that canadian girl

Latest adventures…

  • Lloyd Webber to revive Evita

    The Beebs’ Entertainment section brings us horrific news – We all thought Evita, one of the worst musicals of all time, had died a painful, slow death, surrounded by too many dull recitatives and sickeningly repetitive leitmotivs. Unfortunately, Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber has decided to revive Evita.

    Don’t get me wrong, I am a lover of musicals, and have spent an embarrassing amount of time listening to some of ALW’s other productions. I even gave Evita a good go, both the original musical and the Madonna movie version. And nope, no Rainbow Tour or High Flying Adored for me. I mean, I could still sing about 3/4 of the musical from memory, but that doesn’t mean I *want* my limited brain space to be used up by it!

    her: “Señor Peron?”
    him: “Eva Duarte?”
    them: “I’ve heard so much about you…”

    No, no!!! Make it stop!

    “On this night… on this night of a thousaaaand stars, let me taaake you to heaveeeen’s door, where the music of loooove’s guitars playyyyyyy foreeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeverrrrrrrrr moooooooooooooooooooore!”

    *Twitch*

    Ok sorry about that guys, as I was saying, crummy musical, not my cup o tea, not going to see it. “Last year, Evita came in the top 10 in a BBC Radio 2 poll to find the UK’s favourite musicals.” Now that’s disturbing…

    My top 10 Musicals/Broadways:

    1. RENT
    2. Les Miserables
    3. Miss Saigon
    4. Starmania (Berger/Plamondon)
    5. The Life (Cy Coleman)
    6. Chicago
    7. Company (Sondheim)
    8. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat
    9. Sunset Boulevard
    10. Phantom of the Opera – Loved it when I was younger, but now it truly grates on my nerves, so it’s only just made the list

    The top 5 are clear winners, the rest is wishy washy and could easily be swapped with other ones like Jesus Christ Superstar, Little Shop of Horrors or Demain Matin, Montreal m’attend, all depending on my mood!

  • Careful blogging…

    I’ve had an email from Micfo, my hosting company, letting me know that today they’ll be moving my stuff from one server to another, so I’ll keep my entries in Notepad to be sure I don’t lose anything permanently during backup…

    I’ll post everything a bit later tonight 🙂

    In the meantime, subject to them not screwing up the move to the new server, I highly recommend Micfo for your web hosting needs. They’re cheap and react quickly when something goes wrong, AND they have these occasional fantastic deals where existing customers can upgrade their package to something insanely too big for anything you’ll ever need for a one-off $20 cost!

    Ok, back to the Mythbusters marathon on Discovery Channel… Best way to spend a Sunday!

  • What is Yahoo thinking!?

    So you’ve seen blogs where you need to enter a few characters to verify you’re a real person and not a super-duper-spam bots. Ever struggled to read the characters? I know a few times I smirked and thought it wasn’t that easy, but it never stopped me from getting it right.

    Until today.

    Yahoo! mail requires users to enter a code before they can hit send on an email now. And it’s not any code, it’s mythical super-duper-alien alphabet!


    (Click here to see the whole email page – Then leave me your best guess in the comments! Andrew’s guess on the screenshot was wrong!)

    Can you seriously read this? I know I have no idea what that second character is. Andrew and I got the guess wrong, and it took until our third try to find a clearly readable one! Granted, I can cope with getting it wrong once to get one that’s slightly easier to guess, but anyone with the vaguest visual disability or who isn’t fully technology-savvy will be stumped by it.

    If I can quote my friend vegcat again, Yahoo! mail can bite me. For needing this verification image before hitting send on an email, and for making me use an exclamation mark in the middle of a sentence. Bite my Six Mile Bottom!

  • The World According to Google

    No, I’m not talking about the Money Programme’s “The World According to Google” on which my company was featured as part of the Google Adwords (woohoo 15 secs fame for the PPC team – don’t go click on the ads though!)

    Through Web Pro News, I found The Prejudice Map. Apparently, the Australians are known for their “no-nonsense, uncomplicated friendliness, directness and obsession with sport”, Russians for their “brutality, passion, soulfullness and for being tough negotiators” and Canadians for their “cultural diversity, humility and kindness, being tolerant and for liking their beer”. Amusing stereotype map.

