I’m not angry at the world, or the government, or large corporations (though I’ve sent large mental lightning bolts towards each of those on numerous past occasions). Not today. Today, I’m simply angry at myself.

That happens frequently, too.

My brain betrays me at every turn. It’s not for lack of intelligence. No, I’ve received my fair share of that. It’s not a paucity of creativity, either. I’ve got that one in spades. It’s a little thing called focus.

Let me backtrack a bit. I’m one of those people who is interested in many, many things. That’s good. I have a curious mind, and I want to find out about things, how they work, what happened when, why this is like that, and why that is like this. It’s all good.

Unfortunately, this has led me to be rather scattered over the course of my life. My lack of focus has enabled a certain penchant for flitting from one thing to the next to the next. And while that’s great for learning new stuff and keeping myself entertained, it’s really not ideal for any kind of sustained focus on meaningful projects.

Take this blog, for example. We’re coming up on its one-year anniversary. When I started blogging, my goal was to blog every day. And I did that. For about seven weeks.

Then, in September, I had what I refer to as my “mental health crisis”. Major meltdown. Big time. I was out of commission for a couple of months. I blogged occasionally, but nothing like before. After that, I had flurries of blogging activity, but it still wasn’t anything close to the way I’d started it off.

And that frustrated me. Because, you see, when you take a tendency to flit and combine it with a second tendency towards depression, you end up with one unproductive motherfucker.

And that’s me. In a nutshell. Well, the unproductive part, anyway.

So, what do I do with this inablility to sustain momentum in projects that I start?

Self-knowledge, I have found, is usually an excellent starting point. I consider myself to be extremely self-aware, and I know my tendencies like I know my address and phone number. Sometimes I’m able to strategize around them, and sometimes I’m not. It can be a bit of a crap shoot, but it’s better than not knowing myself at all.

But I’m getting way ahead of myself here. Let me take a deep breath and get back to the point I was originally going to make before blasting into that four-hundred-word rant I just dashed off.

The original notion for this post came from some musing and cogitating I got up to a few weeks ago, mostly about the aforementioned diluted focus and interest in so many things. The anger came from realizing that I’d been thinking about this post for all those weeks and still hadn’t written the goddamned thing.

Many things intervened. The self-same lack of focus numbers amongst them. As does the occasional mood swing. Not to mention a change of jobs. All perfectly legitimate reasons, but they still don’t prevent me from getting mad at myself for not blogging.

However, in with all the angst and self-blame and depression and chaos and general mayhem, a kernel of a seed of a germ of an idea took hold. And, lo and behold, it’s actually a postive idea. Break out the champagne!

Racoons are generalists as well. And, like my brain, they can be damned annoying at times.

You, see, I have come to realize that I am a generalist. I am one of those people who likes to see the big picture. I like to know how things interconnect, how one area of endeavour relates to another. Nothing delights me more than reading a book about, say, computer software, and finding that the author occasionally drifts into an anecdote about music or some equally unrelated area. It jars my brain back into the real world and reassures me that everything is connected together.

Because, you know, it is.

So my challenge is this: How do I use my generalistic tendencies to their best advantage? How to I take what I’ve regarded as a weakness and turn it into a strength? How do I put my curiosity to good use?

These, and other questions, will be the subjects of much further rumination and cogitation over the coming weeks. The fact that I’ve had this insight at all is fairly auspicious. I may be able to figure something out.

Or maybe someone reading this will comment with an idea. Who knows?

In the meantime, I’ve got my blog’s first anniversary to think about. I can’t believe I’ve been blogging (off and on) for a year now. The blog is certainly reflective of my personality: It covers many topics and takes frequent breaks. Perhaps my new insights into myself will fuel a new period of blog productivity.

Speaking of birthdays, mine is the same as my blog’s, and this year is my fiftieth. It’s hard to believe I’ve put up with my brain for this long, but I suppose it’s also testament to my own tenacity that I’ve perservered for as long as I have. At any rate, I’m going to be celebrating big time.

And reflecting on future possibilities.

Hmmm… I might even do a minor blog redesign. You never know.

Don’t forget to leave that light on.

(And, apparently, generalist is also a term used in 3D computer animation. I found a bunch of demo reels on YouTube, and I particularly liked this one by David Radford from 2008.)

I’ve never heard of anything like this happening in Canada before. One of my tweets on Twitter yesterday read: “Is it just me, or is the world getting a little bit less hospitable every single day?” It’s hard to be positive at times, especially when you see a group of anarchists, who basically don’t care about anything except, well, anarchy, hijacking a protest against a group of politicians who are out of touch with reality and don’t, quite frankly, give a rat’s ass about the people they’re supposed to be representing.

It’s the same all over. It doesn’t matter whether you’re talking about governments, huge corporations, media outlets, or religious institutions. The individual just doesn’t seem to matter any more. It’s all about the institution maintaining itself and, if possible, growing even bigger and more powerful.

