I'll be Home for Christmas

And by “home” I mean my home. My new* home. The one I just purchased. The final papers were all signed this afternoon so all I have to do now is wait for the keys. Well, and finishing my packing.

Exciting times, for sure! I take possession in a little over a week, on the 14^th, which just happens to be a little over a week before Christmas. What a nice and expensive present I bought myself this year. I hope the rest of my family isn't upset that I spent vastly more on myself than on all of them combined...

It's hard to wait. Last night I was wishing I could already start moving some of my stuff in, to clear out some space over here in my current place. Since the place has already been empty for who knows how long that technically could have been a possibility, but I'll just have to be patient and wait until it's officially mine.

Also, there are so many things I'd like (or need) to buy, but I've been telling myself to wait until after I've moved in to buy anything. Not only because I'd have to find a place to store it in this mess until then, but it would be a good idea to have a few days to let the layout, colors, etc. fully sink in so I can buy stuff that I'll know will look great there (not to mention the possibility of some great Boxing Day sales). But that hasn't stopped me from going to stores and browsing, though.

The one exception was a new box spring and bed frame. Since I'll actually have a spare bedroom now, having a bed to go in said bedroom would be a plus. And fortunately a friend said I could store it along the wall in his garage for a couple weeks, and we even went out in his van to purchase it. Of course, I'll use the new bed myself and leave the old one for any guests I may get. Don't worry, I did also purchase a new foam top for the old mattress so it hopefully won't be that bad... Maybe I should spend a few nights on it just to see how it is before anyone else has to use it. Worst case scenario, I do have a rather comfy air mattress that could be used.

I honestly can't believe how fast things have gone. Now I'm counting the days until I get my condo. And as soon as the actual time of day when I'll get the keys has been arranged, I'll have to start counting down the hours. If I assume, for now, that my realtor and I will meet up as soon as I can after work that Friday, then that means at this moment I only have about 212 hours to go!

* And of course, by “new” I actually mean new to me, not a newly-built condo. I did check out the pricing on one out of curiosity, and found that a smaller one bedroom unit still cost a whole lot more than my two bedroom one. New would have been nice, but I didn't want to pay anywhere near what they were wanting.

Catching Flies, Part 2

This morning when I got to work I decided to build a fruit fly trap that would hopefully work better than simply setting out a bottle of malt vinegar. Incidentally, the lid full of vinegar worked better than I thought it would. When I dumped it out, I found there were almost a dozen fruit flies that had gotten into it and sunk to the bottom. It turns out that bottle of vinegar also had some liquid dish soap added, which I heard from several places helps in its trapping ability. Apparently the soap breaks the vinegar's surface tension, making it so the fly would actually sink in rather than be able to sit on the top and fly away to safety.

But the downside of something like that is that it still primarily just attracts the flies, and doesn't really trap them. It's only the few that are foolish enough to go right up to the vinegar that meet their demise. Hence the reason for a trap. I grabbed a disposable plastic cup from the closet at the office, then poured a bit of the vinegar/soap mix into it. Next I took a piece of card stock from my recycling box, cut a rough semi-circle from it, then rolled and taped it into a cone shape. After cutting the tip of the cone off, I put it into the cup and put tape around the edge to both hold it on the cup and make sure it was sealed. The important thing is that the only way in or out was through the hole in the cone.

And it worked great! It seems that after the flies are attracted into the trap thanks to the vinegar (I've heard that apple cider vinegar works best though—I'll have to bring some in tomorrow morning) they are simply too stupid to exit through that same hole they entered through. Seriously, throughout the day I watched several of them crawling around the cone inside the cup and go right up to the hole—then turn around and head back the other way. Eventually they either fall into the vinegar or try to land on it. Even if they didn't, they still would be stuck inside the cup rather than flying around annoying me.

At the end of my work day I picked the cup up and looked inside, and counted 35 flies that I could see. Since I could only see what was around the edges of the cup due to the dark malt vinegar, I'm sure there were more in there that I didn't notice so I've been assuming there were around 40. 40 fruit flies trapped, after only 8 hours. In comparison, the filled cap only trapped about a dozen, in 16 hours. Triple the kill count in half the time. Not bad! I wonder what it'll be like when I get back to work in the morning...

Catching Flies with Vinegar

There's an old expression, “You can catch more flies with honey than vinegar.” Not true; I tried it.

I've had a bit of a problem with fruit flies around my desk at work lately, and even have my bananas inside a storage container to keep them away. This afternoon I noticed the container had a couple dozen fruit flies crawling all over it. They couldn't get inside at the bananas, but that didn't stop them from congregating there anyway.