  • Kids are cool

    A father and son podcast, discussing their beginnings with computers, jobs, school… Heartwarming and very cute so give it a listen!

    (found via MC)

  • Seven things

    It was Lisa‘s idea… so I thought I’d improve on it and add another category to make it a 7×7.

    I could post something wittier tonight, but it’s simply not possible. The mental power gets used at work these days, which leaves me feeling like a braindead drooling idiot in the evening. Or maybe that’s the drinking. Well, either way, here goes nuttin’.

    7 things to do before I die:

    • Visit Japan and eat real sushi
    • Live or at least travel for an extended period of time in the South of France
    • Be my own boss and run my own business for a while (and sell it and get rich…)
    • Be in an amateur musical production again (hopefully not TOO amateur…)
    • Learn to drive (soon)
    • Record and write about my life enough to leave something behind for the future generations
    • Know that I’ve achieved the things I’ve always wanted to do and just be happy with life

    7 things I cannot do:

    • Read a livejournal blog
    • Watch an MTV-related channel without muting it more often than not
    • Pretend I want babies any time soon
    • Make roast potatoes as good as Andrew’s
    • Remember ANYTHING. My memory is absolutely horrible.
    • Wear high heels and a dressy skirt for more than a few hours, I need my jeans
    • Program anything in any language. I’d like to be able to but it’s not currently part of my skillset…

    7 things that attracted me to blogging:

    • Being able to motormouth and talk complete codshit without anyone telling me to shut up (or if they do, I can delete their comments, hah!)
    • The idea of recording life snippets to look back on years later
    • Keeping a diary without ever having to handwrite or worry about losing my diary
    • The idea of an online presence – Had some sort of personal online space since 1994, not about to give it up! How many 13 year old girls had their own website on 94?
    • Being able to show-off that my hubby’s a designer and made me a unique and very cool design
    • Knowing that by writing my own, I’ll end up reading some fascinating, interesting or lousy blogs, but at least I’ll keep up with what’s happening in that sphere of technology.
    • Being able to tell ONCE what is happening in my life and directing friends and family, especially the ones across the Pond, to ze blog.

    7 things I say the most:

    • Did I really say/do that? I truly don’t remember saying/doing that! (Andrew will vouch for my complete and utter lack of a memory of what I do)
    • Pepperrell, that’s P-E-Double P-E-Double R-E-Double L, yes, double everything.
    • Andrew, you get up, it’s your turn to go shower first this morning…
    • OMG, I’m SO blogging that!
    • American? I’ve known you this long and you think I’m American? You’re SO blacklisted!
    • I’m going to jump off a bridge… Where’s the nearest one to the office, guys? (at which point they all gladly point me in the right direction… Are they trying to get rid of me or something?)
    • Ooooh, I HAVE to have that gadget!

    7 books I love:

    • Three Quarters of the Orange, by Joanne Harris
    • Any Jamie Oliver cookbooks, for their simplicity, beautiful pictures and for being so inspiring to try new things
    • However mainstream the next two may be… Harry Potter collection, particularly the dark dark Triwizard Tournament one.
    • DaVinci Code by Dan Brown, for being unusual and interesting
    • 1984, because I only read it recently, having skipped Grade 10 English class when they read it.
    • Bridget Jones books (not so keen on the movies), because she’s so unpretentious and genuinely trying to figure stuff out, like the rest of us.
    • I don’t read enough books!

    7 Movies I love:

    • Lucky if I can find 7 movies, I’m not a big TV/Movies person… But definitely Hackers is up there as part of my collection of classics
    • Le fabuleux destin d’Amélie Poulain is THE movie to remind me not to take life too too seriously
    • L’Auberge espagnole, because it makes me dream of travelling again
    • There, I’m already struggling to think of more movies…
    • Because I can’t think of any more movies…
    • I’ll fill up this space and say…
    • La Course Destination Monde, while not a movie, was full of short movies that changed my views of the world and my life wouldn’t have turned out the way it has if it hadn’t been for it.