Somewhere in its growth cycle, the large institution experiences a shift in priorities. Policies, procedures, and power become more important than people. The entity is too large to be flexible anymore, and the people running it don’t care about anything except their end-of-quarter bonuses.

And keeping their jobs.

I’m a dyed-in-the-wool cynic. I take everything I read, hear, and see with a grain of salt. The media may be telling us what’s going on, but they’re doing it on their terms, telling us exactly what they want us to know. They have to show us just the right images, couch things in just the right terms, so that we’ll keep watching or listening or reading, and they’ll keep getting their advertisers’ dollars.

I don’t watch or read the news much. Not only is it depressing; it’s misleading. It gives us a skewed view of the world, and inundates us with infuriating stories and disheartening images. I prefer to use the internet for my current events. At least there I have a hope of getting real opinions from real people.

And even then, my grain of salt is close at hand.

Because most people really don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.

Okay, are you about ready to click away from this post? Have you had just about enough of my cynicism and negativity for one day? Well, hang on just a bit longer, ’cause this rant is about to go in a different direction.

You see, timing is everything. And just a few days ago, before all this G-8/G-20 brouhaha erupted, I made a conscious decision to try something different with my blog. I decided to try incorporating interviews into my blogging mix. Interviews with real people. Interesting people who are doing interesting things and have interesting things to say.

I think I got things off to a good start. If you didn’t read my interview with Julie Wilson (aka The Book Madam), please go check it out. It’s interesting, it’s fun, and it’s a real change of pace and breath of fresh air in what has been, for the most part, a fairly self-indulgent blog.

You see, people are interesting. Governments and corporations don’t seem to realize this. People have things to say, stories to tell, lives to live. We’re not numbers, we’re not database entries, and we’re not blobs of product on an assembly line. Each of us is unique, and each of us has our own, equally unique, contribution to make to the world.

I don’t always remember this. I don’t experience enlightenment every day. Hell, not even most days. It’s hard to ponder an individual’s unique contribution to the universe when said individual is shouting obsenities at the person who just caught them trying to shoplift, or when they’re grumbling at you because they want to pay the American price for a book instead of the Canadian price. On such occasions, it’s hard enough just to keep a civil tongue in your head.

Because people can be damned stupid and inconsiderate a lot of the time.

But we don’t have to get to know everybody we meet. Can you imagine how overwhelming that would be? The world is a pretty overwhelming place on the best of days. Truth is, we don’t even have much in common with most people we meet. And that’s okay. Everyone has their own way to rock and roll. And I have no problem with anyone doing their thing, as long as it doesn’t interfere with me doing mine.

And my thing, as of this moment, is articulating my view of things and trying to make sense of an increasingly nonsensical world.

When I worked for Academic Computing Services at Dalhousie University many years ago, one of the things I did was format and edit the campus IT newsletter, which was called Information Technology Update. While I enjoyed the layout and production process, I also contributed to the publication with the occasional article and, eventually, a regular column, which I entitled “The Human Factor”, in which I made a point of relating all our marvellous technological advances to the reason it all exists to begin with: Us.

Even back then, I was cognizant of the submersion of the individual into an ever-growing miasma of data. I felt it important to poke my head up from the swirls of toxic mist and say, “Hey! Listen! We’re still human beings out here!” The exclamation holds true today more than ever.

I’m glad that BookCamp Halifax happened when it did, because it stimulated my mind and got me talking to a bunch of really interesting people. And that sparked me to revisit the interview thing for my blog. And it’s something I’ll be doing again.

And again.

Because people are interesting.

Don’t forget to leave the light on.

(And, just to add yet another new twist to my ever-expanding blog, here’s my very first video blog entry, embedded from the Faltarego YouTube channel.)

It’s just that over the last year or so, I haven’t been reading as much as I usually do. I’ve been noticing that I don’t have as much fresh material to recommend to customers lately. I just keep recommending the same books to whoever asks my opinion.

And that’s lame.

So, volunteering to help organize BookCamp Halifax was just the thing. I didn’t realize it was going to be just the thing, but it turned out that way. Not only did I meet a lot of great people (many of whom I knew online but not in-the-flesh), but I also learned a lot about books, publishing, book-related technology, and this little concept known as “community”.

Example: If I hadn’t volunteered with BookCamp, I would not have met my co-organizer Robbie MacGregor and would not, then, have been introduced by him to a little book called L:and things come apart written by Ian Orti. As a consumer of a lot of what most folks might call “mainstream fiction”, this was a foray into literary territory I hadn’t visited for a long time. I think the last time I read anything this artistic, imaginative, and thought-provoking was, oh, back in 2004, when I read The Dreamlife of Bridges by Robert Strandquist and wrote a review of it for The Antigonish Review.

My brain needs more of this kind of stimulation. I need to step away from the Dan Browns and Michael Crichtons once in a while. That’s not to take anything away from the pure escapism of Dan Brown and the meticulous research and vivid imagination of Michael Crichton (who I will sorely miss, may he rest in peace), but it’s refreshing to read a book that is Art rather than one that is a movie-on-paper.

