Flecks of… Gray?

from strk3

OK, this is funny; I probably would have went with a short haircut, parted on the side and slicked back and no beard though. Happy Sunday!

picture from re-nest

The Fraser Valley Peach season has brought it’s share of fruit flies into our house. At first I just ignored them but when they started waking me up from sleeping and littering the cupboards in our kitchen, I decided to take action and build a fly trap. It was really effective at trapping a lot of flies, I probably purged about 100 from our kitchen already.

via lifehacker, of course.

this is a follow up to original post

On September 8th, Heidi received her glasses that she had waited 12 business days for (not bad turnaround time). They came wrapped in a fabric sewed, wax sealed box from Pakistan – the post office employee said she’s never seen anything come in a fabric wrapped box before – score 1 for Pakistan!

Inside the fabric wrap were 3 styrofoam cases each holding a case with glasses that were wrapped in non-candied cotton candy and also a glass wiping cloth. Heidi tried the fit and they were all pretty decent with some fitting on her nose better than others. She wanted to note that it’s hard for her to find glasses that fit at a regular glasses shop because of the unique lengths on her face. The prescription was spot on for all of her glasses so for her that’s great – she loves having the prescription sunglasses for sunny driving days – she’s never had them before so that is a real treat.

For $75, including 3 pairs of prescription glasses and shipping from Pakistan, this seems to be a big score – I can hardly wait till my eyes degrade enough to need glasses; hopefully it will be before I turn 60…

YouMail is a advanced message manager for your American cell phone and since I have an American cell phone, I’m able to use it – whee!

With this service I can incorporate my very favorite thing about Vonage into my cell phone which is the ability to have voice mail messages delivered right to your email with the message as an audio attachment! I likey this feature so much and want to have it for my home line again. Note: I don’t recommend Vonage to anyone; in fact, I’ll unrecommend it.

Another feature that I like is the ability to manage all of this information and even listen to your messages on the internet by logging into your YouMail account. Once in your account you can also set up specific voice mail messages for any of the contacts that you have and they have a list of thousands of available ones to choose from if you want something funny or even professional.

And, it’s all FREE – my favorite price! If you have an American cell phone I recommend taking advantage of this!

In Desktop Tower Defense there are the regular game modes of Easy, Medium and Hard which I’ve managed to complete without losing a life so I started to venture into the realm of the challenges.

Let’s start with ‘The 100′ Challenge. I’ve checked the forums and watched videos but I’ve never seen anything to show that anyone has been able to beat it without juggling. I guess there’s really not anything terribly wrong with juggling but I prefer to be able to beat a level without it.

Of the total 100 levels, the highest that I’ve been able to get is to level 74 at which point my maze gets completely overrun. I’ve seen some people get as high as upper 70′s without juggling but I’m satisfied with my successes in this level.

Next up is the Speed Challenge! In this one, you have to keep building quickly and upgrade at just the right times so that you’re not left without towers while the creeps come and you’re busy upgrading. I was able to finish this level with two lives remaining using the above maze.

15 Towers is the next challenge. This one is tough because you can only have 15 towers on your map at any one time, making the spawns really tough to manage. I was able to finish this level also, with 3 lives remaining.

Survivor Challenge is next and I was able to beat this one with some liberal help from this youtube video. I was able to do it and lose only 1 life which I think could be improved to a perfect score with a little practice on the tower upgrade timing.

Last up is the 3K Fixed challenge. In this challenge, you get 3000 dollars to spend on a maze, then you hit go and you’re not allowed to sell or buy anything after that, you just sit and wait to see how well your maze holds up. I was able to complete this one without losing any lives using the above maze.

So, I’m done with the challenges; that feels good. I hope that no one else has been as addicted to this game as I have; I need to get better sleep at night…

I’ve already sent this to a few teacher friends of mine, but maybe you want to send this to your teacher friends. It appears as though Starbucks is giving away free coffee to teachers from Ontario or Western Canada on Mondays in September so they can develop a new habit.

via redflagdeals

Business Week has an article covering the best cities in the world to live in and Vancouver is coming in at #4 just behind Zurich, Vienna and Geneva.

Consultants rated each city on a variety of factors including the level of traffic congestion, air quality, and personal safety reported by expatriates living in more than 600 cities worldwide.

OK, so I really live in a sleepy suburb way outside Vancouver, but I can still pretend I’m a part of the big worldclass city, right?

I don’t really have that many extra books, but if I did, and I couldn’t bear to throw them away, this would be a pretty cool way to keep them around and useful.

Link from dezeen via lifehacker