Mix the soup, water, rice, paprika and pepper in lasagna baking dish. Place chicken on the rice mixture and sprinkle with additional paprika and pepper to taste.

Cover with foil and bake at 375° F (190° C) for 45 minutes, or until chicken is tender.

I was told that, yes, this was the case. The woman called the number for me in the store, but she warned me that, because it was 5:15, there probably wouldn't be anyone there. There wasn't. I thanked her for her help and left.

Today I called the number she gave me and navigated Bell's automated phone system. Reaching the end, I was informed by recorded voice that canceling my Sympatico account can only be done Monday through Friday, 9 to 5, not at noon on a weekend.

I decided to check out their website to see if I could cancel that way and drop off my modem next week sometime. I didn't realize that when I moved out at the start of December that my parents would immediately unplug the modem and not use it for the rest of the month, so I wanted to get this dealt with before January rolled around and I ended up paying for two months of internet no one was using.

On their website I discovered an interesting fact:

To cancel your account, call Sympatico Member Services (310-SURF) and ask to have your account closed. Your account will be cancelled 30 days from the date you called. If you wish to cancel any other Sympatico services associated with, or charged to, your Sympatico account, they'll also be cancelled 30 days from the date you called. You will receive a final paper bill (or a revised final bill) via Canada Post.

So not only do I have to call on Monday, my day off, and hope that there's someone there, but I will in fact end up having to pay for January service after all.

As a human, you would usually spend anywhere from 10 to 40 AP to kill one and then they would spend 1 AP to stand right back up fully healed. This went on for a while and it got to the point that it was useless to even bother attacking zombies. Then, one day, the Headshot skill was introduced. Headshot changed the game.

The second problem was the most minor of the two. Another solution would have been to simply add more zombie skills for them to spend their excess XP on. The problem with this is that the living have much more versatility than the undead. They can learn to shoot guns and read books and heal other survivors. Zombies shamble towards the living and eat them. Of course, there can be much nuance in this, but humans would (and should) have more options available to them.

The first problem is much bigger and harder to fix, but for a short time, it did what it set out to do. Groups of humans with Zombie Hunters could force zombies afraid of losing their XP stores back. I myself had a zombie with 1300 XP to spare that I had revived so he wouldn't lose it instantly. The problem with this approach is that it was pretty one-sided. Once you've taken that first headshot, it's bite is gone for the second if you've already maxed out all the zombie skills. If you're a low-level zombie, it's especially devastating regardless of the number of times it affects you, and therein lies the problem.

Headshot was unbalanced. The higher up the zombie ranks you got, the weaker Headshot was as a deterrent. Low-level zombies aren't a particularly great threat to humans unless they're in huge mobs of 20 or 30. The number of zombie players began to drop drastically, so Headshot was tweaked with.

Around this time, the number of AP required to stand up was changed from 1 to 10, and the Ankle Grab skill which returned it to 1 AP was introduced.

This time, instead of losing all of your XP, Headshot caused you lose 10 XP per level (later modified to 10 XP for each level after the first). Coupled with Ankle Grab, the balance shifted once again away from the human side. Zombies could now die and stand up fully healed for 1 AP. If they were killed by a Zombie Hunter, old zombies would lose unneeded XP, young zombies would lose almost none, and mid-ranged zombies would be the most disadvantaged. Humans once more had no reason to attack and kill their enemies.

Ever since I caught on to the original problems of Headshot, it's been my opinion that it would be better for both zombies and humans alike if it damaged a zombie's AP, not their XP for a few reasons.

Attacking AP instead of XP means it would affect all zombies equally across the board. As a weapon, it would be an actual advantage to a human player to possess. Instead of standing up for 10 AP, the average zombie would have to spend 15, a large enough number that it would impact their days' total enough to make them wary, but not large enough that it would leave them helpless. Ankle Grab, in my view, would make standing up cost 5 less AP. So a mid-level zombie could stand back up for 5 AP, or the default 10 if they'd taken a Headshot. Affecting AP also means that you won't have wasted all the time you spent earning those XP.

This brings us to today's update where it pretty much changes things to what I imagined. Ankle Grab still reduces your stand-up cost to 1 AP, though, but Headshot now adds 5 AP to the cost, making it 15 AP for low-level zombies and 6 AP for the higher ones. Fresh zombies won't waste their time collecting XP to have it disappear. Humans will have a tool to slow down the undead during sieges. You'd think this would make people happy.

But it doesn't. Instead, some think it's made things even worse, have started a petition, and are threatening to boycott the game until Kevan changes things to their liking.

It's strange how big your sense of entitlement gets when someone creates a game for you to play for free on the internet.

The music industry is to extend its copyright war by taking legal action against websites offering unlicensed song scores and lyrics.

The Music Publishers' Association (MPA), which represents US sheet music companies, will launch its first campaign against such sites in 2006.

MPA president Lauren Keiser said he wanted site owners to be jailed.

While I can certainly understand the music industry's desire to squeeze as much blood from their artists stones as they can, from a personal point of view this is more ungreat news. Occasionally at work when I'm fact checking, I'll need to look up the lyrics to a specific song. I need to fire up the Internet since keeping around lyric sheets of every song every recorded in our office is a bit impractical. There's no IMDB for lyrics right now, and relying on whatever random site Google finds isn't exactly the best solution. A lot of the time, these lyric sites won't agree with each other, which means picking the right version is all the more harder. So if the MPA were proposing consolidating, say, the Gracenote CDDB with a song lyric database for a little money, I would welcome this change with a bit less bile in my stomach. This MPA idea of taking every lyric site off the Internet would be nothing but a headache for me. (Via).