Yes, yes. I know. All authors are artists. It’s just that some are a bit more… um… artistic than others. To my mind, there’s a big difference between spinning a good yarn and crafting a piece of written work that steps beyond story and actually starts to spread itself through the reader’s mind like a fine web. It settles there, fastens itself to your neurons, and makes you pay attention.

I love a good yarn. No question about it. I appreciate a tale that will whisk me away and get me turning those pages. Sometimes I just want to be entertained and told a story. That’s the kind of writing I do myself. I have no delusions about my style. When it comes to allegory, allusion, and analogy, I’m all thumbs. I like to get characters talking to each other and seeing what happens next.

But as a reader, it’s nice to challenge myself once in a while, read a work that is not an obvious A-to-B-to-C narrative. Throw my preconceptions out the window and look at the world through a different set of eyes. It’s called expanding one’s horizons.

So, yes, the BookCamp experience has juiced my brain up a bit for the literature. But it’s done something else as well. I was so stimulated by the discussions at the event, and so intrigued and impressed by the people I met there, that I began to revisit a notion I’d entertained back when I first started this blog.

And that is the notion of interviewing interesting people. It’s not something I’ve ever done, and I have no training in journalism, but the concept is intriguing, and because I’m a curious person with a slightly skewed view of the world, I’m pretty sure I can come up with an interesting question or two.

So, I’m doing it. It’s a done deal. I’m taking my rediscovered literary zeal and my rediscovered fascination with people and setting off into the hinter-net with my binoculars and compass to track the species known as “interview subject.”

So watch this space. In the next day or so, I’ll be posting an interview with my first victim, book maven and publicist extraodinaire Julie Wilson (also known as The Book Madam), whose generosity of spirit has given me a tremendous shot in the arm in terms of getting this new aspect of my blog started.

What can I say? I’m excited.

Don’t forget to leave the light on.

(Here’s a brilliant stop-motion book trailer for L:and things come apart, put together by the author, Ian Orti.)

There are ninety-one countries on the list I looked at, and every last one of them publishes some number of books, either large or small, every single year. The top four countries (U.K, U.S., China, and Russia) each publish more than 100,000 books each year. Forty-seven of the ninety-one countries publish more than a thousand books per year.

What I’m saying is: That’s a lot of books.

Hundreds of thousands of books. Millions of pages. Tens of millions of paragraphs. Hundreds of millions of sentences.

All written by people.

In our flashy, souped-up, high-tech world, it’s easy to forget that actual human beings are the source of just about everything we take in. It’s especially easy to forget this when you look at all the technology involved in producing most of our entertainment.

Take something like Iron Man 2, for example. You know, that movie I blogged about for a whole week before I dropped off the face of the earth for a month or so. There is so much technology in that film and so many people involved in its making that it’s hard to see the trees for the forest. Each of the names listed in the (very long) credits at the end of the film represents an actual living, breathing person who is probably passionate about the job he or she does in the film industry.

But let us return to the humble book. Not nearly so many people involved in its production. Yes, there are editors and printers and typesetters and graphic designers and all the trappings of mass market manufacture. But at its heart, the book is the product of one mind. One heart. One person.

The author.

As I mentioned in a previous blog post, I was involved in organizing a little thing we like to call BookCamp Halifax, which took place on June 5th. It was a remarkable day, for a number of reasons. First off, it was the very first BookCamp ever to be held in Halifax, which is in itself cause for a good bit of cheer. Secondly, the feeling of community of was so palpable through the event that most of us didn’t even notice how small a group we were. Small but mighty, is how I called it. And thirdly, I got to meet some very fine folk from Toronto who were headed to the AGM of the ACP and managed to swing down a few days early to grace our little shindig.

Now, I don’t mean anything pejorative by my use of those diminutive adjectives. Far from it. Sure, we organizers were a bit skittish for a while there about the low registration numbers, but those Toronto folk I just mentioned set us straight in short order. They’d been to the BookCamps in Toronto, and big as they were, they liked our size and energy just fine, thank you very much.

It’s all about people, and it’s all about having something to say and having the space to say it. One of our Toronto visitors, Meghan MacDonald, who’s a project coordinator at BookNet Canada, posted a blog entry about BookCamp Halifax, in which she stresses how important a sense of community is at events like these and how much more inclined people will be to participate in the discussions if they feel comfortable.

I love technology. I love gadgets. I love the internet. But I also love communication. And interaction. And you need fellow human beings for those last two. It’s all about the humans. It’s really the only reason any of us do anything. You can’t even make money if there’s no one around to either give you a job or pay you for your product or service.

Some people get so focussed on the thing they’re doing or the object they’re creating that they lose sight of the fact that there’s very little value in it if they’re the only one who can appreciate it. We write books because we want people to read them; we make movies because we want people to watch them. We make art not for art’s sake but because we want to take a piece of ourselves and put it out there on display, for better or for worse, and hope against hope that somebody out there will get it.

