adventures section, which will probably take a few days. I might throw something into the About Don Dueck section soon, too.

Instead of putting up my email address for all the spammers to harvest, I hope to be setting up an email form as soon as possible. I might change my mind later and put up my email address anyway, though.

The site will probably undergo minor tweaks and changes during the next little while until I feel comfortable with everything.

I've finally got off my butt and redesigned my website. Some sections have retained their old style while others have been completely redone. I hope you find something interesting here.

It will probably take a couple of days for all sections to be complete and for all files to be uploaded. Be sure to check back again soon.