Watching the opening ceremonies for the Winter Olympics is a big tradition in our family and tonight Vic, Ian and I set down to watch the crazy spectacle, giant balloon headed dancers and all.

In typical Olympic fashion it was a happy feely explosion of the bizarre, boisterous and bombastic, devoid of current politics save for the obligatory plea for peace followed by perfomers dressed as post modern doves doing acrobatics in a futurist avant garde frenzy.

Oh and Yoko Ono.

Ian's quote: "I've seen NFB films and I don't get this shit."

But there was one bit that made me smile and that was the entrance of athletes. Whoever was choreographing the music seemed to be having a huge laugh. Disco and 80s hits, like a great big grad medley from hell, playing a different song after every couple of countries. Songs like Hot Stuff (Finland), Disco Inferno (Uzbekistan) and Sweet Dreams (Poland). But the absolute best was at the entrance of Denmark and the stadium rang with the lyrics "I'm just a soul whose intentions are gooood! Oh lord, please don't let me be misunderstood!" We laughed so hard. Then Iran came out, "Won't you take me to...FUNKY TOWN!"

The United States came out to Aretha Franklin: "You better think (think) think about what you're trying to do to me. Yeah, think (think, think), let your mind go, let yourself be free."

That was so cool.

I just learned the brilliant, positively radiant artist, Seth Fisher passed away.

I am so fucked up about this.

I had been using Nevidia.com as a site host for over a year with few problems. Every couple of weeks the site would go down for a couple of hours, I'd send in a complaint and get a response the next day saying "We can't see anything wrong here" and the site would be up again so I must have been imagining it. Annoying but whatever. Then a little while ago they went and lost my entire home page. Had to make a new one from scratch. Okay, didn't like that. Carrying on.

Last Friday the site went down. And it stayed down. I sent in complaints and got back one note saying they were having server difficulties, please be patient and I was. Until Monday came around and the site was still offline. I couldn't access the control panel, couldn't access their live chat assistant, their sales staff, their general contact info, no response from anyone. So bugger them and now I have a new host.

There are still some dangling bugs here and there, and I'll be working on those very soon. Work has been pretty heavy lately. This latest arc has a lot of detail in it and it's a lot to just keep up. The cats are adjusting to new food, Charlie needs a wet diet now that he's had some dental work done. The result being they get hungry sooner which means we end up losing sleep when cats start hovering around our heads in the morning.

Add to that a sucky predicament this week. Back in December Ian gave me a very cool birthday present: tickets to the Lord of the Rings musical in Toronto. We booked a hotel and airline tickets to go out this weekend to see it and were pretty excited about having a geeky little side trip to break the post Christmas/pre-wedding monotony. Yesterday morning we got a call that the Friday show was cancelled. Turns out, and the site really didn't make it very clear, that the tickets we had were for previews. Cost the same as regular nights, no caveats that shows could be cancelled for whatever reason... just cancelled.

Ian spent a good chunk of yesterday wrangling for refunds on the hotel and air. I had to re-organize a side trip to Calgary to see my godson. Blah.

So it's more work this weekend. Probably for the best.