It’s called sharing the human experience.

There’s a certain energy about holding a book in your hand. It’s a made object, put together in the grand tradition of the good people who first discovered how to make a writing surface out of wet reeds. It’s tangible, it’s portable, and it contains the energy of the author.

I’m not dissing e-books, not by a stretch, but I don’t think anything will ever replace the feel of a paper book in your hand, nor the satisfaction that comes with that little thud you hear when you shut the back cover after reading the last page.

BookCamp Halifax was a wonderful experience, and I look forward to putting it all together again next year. I get the feeling that my co-organizers—Kimberly Walsh, Ryan Jones, and Robbie MacGregor—feel pretty much the same way.

Don’t forget to leave a light on… so you can read that book in your hand.

It sucks when circumstances get in the way of plans. I mean, I suppose I could have written this thing yesterday, or the day before, but it’s amazing how little you feel like doing the normal things when your body is not cooperating with you.

I went to see Iron Man 2 late Saturday afternoon. I enjoyed the hell out of it. I planned to write a review as soon as I got home.

Didn’t happen.

First off, my exhaustion had not completely left me. Plus, for some unknown reason (seriously, I don’t know what brought it on), my lower back started giving me problems. It’s like a neck pinch, except worse and on the right-hand side of my lower back. I think it’s starting to work itself out now, but over the last two days, I have not felt like doing anything.

But today is a new day, and though the painful twinge has not yet left me, I’m up early and am ready to put this puppy to bed. So, yes, it’s time to complete my Cycle of Iron Man 2.

Let’s just say that I’m going to be seeing it again. Soon.

This movie was a real ride. It was jam-packed with action, humor, hi-tech wizardry, and great characters. Some people say it was too jam-packed for its own good, but I don’t agree with them. I stepped into the car and was whisked away, never looking back.

In short, I had a blast.

There was so much in this film that it’s hard to know where to begin.

Well, first off, there were some amazing new cast members. Mickey Rourke plays Ivan Vanko, the embittered son of a Soviet scientist who had worked with Tony Stark’s father. Scarlett Johansson plays Natalie Rushman, a Stark employee from the legal department who ends up as Tony Stark’s assistant and turns out to be more than she appears. Sam Rockwell plays Justin Hammer, a rival of Tony Stark’s in the weapons industry.

Don Cheadle takes over the role of James “Rhodey” Rhodes and does so with flair, style, and humor. His chemistry with Robert Downey is great, and he gets some really good lines. We may never know the real reason why Terence Howard didn’t return in the role, but, frankly, I didn’t miss him.

And then there is the awesomeness that is Samuel L. Jackson. His scenes as Nick Fury were few, but he made the most of them. The man eats up the screen when he’s on it, and it takes someone of Downey’s calibre to balance him off. It worked well.

[Okay, from this point on, I can't guarantee that I won't give away plot details, so if you haven't seen the film yet, be warned. There might be spoilers ahead!]

Despite my love of comics and superheroes, I’m not a regular comic book reader. I like to buy trade paperback compilations of the really good stories, but I don’t buy individual comic books. It’s just not worth the money to me. I can tear through a single issue in about twenty minutes, and that’s not enough bang for my buck. Even the compilations go by quickly if I don’t pace myself.

So, as a result, I’m a comics geek, but not a die-hard comics geek. It doesn’t bother me when superhero movies change things around from the original comic book stories, because chances are, I haven’t actually read the original stories. As long as the moviemakers are true to the characters and have respect for the source material, I’m happy to go along on whatever ride they want to take me.

So it didn’t bother me to learn that this movie’s version of Ivan Vanko is an amalgam of two Iron Man villains, Whiplash (later upgraded and renamed Backlash) and the Crimson Dynamo. Neither did it bother me that Natalie Rushman (aka Natasha Romanoff) was never Tony Stark’s assistant in the comics and was, in fact, a Soviet-trained operative before defecting to the U.S. and becoming first a member of the Avengers and later an agent of S.H.I.E.L.D. In the movie, she’s a S.H.I.E.L.D. agent first, and we can only assume she’ll join Avengers when that film comes out in 2012 (provided the world doesn’t end).

I loved the scenes at the Stark Expo, and despite hearing and reading comments from others about the ridiculousness of the Ironettes dancers, I found the whole scenario hilarious and very much something Tony Stark would have in his trade show. His landing on the stage in the Iron Man suit and the machines rising from the stage floor to remove it and reveal Stark in a tuxedo were so showy, ostentatious, and over-the-top that it was a thing of beauty.

I particularly enjoyed the incorporation of “footage” from Tony Stark’s father taken at the 1974 Stark Expo. The retro feel really fit in with the whole superhero milieu, because these characters have been around for a long time. It also strengthened the presence of Howard Stark’s legacy in Tony’s life.