Woman (yelling): Fucking white people!
Teenager 1: I know.

For my second MonkeyFilter CD, I was going to, like the first time around, make an all-Canuck mix. Unfortunately, I left it a little too late and ended up just throwing together a bunch of rocking tracks.

01. "We R In Need Of A Musical ReVoLuTIoN" by Esthero (Wikked Lil' Grrrls, 2005)
02. "Emergency" by Femme Generation (Circle Gets The Square, 2004)
03. "Luno" by Bloc Party (Silent Alarm, 2005)
04. "All Nite Disco Party" by Brakes (Give Blood, 2005)
05. "El Manana" by Gorillaz (Demon Days, 2005)
06. "Memorize The City" by The Organ (Grab That Gun, 2004)
07. "Modern Way" by Kaiser Chiefs (Employment, 2005)
08. "Their Party Days" by Magneta Lane (The Constant Lover, 2004)
09. "Metal Heart" by Garbage (Bleed Like Me, 2005)
10. "Soft Revolution" by Stars (Set Yourself On Fire, 2004)
11. "Junior Kickstart" by The Go! Team (Thunder, Lightning, Strike, 2004)
12. "Magnetic Strip" by Controller.Controller (X-Amounts, 2005)
13. "Monster Hospital" by Metric (Live It Out, 2005)
14. "Warning Shots" by Thievery Corporation (The Cosmic Game, 2005)
15. "Reason Is Treason (Bonus)" by Kasabian (Kasabian, 2004)
16. "Love & Death" by The Stills (Logic Will Break Your Heart, 2003)
17. "Alive" by VHS Or Beta (Night On Fire, 2004)
18. "Last Broadcast" by Doves (The Last Broadcast, 2002)

Since I still had five of those cheap-ass cases from the last time, I again didn't go with any cover art, just the CD design. The last time around, the monkeys said they were having problems reading my included .txt text listing, so I figured I'd give that a second try before abandoning it. I don't think it was Toast screwing anything up when I burned the disc, probably just those wacky Kanji characters.

The artwork for this one is probably the least pretty inspired of the ones I've made. It's just a WWII propaganda poster I found on the net somewhere with an orange cloud multiplier layer because this time, instead of group numbers, we were group Orange. (By the way, let me tell you that two orange covers in a row isn't rocking my world or my ink cartridge). Throw in a Photoshop filter, the same MoFi logo I used the last time and some curved text, and there you go: one MoFi CD Swap label.

* cover: for example, "Beatles cover"
acoustic
African
asian: mostly Japanese hip-hop
Canadian
cdx [mofi cdx]: songs I've used or gotten from CD swaps; subset: MonkeyFilter CD swaps
drum and bass
electrojazz
featuring *: any kind of non-remix collaboration
itms: songs bought from the iTunes Music Store
latin: mostly Brazilian beats
live
Ninja Tune
remix
ripped: stuff that I either downloaded from somewhere or needs to be reripped again
soundtrack
triphop

* denotes a wildcard.

For the record, if I ran into this at work, I would use "six $10." Numbers under ten are to be written out with a few exceptions, notably sports scores and money. Numbers above 9999 are introduced to our friend the comma. You should not, however, use digits if the number in question starts the sentence:

Person A: They were $10 installments?
Person B: Ten dollars, yes.
Person A: And six installments per person, meaning the total was $60?
Person B: Yes, and and since we had over 12,000 donors, we are rich.

You can (and often should) start mixing numerals and words once you hit one million, but the number of millions should follow the above two rules: $999,999 versus $1 million, and nine million versus 10 million.

At the most basic level Child’s Play is a way for gamers to help sick kids in Children’s Hospitals. These hospitals obviously receive plenty of donations year round but what we learned is that the money they get for the most part is spent on things much more important than toys. Things like medicine and equipment are a bigger priority than say Crash Bandicoot.

These Kids need toys though. They need games to play and crafts to make in order to take their minds off their situations. Something as simple as a Game Boy can make the stay in one of these Hospitals much more bearable for a kid. That my friends, is where we come in. Penny Arcade has teamed up with Amazon to create wish lists for Children’s hospitals all over the world this year. Each list is full of age appropriate games and toys. You simply select a hospital from the map and choose a gift. Easy as pie.

This year, Child's Play has spread north of the border and SickKids in Toronto is taking part. Check it out the official Child's Play site.

But what is it about zombies that have recaptured the minds of horror fans the past five years? Ellis had some thoughts on the subject. "Zombies tend to enjoy a resurgence when Western society feels it's up against a faceless, silent threat -- whether it's conservative culture threatened by Communists or radical Islam, or liberal culture terrified by all-enveloping capitalism and the world turning into a mall full of drones.

"But that's not what you want to hear. PEOPLE LIKE IT WHEN ZOMBIES' HEADS EXPLODE."

Waren Ellis is a smart man.

The Yale School of Music has received a gift of $100 million that will allow the school to subsidize fully the tuition for all students, Yale President Richard C. Levin has announced.

(Via).