I woke up quite early in the morning recently with a startling revelation. As the raving lunatics in b-grade sci-fi flicks often say, "It's all so clear to me now!" They also often say something about eating brains, the end of the world, or "It's a cookbook!" I'm not hungry at the moment, and the end doesn't appear to be nigh, so I'll focus on the "it's all so clear to me now" part.

The reason that I'm having so much trouble with these story ideas is that they're not funny at all. So now I'll either start fresh with new story outlines, or make small changes to the existing ones that will make them funny. It's easy. I'll just replace the protagonist with a one-legged dwarf who eats nothing but chili. If that's not funny, I don't know what is.

It was my lunch break. I opened Blogger. I stared at the vacant text box and thought about what to type in it. I stared longer. The box failed to fill with words. No matter how hard I stared at it, no words appeared.

Fifteen minutes later, my lunch break was over, and I closed Blogger. Then I opened it again and typed this.

Next time, I'll write about something.

Within the walls of the cube farm, even the simplest of events can cause a stir. Like the time when someone brought in samosas. The entire sixth floor rejoiced and ate of the samosas. Then there was the time when they handed out free promotional CDs. CDs with interesting product information for everyone! And more recently, when they closed the bathrooms on this floor, curiosity led to rumour, rumour led to bigger rumour, and bigger rumour led to people walking into walls due to overstimulation.

The bathrooms were closed for not a couple of days, but two weeks. Two weeks! This was no small repair, but a major renovation. We could only imagine what wonderful changes awaited our bladders when the bathrooms finally reopened. Gold-trimmed fixtures? Wood panelling? Comfey sofas? A nice fireplace and decorative sculptures of scantily clad individuals caught in mid-frolic?

Finally, the day came that they reopened the bathrooms to the general cube farm populace. Breathing the heady fumes of drying paint, we entered.

Well, it was a bit of a letdown. They'd replaced the faucets and slapped a new coat of paint on the stalls and taken a very long time to do it. On the bright side, the intrigue brightened our small lives, and for two weeks we had regular exercise hiking up one floor. It wasn't, in retrospect, a complete waste of time -- the cubicle drones were able, for a short time, to pee in the very same fixtures as the executives. And that's worth something, isn't it?

This morning a friend, for reasons known only to her, asked that I write something about salmon. Additionally, and probably due to my sushi addiction, Christine told me that I was not allowed to write about raw salmon. This makes my task much more difficult.

What can I say about non-raw salmon that hasn't already been said? They're a fine and noble fish, and particularly slippery if you try to bring one into your boat with your bare hands. I think very highly of those creatures, even if I can't be certain what they think of me.

What would they think of me? What would they think if they knew that, somewhere out there, in the fishless wastes known as "dry land", there exists a creature that particularly enjoys soaking their flesh in sauce for a couple of hours before cooking them over a barbecue until their flesh is firm and pink. I would guess that they wouldn't appreciate the whole barbecue experience the way I do. If they had a brain larger than a pea, they might take exception to my eating habits, and possibly take action against me, legal or otherwise.

Thankfully, salmon are unlikely to think about these things because they're preoccupied with finding that perfect shoal of herring that loiters in the shallows near that rock with all the seagulls on it.

So that's my blog entry about non-raw salmon. I wonder how Christine is doing with her blog entry. I asked her to write about bubbly soup.

I don't know how it happens, but even when I try to take a break from Second Life, it somehow pulls me back in and I update another vehicle. This time, I dropped in to do a major upgrade to the Terra Hoverbike. What's new? Check out this:

• It now carries 2 avatars, so you can take a friend with you.
  
• It can fly! That's right, it works like a hovercraft as usual until you switch to "helicraft" mode. Soar above the clouds like a jet-powered birdie.
  
• I added the Terra Combat System, so now you can duel with other hoverbikes or any vehicle with the Terra Combat System.
  
• It now changes colour on command. Choose from one of the lovely preset colours or enter your own RGB code. Any colour at all.

Drop by my shop in the northwest corner of Abbotts and have a look.

Two days later, Matt, Ken, and I went back to the same restaurant. If the waitress recognized us as the freaks who ate several pounds of raw fish on Tuesday, she didn't let on. This time, we approached the menu with caution. We enforced a two-item limit on ourselves, and only broke that rule once.

Then tragedy struck. The waitress emerged from the kitchen with the bad news -- they were out of quail eggs. Out of quail eggs! My heart fell at the news, and Ken had to make do with only three of the four tobiko-and-quail-egg sushis that he'd ordered.

At that point we took matters into our own hands. What was a sushi night without an adequate supply of quail egg? We paid the bill and set out into the darkened streets of Vancouver to begin our search.

It was close to the corner of Main and Hastings that we were approached by a scruffy type in a trenchcoat. "Weed, hash, quail egg," he muttered. "Weed, hash, quail egg." This was the very man we were looking for.

I stepped into a darkened doorway with him, while my brothers lingered inconspicuously under a lamp post. "How much?" I asked.

"Two for twenty." He peered at the other two through narrowed eyes. "Hey, you're not cops, are ya?"