This becomes particularly important to the story when artifacts from his father’s time suddenly appear in Tony Stark’s life, courtesy of a crate brought by Nick Fury and his S.H.I.E.L.D. agents. Among the items are a few reels of movie film, which Tony screens in his lab. He discovers that his father has a message for him, and that he wasn’t as cold and unfeeling as Tony had thought he was. Personally, I found this scene quite touching.

There’s so much more. The grand prix auto race in Monaco; the palladium core of Stark’s chest reactor, which keeps burning out and is slowly poisioning his blood; the promotion of Pepper Potts to Stark Industries CEO; the transformation of Rhodie into War Machine; some kick-ass martial arts by Natasha Romanov; and a great turn by Garry Shandling as an uptight U.S. Senator.

Whew. I get winded just thinking about it. I don’t know how they managed to fit so much into a film without it seeming rushed. The film clocks in at just over two hours, so it’s long, but not excessively long. I think they managed to balance everything pretty well.

Anyway, I fully enjoyed Iron Man 2. It went by far too quickly, and now I’m going to have to see it again to soak in the details I missed first time around.

Highly recommended.

Don’t forget to leave the palladium-core arc-reactor on.

(And here’s that over-the-top, Vegas-style entrance that only Tony Stark as Iron Man could pull off. Love this stuff. Makes me smile.)

Due to an extreme bout of fatigue yesterday, I did not write a blog post. I’m naturally disappointed about that. I’m also disappointed that I’m actually not going to be seeing Iron Man 2 on opening night. Previous committments have prevented that from coming to pass.

So… some flag-waver I turned out to be.

On the upside, I’m pleased that I wrote blog posts five days in a row. That hasn’t happened in a while. I’m also not a big fan of opening night crowds, so I’m not really all that upset about not seeing the film tonight.

I’ll probably go tomorrow. Ooooh… There are matinées!

I don’t think I’ve been this excited about a movie opening since the days when I ran a local Star Trek club, and the gang of us would line up on opening day for whatever Trek film was just coming out. Ahhh, those were heady times.

But I digress. As usual.

The classic Iron Man landing position

In preparation for the grand event, I pulled out my DVD of the first Iron Man film last night. I was planning on watching it and then blogging about it. I ended up watching it, going back to a particular scene to get a certain line, and then posting that line on Twitter. I then promptly fell asleep.

The line I wanted to get just right was: “If you douse me again, and I’m not on fire, I’m donating you to a city college.”

This is just one of many classic lines from Robert “Tony Stark” Downey. The way he talks to his robots is probably one of my favorite parts of the whole film.

Another classic line (to the soldier in the Humvee who’s having his picture taken with Stark): “I don’t want to see this on your MySpace page.” I think one of the things I love about this line is that it shows that, despite Stark’s technical genius, his social awareness is a bit off. Most people would have said “Facebook” rather than “MySpace”. Who talks about MySpace anymore? Tony Stark, evidently.

I’ve watched Iron Man about six times, I think. I know I saw it twice in the theatre, and I’m pretty sure I’ve now watched it four times on the DVD. It doesn’t get old, and I keep looking forward to my favorite parts.

A few of my favorite highlights:

• “Back in Black” playing under the opening shot of the Humvee convoy.
• The whole scene in the Humvee (“Good God, you’re a woman. Honestly, I couldn’t have called that.”)
• The first time we get a full look at the original iron suit in Afghanistan.
• The chemistry between Robert Downey and Gwyneth Paltrow.
• The Jarvis AI.
• The two things Stark wanted on his return to the U.S. were a cheeseburger and a press conference.
• The fire extinguisher robot.
• The revised S.H.I.E.L.D. acronym: Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement and Logistics Division. Has a nice ring to it.
• Iron Man landing in the Afghan village. (Seriously, that landing on one foot and one knee is epic.)
• The machine guns in the shoulders of the suit.
• The shot where Iron Man is walking towards camera as the weapons behind him are exploding.
• “I am Iron Man.”
• Samuel L. Jackson!

Okay, enough of that. You get the idea. I’m a big ole geeky fanboy, and I memorize memorable lines. I can only imagine what’s going to come out of Iron Man 2. Just from the trailer alone there are half a dozen memorable bits.

Not much longer now. Will be seeing film soon. Soooooon.

And then it’ll be all about counting down to the Thor and Captain America films.

Next year, baby.

Don’t forget to leave the light on.

You see, despite the fact that I’m running a blog and downloading and tweaking pictures and modifying snippets of PHP code in my blog theme, things are really very low tech in this here domicile.

As of two days ago, the setup was: A ten-year old HP Pavilion desktop system in the den where I work, a seven-year old Acer desktop system in the dining room where my wife works, a LexMark Scanner/printer connected to my machine, and an HP inkjet printer connected to the other machine.

The HP Pavilion was recently upgraded to a real, whole Gigabyte of RAM, and the Acer was grinding along with a painful 256 Megabytes of RAM. The Acer was becoming nearly unusable. Like I said, seriously low tech. We might just as well have using smoke signals and stone tablets.

Now, this guy knows how to fix a computer.

