You gotta hand it to the Chinese; when it comes to developing a language that lets you save money on make-it-yourself jewelry, they are ahead of the rest of world by centuries. Michelle and I were at Northland Village Mall this evening and she dragged me into this shop that sells beads and dangly things and all kinds of crap you can use to make pretty things for yourself to wear. In the spirit of the occasion, I thought I'd buy a few 8¢ little alphabet beads and make myself a necklace that says "monkey". But I wasn't thrilled with their plastic alphabet bead selection, and the metal ones were 70¢ a piece. Now, I don't mind looking a little gay for the privilege of wearing the word monkey around my neck, but I'm certainly not gonna pay $4.20 to do it. I 
considered just stealing the letters, since the single attendant probably wouldn't have noticed me slipping less than a combined cubic centimeter of them into my pocket, but that seemed like more risk than it was really worth.
I had all but abandoned my dreams of a funky new necklace when I spotted a bin of Chinese Zodiac pendants. The perfect solution! Why take 6 little metal pieces to do in english what one little metal piece can do all by itself in chinese? So I'm pretty psyched that the whole thing worked out so well.
And for those you wondering, I actually was born in a year of the Monkey, so I'm not totally bastardizing the symbol.
By Ian on July 22, 2002 at 11:39 PM
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It's been a little while since ianwallace.com has been available. The problem was that I bought hosting from the Mafia. You've seen The Sopranos, right? Where the mob guys run that brokerage & stuff? Well, I somehow managed to stumble onto a crime family running an internet services company called Datapeer. The first tip-off should have been their criminally low prices, and the Jersey accents of their tech support guys the second.
"Hey, dis is Dadapee-uh. Whaddya need dere? Yeah, we havin' some problem with da soivers right now. We gonna take care of it, donchoo worry abowdit."
So yeah. I call them up one day to sort out an issue with their online control panel, and I'm basically told that whoever took my original order sort of took off with the money and didn't leave any records. Now this is one excuse I've never been given before, and the sales guy sounded sort of menacing, like Al Pacino in Godfather Part II, so I decided to just let it go. A few months later, the web access to ianwallace.com was cancelled. I considered going back to La Cosa Nostra Web Hosting and giving them more money, but I was worried that their low prices might someday entitle them to a favour from me. I enjoy posting to ianwallace.com, but not enough to whack someone.
I looked around for a Canadian company to host with, preferring to avoid the exchange rate and maybe pump a little cash into my own economy for a change. The pickings are pretty slim around these parts, and strangely expensive for some reason. But then a friend recommended a small Ontario-based firm called Macroshell and I found their prices pretty reasonable. I spoke to Mike Cicci there about setting up a new package, and I was sold by his flexibility and willingness to help. I was so impressed, in fact, that I decided to expand the Ian Wallace Internet Empire a little bit at the same time as re-establishing this site. I decided to register a few new domains for myself, as well as one for Jessica, and Mike was able to customize a single hosting plan to rule them all.
So, I'm back online, with some new projects on the drawing board and hopefully there'll be some pretty nifty things here soon for ya'll to take a gander at.
Unfortunately, the mob still has a lot of my old images and such. So please disregard the blank pictures and missing stuff for now. I'll re-post everything in the next few days.
By Ian on July 19, 2002 at 12:30 PM
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