Anne rode into work with me this afternoon. It was really nice going in. overcast but there was no wind and it was pleasantly mild as well for it being only +11C. Anne wanted me to take Saturday off. I didn’t know yet and I still don’t know. I committed to my wife but, we’ll see. I’d just as soon go in for the 4 hours but I could also appreciate the sleep in as well. We did CRF and I ended up having top total of $540. No credit cards but this was pretty good for a Friday night. I had Brent sitting with me all night. Still it was nice. I had a good time and we got out at 8:15pm. I went over to Audrey’s to see if thy have anything for me. Nothing. So I ended up going home and got in to watch Smackdown. I didn’t see it all. I wasn’t really into it. I should have said something to Will how I wasn’t going to be in for Saturday but I’ll attempt to call in instead and I’ll leave a message on the answering machine or something. Not just that but, uggh, they’re doing Magic. Four hours of Magic? That’s what we did last weekend.

So I’m working on F this morning after I blog this and we’ll most likely be in at 3am. Odd for a Saturday morning. We’re getting up at around noon and then out of here about 2pm for my haircut. Then at 8pm is the other Oiler/Canuck game. This game was at Rexall and I didn’t see all of it. I watched about 80% of the 3rd period. The Oiler’s were down 4-2. They lost their first game at Home against Vancouver 5-3. Luongo robbed the Oiler’s of a couple of good chances. But the Oiler’s coach, I think made the mistake of not putting Rolly in right away. They’ll spit the series in Vancouver tonight.

Since there aren’t a lot of new books coming out in paperback anytime soon, I’m going to go strait for Audrey’s special order. It’s a good service. I can order my 4 books/month and always have something available. This is why I like Fantastic Fiction and Amazon.ca. FF. If the book looks good and sounds intriguing then I go into Amazon.ca and take advantage of their “peak inside feature.” This helps me to make sure it’s not Cyberpunk, Alternate history or young adult type thing. If the books are part of a trilogy then I’ll order the whole trilogy and I avoid buying book 2/3 only to special order book 1 before I can read book 2. That’s my book ordering process. Four books/order, once/month. Or one book/week. Also I can read books I might have missed over the years since my science fiction reading hiatus. I’d always read science fiction but maybe one or two books/year. I think in the 1980’s I was lucky if I read basically just one or two SF books. Not that there was nothing good to read it’s just that I had other things to be concerned with and reading SF barely registered on the radar screen in the 1980’s much less most of the 1990’s. Any books I did have over the 60’s and 70’s went for food.

Last night while watching G4/ATOS they reported Electronic Arts had taken over Bioware here in Edmonton. This is huge news in the gaming community. It means that Bioware will be making better games. I just hope Bioware remains here in Edmonton. At Speculation this weekend Bioware will have a presence at the convention. I bet the merger will be the talk of the convention.

I didn’t check the markets for Friday but oil is at $83.69 and even went into the $84/barrel territory. No doubt brought about by the trouble in Iran and the rest of the Middle East. Still I’ve never seen it go this high.

The RCMP shooting in NT over the weekend is something our community has been keeping a close eye on. I’ve been just waiting for the creep to turn himself in for a lesser sentence. Since he didn’t he’ll get murder one. He should really get the death penalty as far as I’m concerned. I’m glad they caught the bastard.

My morning blog rounds start off with Robert J sawyer’s blog but he hasn’t posted anything in almost 10 days which is really unusually for him. I think He’s off to a convention or something the last I heard. His newsgroup is still quite lively but nobody there is saying much about this. Keith hasn’t posted anything since the other day and J has made a convention update over there at his Live journal. Neil Asher hasn’t posted anything in over 2 weeks now. Yesterday Holly Lisle talked about her One more word.com books project. Sounds like she’s doing a Jim Bean Universe type thing.

Sigh, Speculation is on this weekend and I wish I could attend. I haven't been to a good old Science Fiction convention in years. Come to think of it, I've only attended one SF convention and that was NonCon 1979. i might not be there in person but I'm there in Spirit.

In reading the Edmonton yesterday they had an article about the Stargate SG-1 boxed set/anthology. This looks like a pretty good anthology as well spreading over the course of 10 years. There is a special behind the scenes 4 disk feature added to the anthology. I haven’t seen much about this beyond what’s in the paper. Amazon wants $270 for it which is really pricy. I’ve never been a huge fan of the series at all but I’ve watched a few episodes. I still think Babylon 5 was better.

That’s about it for me for now. I’ll probably pop in after the hockey game tonight.

Anyway, that’s all for now.

e. Jim