Yesterday, I called around to see if I could obtain some more SDRAM for the Acer machine. I figured it would be expensive, being older memory, but I was prepared to bite the bullet just to get that machine up to some sort of reasonable functioning. One of the places I called said that, while they didn’t have any SDRAM, they did have some old IBM systems that had two gigs of RAM in them, plus a faster processor than either of the machines here in the old household. Plus, they were on special: Down from $199.99 to $99.99

I veritably zoomed over there to have a look. I figured that if these machines were any good at all, I could pick one up for myself and replace the chugging Acer with my HP. It would just be a matter of swapping the disks around.

Well, it’s at this point that I cease going into detail. Suffice it to say that what started out as a two or three hour proposition at most turned into an all day affair that ran well into the evening. Disks were removed and reinstalled numerous times. Windows XP was repaired, reinstalled, and re-reinstalled several times. A 120-gigabyte disk with video projects on it was lost in the process. I still don’t know what happened to cause it to fail, but thankfully there was nothing on it that we’d accessed recently.

As of hitting the wall last night and heading for bed, things were in a disastrous state. Neither computer had Windows XP fully installed and configured, there was no internet access, and I was furious. Profanities were uttered. Teeth were gnashed. Large corporations were ritually cursed.

Today, I managed to start putting pieces of Humpty back together again. As of this writing, both computers have all their video, audio, and network drivers installed and operational, the internet is working, Google Chrome and AVG Anti-Virus are installed, and the world is starting to look like a friendly place again. There are still many software applications to install, and our documents still need to be retrieved from their backup locations, but the machines are working, and there is much improved speed on all fronts.

Despite the techno-disaster of yesterday, I managed to get in a blog post before the day was out. It was fearful close to midnight when I published the entry last night, but I managed it. And I cheated a bit: I published the text before tweaking it and adding the image and video.

Tonight is a lost cause. It’s already after midnight as I write this (well, four minutes after midnight), and I’m typing as fast as I can. I’m going to cheat again and backdate this entry on my blog so it shows up in the right day. Extenuating circumstances permit me to feel no guilt whatsoever about this.

So, yes, I’m looking forward to a glimpse of slick, futuristic, Stark-style technology when I plant my tired bum in a movie theatre seat and let the images of Iron Man 2 wash over me. It will be a welcome reprieve from the seriously out-of-date techno-world in which I exist daily.

When I finally get a netbook, I’m naming him Jarvis.

Don’t forget to leave the light on. But turn off those noisy old computers, okay?

(And here’s a glimpse of the high-tech future that’s happening today. The Iron Man suit is not as far fetched as we might have thought.)

That should be sufficient. I really shouldn’t have to say any more, but then it would more of a tweet than a blog post. Not even a full tweet, really. More of a semi-tweet. But that makes me think of chocolate, which is not what I’m going to be talking about here.

What I’m going to be talking about here is one of the most anticipated movies of the year: Iron Man 2.

Okay, I’ll just get this out of my system…

SQUEEE!

Ahem. Sorry about that. I’m fully composed now.

I’ve been following Iron Man director John Favreau on Twitter for some time now, and he gave some tantalizing glimpses into the production process of this most golden of sequels. He tweeted from the set while shooting, from the sound editing facilities, from the special effects facilities, et cetera, et cetera…

The Iron Man 2 Poster

This was a great way to the keep the fans interested. Not that they wouldn’t have been interested anyway, but it was a nice touch, and one that I appreciated. It didn’t give anything away, but it kept us in the loop. Well, maybe just on the outskirts of the loop. Or at least it let us know that the loop was actually there somewhere.

You get the idea.

Need I reiterate that putting Robert Downey Jr. in the role of Tony Stark in the first Iron Man film was one of the most ingenious and inspired bits of casting ever, in the entire history of Hollywoodland? No, I needn’t reiterate it, because you already knew that. But I reiterate it anyway, because I’m a shameless geek and a slobbering fan of both Iron Man and Mr. Downey. (I hesitantly remind you of my embarrassing exclamation of delight above.)

So… needless to say, I’m anticipating this next instalment with a certain degree of… um… enthusiasm.

Back in the good old days, when I used to update this blog every day (Every. Single. Day.) I wrote about superheroes regularly. On Saturdays, if I recall. Yes, yes. I remember. I called it “Super Saturday.” Ah, those were the days. The blog was new, the world was fresh and shiny, dew drops everywhere…

But that was then. This is now. Shit happens. Priorities shift. I don’t update the blog every day anymore, but I do want to work my way back up to that level of activity. I also realize that I miss writing about superheroes. Well, true believers, what a great opportunity for me to do just that: The countdown to Iron Man 2.

So… here’s the deal I’m making with myself. I’m going to write a blog post every day for the next seven days, and each of those posts is going to be about some aspect of Iron Man. The posts may not be entirely about Iron Man, i.e. I might bring in other related topics, but ole shell-head is going to be front and center. I’ve thought of a couple of ideas already, and I think this will be fun.