"Naw, we're not cops. We just want some eggs." I pulled out a twenty to show him I was serious. The sight of money bettered his fears, and in a smooth, practiced gesture, he took the twenty and slipped a couple of fat dime bags into my palm.

"Pleasure doing business," he grinned and in a second, he was gone. I rejoined my brothers who still loitered inconspicously. They were by far the most inconspicuous persons on that particular street.

"Hey," Matt said. "People here are really friendly. They keep calling me 'bud'."

"I got the stuff. I think we should get out of here," I suggested.

After walking a couple of blocks, I felt it was safe to examine what I'd paid twenty dollars for. Tucked safely inside the tiny bags were eggs. I peered closer. They were blue. The bastard slipped me robin eggs, not quail eggs!

We thought about going back, but it would be too risky. Defeated, we trudged home as rain started to spatter from black clouds. There would be no more quail egg for us that night.

My favourite part of being a tech writer is editing other people's writing -- particularly when I'm specifically asked not to change any of the wording.

This week I have the pleasure of a visit from my brother and sushi addict, Ken (a.k.a, "Doctor Destructo"). Sometimes I suspect that he likes to stay at my place only because of its proximity to The Clubhouse. This is the golf-themed restaurant where you can start with a plate of nachos, then move on to sushi and okonomiyaki.

Last night, we walked down the street to The Clubhouse and proceeded to order pretty much everything on the menu. In hindsight that was probably a mistake, but an unavoidable one. Sushi addicts have an inability to order a sensible amount for two people.

To help other sushi addicts, I came up with this list of signs that you may have ordered too much sushi:

• You need to write a list so you don't forget what to order (Ken had a pen handy, possibly just for this reason).
  
  
• When the waitress takes your order, she starts to look a little worried, and comments that it's a lot of food for two people.
  
  
• When the food arrives, you run out of space for the various platters.
  
  
• When you finally stuff down the last tobiko-and-quail's-egg sushi, two more platters of sushi arrive that you completely forgot about.
  
  
• An incredulous kitchen staff crowds around the doorway to see if you actually eat that much rice and raw fish.
  
  
• You have to think carefully about how your stomach works to figure out if you can finish your beer and the gigantic 10-inch seafood pancake.
  
  
• The amount of leftover sushi that you have boxed for take-out is possibly greater than the amount you actually ate at the table.

There you go. If you experience any of those signs while at a Japanese restaurant, you have probably ordered way too much.

Is Shaw Cable deciding what I can and cannot download? Are they censoring the Internet? BoingBoing.net claims that Shaw Cable has installed a monitor that blocks certain protocols and discards packets based on some hidden criteria.

If this is true, then it explains a lot of the effects that I see. I admit, I use a file sharing application to download MST3K episodes -- not only is it (currently) legal to do so in Canada, but the producers have stated that they don't mind if fans share the episodes that aren't available for sale on DVD. Right, so I used to be able to download these things fairly quickly, but a while back, everything slowed to a crawl. Transfer rates slowed from 80Kbps to 1Kbps. Packet loss went through the roof, especially when I played online, multiplayer games like Second Life, which streams graphics and sound over the net.

I'd be outraged if this turned out to be true. Shaw has no right to secretly dictate what I can or can't access on the net. I really want to know if this is true.

Link: BoingBoing.net: "Shaw is censoring Internet feeds and lying about it"

In an article by Stephen Totilo, Abbotts Aerodrome gets passing, vague reference as "an extravagant airport where users can purchase the ability to skydive". (Actually, skydiving is free, and you can choose to buy an upgrade to a better parachute from Al Bravo.) My name isn't mentioned, but I guess I shouldn't complain -- it's the NY Times, right? There's also a screenshot that includes the Aerodrome tower and one of my planes.

Link: New York Times: Do-It-Yourselfers Buy Into This Virtual World (registration required)

The funny thing about being sick, other than the hilarity of losing control of your bodily functions, is that it actually makes me want to go to work. After a week of watching daytime television, surfing the web endlessly, and staring out the window at passers-by like a crazy old man for a week, I think it would be really nice to be anywhere other than at home.

But I do have television. Television is my friend. It gives me those daily three-hour doses of Star Trek and a few doses of Stargate SG-1. And those hourly comedy shows on channel 37 are hilarious -- they have this running plot about this guy who looks like a chimp winning a presidential election. What's that show called? Oh, yeah... CNN. His dialog is just over the top. "Gonna hunt'm down. Bring'm t'justice." Hoo, that kind of cheesy acting can have me giggling for hours.

Thankfully, I also have Zip DVDs arriving by mail. Like that Vin Diesl movie about the mass-murderer who becomes the movie's hero. It warms the heart to see Hollywood promoting those kind of values. In the 35-minute animated sequel for children, however, the Riddick character only disembowels and otherwise dispatches people who are are clearly villains. I suppose that children's stories have to be toned down appropriately.

So I'm not short of entertainment at all, while I'm spending time as a sickly shut-in. I have the TV, I have the computer, I have the Penguin Wordmaster Dictionary. That's a great read. All the same... it might be nice to see what the real world looks like. Before I completely bloody insane.

High on the list of food products that sound completely unappealing: a breakfast cereal from Nature's Path called "Gorilla Munch".