One of the guys at work recently dubbed an old bottle of vinegar to be a “Fly Trap” bottle so I opened it and sat it on top of my banana box. Then, remembering that expression, I grabbed a plate, smeared some honey on it, and set it up next to the vinegar. Well what do you know, after several minutes there were flies all over the bottle, and only one crawling on the plate (and it wasn't anywhere near where the honey was).

It would appear that whoever first came up with that expression had no idea what they were talking about.

But attracting flies and catching flies are two different matters. It doesn't seem like simply setting out vinegar will actually catch them, and it'll need to be just part of the bait in some other sort of trap. I poured some vinegar into the bottle's lid and, while lots of flies were crawling on it, none actually ventured into the vinegar itself where they would drown. So now I'm worried that, tomorrow morning, I'll have a really massive infestation around my desk thanks to the vinegar. Fortunately I've found several promising fruit fly trap ideas online that I'll have to give a try in the morning...

The 70s Come to Korea

I just stumbled across the song and music video “Gangnam Style” by South Korean rapper Psy. I enjoy watching Japanese music videos because some of them are quite... creative. And Korean stuff can come close. I watched this video several times, not only because I found the song catchy, but because I got a good laugh from both his dance moves and the suits he wore in the video.

Once suit in particular seemed very familiar. Well what do you know, that appears to be almost identical to the tuxes that my dad and his wedding party wore. Back in the mid-70s. I guess it's true what they say about fashion, how everything comes back in style eventually.

Run, run, as slow as you can...

I have gotten quite out of shape over the years. While I was never into sports or other physical activities beyond walking, I did get a fair amount of walking done while I was in school. And then during the times while living in Surrey that I didn't own a car I had to walk to and from the bus when I went to work each day. For a while after the office and I moved to Abbotsford, I even walked or biked to work, which was a good 40 minute walk each way.

After I finally got another car, that stopped but I still made a point of walking to the stores or mall, which are a 20-30 minute walk away, and had the occasional walk at the park or around the neighborhood. Eventually, though, that all seemed to fade away and the extent of my real physical activity became just occasionally moving around boxes and containers at work and any chores I did around the house. But my fingers certainly still got a good workout from all those video games!

But that has to change. I'm certain that most of my health concerns would fade if I took better care of myself. Part of that involves eating better, which is always a struggle for a single person who doesn't often enjoy taking too much time cooking. Another part would be making sure I get any medical assistance that would help improve my quality of life.

But I think the main thing is to finally start getting more active and getting back into shape. Fortunately, it's much easier when it's such nice weather out like we've had here lately, and I find myself looking for any excuse to be outside (for example, I'm even sitting out on my patio as I write this). I started out by taking a good 20 minute walk around the neighborhood each night this week. But even when walking at a faster pace and for that amount of time, it didn't feel like my heart was getting that good a workout. That's when I remembered a nice outdoor track I've seen that I heard was open to the public.

So I swung by this evening to check it out and see what I could do. Well if I didn't know it before, I know now that I'm definitely out of shape. Each lap appears to be 500m, and I decided I'd had enough and switched down to a walking pace before completely finishing two laps (the RunKeeper app I have indicated my "almost-2-laps" was 0.83km and took 5½ minutes). But it certainly gave my heart a good workout! I might have been able to keep jogging a little longer, but I didn't want to overdo it on my first try. Plus I probably would have been completely out of breath before being anywhere near finished the third lap anyway.

So my challenge to myself is to go back to the track every evening between now and my vacation in just under two weeks. And hopefully while on vacation I'll have a chance to do some jogging too, or at least I'm sure there will be a fair number of walks. And playing with my two young nephews is bound to give me quite the workout too.

But since the weather is supposed to continue being really nice for the next couple weeks it shouldn't be too hard to make sure I do it every evening. I'll hopefully see a decent improvement in just that short time. And who knows, maybe if I keep this up, by the end of the summer I'll be able to do 10 laps rather than almost two.

Honey, I Shrunk My iPod (and the price tag)

April 21, 2001. I bought my first portable MP3 player, a Creative Labs Nomad Jukebox. It was only slightly more bulky than a typical portable CD player, and had 6GB of storage space. The total cost including tax worked out to $93.86/GB.

6GB seemed like a lot of space, but as I ripped my music library to my computer over the next while I found I had close to 18GB of music. So, I took my library of 192kbps MP3s and had them batch re-compressed to 64kpbs WMA files. Cutting it down to ⅓ the size let it fit my Jukebox just perfectly. But let me tell you, even with Windows Media Audio files having better quality than MP3 at low bit rates, I could still clearly notice the difference in audio quality but I just lived with it. Until...