Man, I’m a geek.

I just reread a post I wrote back on August 8th, called Twitter, Favreau, and Iron Man 2, and it’s interesting to see how things have changed. In that earlier post I mentioned an April release for the film (no date, just the month). I don’t think I got my facts wrong; I just think that, at the time, that was the targeted release month. It’s pretty amazing that the date only slipped by a few weeks, truth be told.

Also, the only image I was able to find for Iron Man 2 was a shot of the armour with a big white “2″ behind it. Now, of course, there’s tons of stuff out there. I decided to use the official poster for this entry, because, well, that’s the best way to start off the countdown.

Iron Man, Tony Stark, Robert Downey, and Jon Favreau are on their way.

Can you tell I’m excited?

Let’s do this.

Don’t forget to leave that glowing blue in your chest on.

(And, of course, to really start things off, here’s the official trailer for Iron Man2. I get jazzed everytime I watch it. It’s just so cool!)

I do have a topic for today, but before I get to it, I feel an odd compulsion to share with you the rather bumpy and circuitous route by which it arrived in my brain. Synapses work in mysterious ways, and this is a fairly good example.

Bear with me here. The link density in this first bit will be rather high.

One of my Twitter friends, who goes by the handle @AliasGrace (and whom I met in person for the first time at PodCamp Halifax two weekends ago), has a blog entitled East Coast by Choice, for which I wrote a guest post three weeks ago. She’s had a number of guest posts over the time she’s been blogging, the most recent of which, entitled “The Death of Barrington Street?” and written by Paul MacKinnon (Twitter handle @downtownpaul), was a really interesting read.

Paul’s post mentioned a number of well-known buildings on Barrington Street, but the one that caught my attention was the Green Lantern building. Now, being the geek that I am (you knew that, right?), you’d think I’d have known Halifax had a Green Lantern building. For some reason, though, I didn’t remember the name at all. But, of course, I was tickled by it. So I went to my dear friend Google to see if I could find some pictures.

And find them I did. The Coast (our local artsy/cultural/gritty/emo/freebie newspaper) has an article about the building, complete with historical pics from the time when the building actually housed the Green Lantern restaurant. The building’s official name is the Keith building, and it currently houses Pogue Fado, a traditional Irish pub. Nice to know the green is still there, anyway.

Still with me? Good. ‘Cause I’ll be getting to the point any second now.

When I looked at those pictures of the Green Lantern restaurant, taken in 1941, I very nearly audibly sighed. The shiny newness of the tables, counters, seats, and fixtures made me want to step into the images and experience what it would have been like to sit there, order a meal or a coffee, and watch the people go by. It all just looked so… nice.

How weird is it to suddenly feel nostalgic for a restaurant that opened a couple of decades before I was even born? Well, it did operate into the sixties, but I don’t remember ever going there. Even if I had, I would have been extremely young, and the shiny newness seen in those pictures would have long since faded.

The whole experience of finding these photos and reacting so strongly to them reminded me of how much we romanticize the past. I know I often think fondly of times gone by and wonder what it would be like to visit times before my birth. Sometimes I want to pick a spot, stand there, and move progressively back through the years so that I can see the changes unfolding backwards.

Intellectually, I know that the past was not better. Previous years of my life all had good points and bad points, ups and downs, high and lows, just like the present time does. And some day down the road, I know I will look back upon 2010 with the same gauzy filter through which I now gaze upon my childhood.

So why do we do it? Why do we remember selectively? Why do we idealize past events and put them up on pedestals built of nostalgic longing? Why do we filter things so much? Is the present really that bad?

Well, I have my theories about that.

From what I’ve observed, people tend to get more nostaligic as they get older. This applies not only to people I’ve met, but also to myself. The older I get, the more stuff I have in my head, and the more stuff I have in my head, the less attention I have for the world around me, and the less attention I have for the world around me, the faster time seems to zip on by.

Remember when you were a kid? (Yes, let’s get nostalgic for a moment here.) Remember how long the Christmas break was? Remember how long the summers were? Remember how each school day dragged on and on? Time was different then. There seemed to be more of it. Even the pleasant days lasted longer.

That’s because there was less stuff in your head back then. Less worry. Less planning. Less responsibility. Less distraction from the moment. You were free to soak it all up, see it for what it was, without all the voices in your head tearing your attention away from it.

We talk about the carefree days of childhood. And for a lot of folks, that’s pretty much what they were. Obviously, not everyone has the same experience. Childhood was a nightmare for some people, and they look back with a different filter entirely. But for many, thinking about childhood brings back fond memories. We might not have been free of cares, but we certainly had less of them.

As we grow older, however, and accumulate knowledge, skills, and responsibilities, our attention is more frequently hauled away from the here and now. And so the present becomes something less than it could be. We miss the moment because of our inner time travel. We fret about the past and worry about the future. We go over and over things we might have done differently and try to plan things we can’t possibly control.

And suddenly, the present is not so great. But it’s not the present’s fault. We’re clouding it with hurts from the past and uncertainties from the future. The poor present moment doesn’t stand a chance.