    7 things you hold true at this very moment:

    • I need a bare minimum of 7 hours of sleep to function properly, which is an improvement to my previous unbelievable grumpiness if I didn’t get a full 8 hours
    • Dooce is one of the coolest bloggers of all time
    • Wearing high heels is an art which I haven’t quite mastered at this point in time
    • For the first time, I feel I’m learning new stuff in my job, unlike previous jobs where I felt my brain melting. This is exactly the feeling of constant learning and growth I’ve been looking to find since I left University
    • Working on Mac in the office is much less frustrating than working on Windoze
    • Blogging is fun, but sometimes it’s hard work
    • This was fun to fill in, but probably will make very little sense as a whole once I hit Publish.

    Tadah! That’s it! Good night!

  • I don't usually post jokes

    but this has to be the funniest blonde joke in history!

  • BrightFeet Light Slippers

    Bright Feet Light SlippersNo way! I think these BrightFeet Light Slippers were made for me! I can finally see where I’m going when I need a wee in the middle of the night, but without blinding myself by turning the ceiling light on.

    I truly AM the queen of clumsiness! There was a certain yogurt incident a couple of weeks ago; I took the lid off a small yogurt and dropped it on the carpet so quickly I reached for it to pick it up… with the hand that was holding the full yogurt tub! I’m such an idiot sometimes! Between that, near-spilling a bottle of water on my boss’s laptop and tripping on my own feet when walking on an otherwise perfectly flat surface, I’m lucky I haven’t injured myself more often.

    And people wonder why I’m not keen on sports like snowboarding and rock climbing. Well, let’s see… I’d probably manage to kill myself in the stupidest ways possible, like falling off a ski lift or strangling myself with a rock climbing rope while standing on terra ferma.

    I’ll stick to less dangerous sports like knitting and gossiping. Though I’m sure I’ll somehow find a way to injure myself with a knitting needle!

    (via Shiny Shiny)

  • Macworld San Francisco 2006

    MacRumors.com did a fantastic job at keeping us mere mortals update during Steve Jobs’ keynote presentation!

    The new Macbook Pro is out. Dual-core Intel, apparently 4 times faster than the current Powerbook, with built-in iSight (creepy, I’d never be comfortable blogging in my underpants with the thought that someone could be watching me), but as far as the looks go, it’s still pretty much like the Powerbook.

    Macbook Pro

    Priced at £1429 for the 1.67GHz and £1779 for the 1.83GHz, it doesn’t come cheap. But then, since when did price stop Mac users from getting what they MUST own?

    Oh yeah, and Steve presented other stuff, blahblahblah just look at any Mac site for the full updates on the Keynote 🙂

  • Too proud not to mention…

    Technically, this should go on my food blog. But that would involve logging out of this, logging into my other admin, and telling a much much smaller number of people about the unbelievably successful dinner last night.

    I thought we had nothing left in the fridge, I figured we’d have to have a bowl of pasta with some pesto or chopped up tomatoes made into yet another boring tomato sauce. But I really really fancied a cheese sauce. Sainsburys was closed, being Sunday night, so I thought let’s give a cheese sauce a go. If I fail, we’ll go for boring pesto or tomato sauce, if it works, then we’ll have a yummy parmesan sauce, it’ll fix my craving and I’ll be a happy bunny.

    Quickly checked what else was in the fridge, found asparagus and smoked salmon. Got a bit too excited over what I was going to cook and nearly sliced my wrist on the cheese grater while grating the parmesan piece.

    Cut to the chase, it was a superbly successful creamy cheese sauce, made with fresh parmesan, some Cravendale milk (oh my god, that’s the nicest milk in the world and it keeps for AGES!), garlic and shallots, and a little bit of flour to thicken. It was very very yummy over tagliatelle with asparagus and smoked salmon.

    The moral of the story is, you might think there isn’t anything in your fridge, but look twice, you might be able to create something amazing, AND feel great about your new-found success! Don’t be afraid of trying new recipes!