And therein, friends, lies a profound irony. As much as we look back on certain past events with pink gauze over the lens and sigh about how much better things were back then, we are simultaneously corrupting the present moment with ghosts and shadows of past events that just weren’t that shit-hot at all.

Today, I purchased a book entitled The Secret Pulse of Time. It’s a science book, and it looks like it’s going to be an interesting read. I’m looking forward to it, because, well, I’m a little obsessed about this whole time thing.

As I’m sure many of you are as well.

Don’t forget to leave the light on.

(And, in keeping with the nostalgia theme, not to mention the time theme, here’s a live performance of “Time” by Pink Floyd.)

[I'll still wait until tomorrow to take my Christmassy banner off the blog.]

Anyway, on to the blopic at hand. On New Year’s Day, I started writing what was to be my first post of 2010. It was all about how horrible 2009 had been, and it got rather long. It also ended up containing a lot of really personal stuff and a few passages that I now consider to be bitter whining.

So I decided to sit on it a while, and I’ve now come to the conclusion that this stream of negativity should not be posted. I no longer have anything against sharing personal stuff on this site, but some of the things I wrote on January 1st really went a bit too far.

I’ve decided to move on. 2010 is not only a new year, but a new number ending in a zero. And that’s something we can all get excited about.

I know I’m on board.

I’ve never been the sort of person to indulge in New Year’s resolutions. I find the whole concept repulsive. It’s become a cliché, and nearly everyone who makes them ends up tossing them out the window by the middle of February.

[If you join a fitness center in January, be patient. It will get much less busy as the first six weeks of the year roll by. The "resolutionaries" will start dropping like flies.]

I do, however believe in setting goals. “Resolution” is such a dictatorial word. I’d be setting myself for failure even trying to resolve this or that or the other thing. But I’ve definitely got a few goals in mind for 2010. Many of them involve my health, both physical and mental, and others involve my financial world and my creative world. None of them is unrealistic.

And that’s the thing, right there. Whether you call them goals or resolutions or bumblebee lollipops, they have to be realistic. They have to be things that you actually have a hope in hell of attaining. If you get too grand and sweeping with them, you’ll overwhelm yourself and thus put the kibosh on any possibility of actually accomplishing them.

Because 2009 was such a consistently horrible year for me (with some notable exceptions, of course), I am uncharacteristically motivated to seek massive improvements in 2010. So, the goal-setting was a no-brainer. I know what I need to do, and it’s not going to take a whole hell of a lot of doing to make the coming year a better one than the last.

Okay, even that was too much whining. I think you get the picture: 2009 sucked. Moving on…

"The Three Sphinxes of Bikini" by Salvador Dali

One of the things I am going to be working on, and have already been working on, is my mental health. I have been subject to bouts of depression for a very long time, and I was recently told, after years of wondering, that it is probably not a chemical-imbalance type of depression, but more of a psychological-issues type of depression.

I could deal with that. I’m not a fan of the psychopharmaceuticals. So I’ve been working on dealing with past issues and getting in touch with buried feelings.

And it’s been working.

It’s been heartening to see the occasional public service ad on television dealing with mental health. For a very long time, this whole issue has been something people have been reluctant to talk about. Mental health patients have been marginalized, and people seeking treatment for mental illnesses are very unlikely to share that information with friends and colleagues.

I have no statistical data on this, so don’t ask. It’s an impression I have gotten over the years.

Mental illness is just as real as cancer or any other disease, and it needs to be addressed just as seriously as other diseases. We only get one mind, and if things start to go wrong with it, we need to know that we can seek help for it and not feel like we’re suddenly creatures from another planet.

Because the stigma is still there.

I have a mental illness. I’m not going to make any bones about it. It’s just something that is. It doesn’t make me any less intelligent, or creative, or verbose. It just means that I get overwhelmed easily at times and find it hard to see the positive in things at others.

I consider myself fortunate, however. I get depressed, but I can still function. Other people are not so lucky. Some people sink into depressions so deep that they can’t even get out of bed in the morning. Others become afraid of the simplest things. And it’s not their fault. It’s an illness. And it must be treated as such.

I’m also fortunate in that I’ve finally found the right treatment for my illness. I’m stronger now than I have been in a long time. 2010 looks pretty good so far.

It’s all about awareness. And perspective. People who know me would probably never guess that I had anything wrong mentally. But it’s been there, hovering just under the surface for a long time.

And I’ve decided that I’m not afraid to talk about it. Yes, this is very personal information. But it’s also important. Because mental health is important.

So along with diet and exercise, one of my goals for 2010 is to take what I’ve learned about maintaining and safeguarding my mental and emotional health, and put it into practice.

And while I’m getting healthier, I’m also going to finish editing my novel and get it publication-ready. Because I’m going to become a published author this year. That is most definitely a goal.

I wish you good health, mental and physical, in the coming year.

Don’t forget to leave the light on.