Downtown Pantsburg

Till we run out of cake!

2007-10-16T19:11:00.000-04:00

Portal is awesome. One of the best video game endings in recent memory. That is all :)

Life at the zoo

2007-09-25T12:16:00.000-04:00

Wow, it's been all summer since I wrote in here.

So I've been camping all summer, it was great. Lots of pics up on flickr. Last trip it was 2 degrees at night and I nearly froze my ass off.

I've been cycling a lot, back and forth to work mostly. It takes me about an hour to go one way, 16km. Trying to do that 3 times a week nets me about 100km/wk. So since I started doing this consistently in August, I've lost 20lbs. I also picked up a recumbent trike, which makes the ride so much more fun and enjoyable. I think this is key to using exercise as a weight loss tool, to make it fun, and make it regular, which is why this has worked so well for me. The time I spend cycling into work is time I would have spent commuting anyway, so it doesn't feel like I've spent any time out of my day.

I actually started playing world of warcraft again. I know, it's a huge waste of time, and it seems like going back to that game is a step backwards. However, it's just a different way to waste time. Some people watch TV, some people read books, some people play xbox, some people yak on their phones. I play wow. The game itself isn't all that great, but the people I get to work together with and talk to make it an interesting social experience.

Work is crazy, like usual. The project I'm working on is winding down, so I may finally be moving onto something else soon. we'll see.

I've booked train tickets home to PEI for Christmas. I haven't been home in a year, since we didn't go there this summer, or last Christmas. I'm sure Loralei's parents will be a little upset since we're gone from the 20th to the 31st. But maybe we can get together with them in the new year. It'll be a nice train ride home, I booked a deluxe double bedroom, on the newer model train, so its nice and posh. I can spend my time at the bar car, watching the plasma tv. Also probably watch stuff on the laptop, like finishing up watching my full metal alchemist series in divx. :)

Oot and Aboot

2007-06-11T09:12:00.000-04:00

Another great weekend. I guess I didn't write about the last couple weekends here, so I'll recap.

We went for our first camping trip this year at Bon Echo. It was great! somehow we didn't forget anything. The site was extra large, 2 minutes walk away from the shoreline, and fairly private. We went for a 5 hour hike on the abes and essens trail. We just did the 2nd loop, the 3rd would have been way too long. The bugs were INSANE. We narrowly missed being carried off and eaten by continually applying bugspray. I'm sure later in the summer it won't be so bad. We did miss the clifftop walk, but Bon Echo is relatively close, so we can come back anytime this summer.

This Saturday was Jeremy's birthday. So we headed out for some chineese food at the new hong shing, and played a new board game based on bohnanza.

On Sunday Loralei and I went to Bolt castle, in the middle of the 1000 islands. Pretty interesting. I haven't posted the pictures yet, but I think there's some good ones there. The castle was built right at the turn of the century, and has been abandoned for several years until 1970-ish, so it's in pretty rough shape on the inside. The bridge authority has taken ownership and is slowly restoring it.

We also headed out to Bushtakah to get Loralei a pair of hiking shoes, and I got a water filtration system. So theoretically now I can pump this thing and get potable water out of dirty brown lake water rife with beaver fever. We'll test it out next weekend when we go to Achray.

Open letter to CTV

2007-05-23T20:19:00.000-04:00

I hate your ass. I'm primed to watch the season finale of Lost. Now I have to find something else to do while you air 2 hours of shitty american idol programming before the second half of the Lost finale. What was wrong with airing 2 hours of lost in a row?

Also, your commercials aired in SD widescreen format suck. please tell your advertisers to either start making commercials in HD widescreen, or in full frame. black bars at the top, bottom, AND sides is NOT cool. i pay for a gigantic widescreen, and the ad takes up maybe 1/4 of the screen. it looks bad.

Back on the fitness track

2007-05-02T15:25:00.000-04:00

So, I've started morphing into a fatass over the past few years. I decided i should do something about it. Went back to the gym, changed my diet. started losing weight, gaining muscle. It's not actually very hard to do, you just have to keep doing it, and be patient.

I was reading this guys article, and he's had some really great results in a similar workout to what I'm doing.
-I work out at the gym twice a week for half an hour.
-I work out every muscle group.
-I do the exercise nice and slowly to maintain constant, even pressure. 2 seconds up, 3 seconds down.
-I cycle to work whenever possible, and take walks freqently.
-I avoid starchy/high-carb foods such as potatoes, pasta, rice. when possible.
-I avoid large meals, in favor of more frequent smaller meals. This gives a more even bloodsugar level during the day, and sugar crashes.
-I avoid eating for 2 hours before bedtime. if you eat directly before you go to bed, the calories mostly go straight into body fat, because your metabolism shuts down at night.
-I try to work more raw vegetables into my diet. generally the more processed something is, the worse it is for you. raw veggies are filling, refreshing, and good for you.

I'm losing bodyfat at a good rate, and rapidly gaining strength, and I hardly put in any time at all. how much benefit you see out of trying this stuff is dependent on how much of it you stick to. of course, I don't care to take all the measurements that some people do, I can actually see myself improving, and thats good enough for me.

I've gotta get rid of all this world of warcraft chubbiness I put on. :)

so uh

2007-05-01T20:59:00.000-04:00

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

That is all.

Flickr community

2007-04-22T11:44:00.000-04:00

Is full of idiots. who swoon over obviously photoshopped thumbnail sized pictures. the sites supposed to be about photography damnit!

Someone explain to me how this photoshop got onto the explore page.

There's also the myriad of people who make it onto explore with 500x400 (or lower) photos. Granted, they do look good, and I realize some people would be annoyed if their work was stolen, but really. how do they get on the explore page with only a postage stamp size resolution available?

A master My bike is out

2007-04-22T10:53:00.000-04:00

The weather finally got warm enough to pull the bike out of the basement. this is following last weeks freakish 15cm of snow. so I've been able to do my cardio outside the gym, thank god. I hate doing cardio at the gym. the only good thing about it is that you get to watch all the girls exercising. :) but the downside is that its far too hot in the gym, and there's no breeze to evaporate your sweat.

I've been trying to go to the gym 5 days a week to lose some weight. its working so far. i suppose i should start tracking how much I've lost, but I've been at for 3 or 4 weeks and I'm happy with the results.

I tried doing the gym buddy thing, but it never really works out. schedule conflicts, work, laziness, sick days. you end up waiting for the other person way too much. its cool when you have someone to talk to, but you should never end up missing a session because of someone else's schedule.

It went up to 22 yesterday in ottawa, so i decided i'd spend the day out taking some photographs. so i walked all around downtown looking for shots. found some good grafitti, a couple of small blooms, some interesting buildings, and a white water kayak compo. after all that snapping, I decided it was time to upgrade to a newer digital rebel. so i stopped in at henrys and got the XTi. I should be able to sell off my old rebel no problem, so the upgrade won't cost so much. the new one is nice, has automatic sensor cleaning, 10mp resolution, more AF points, lower noise sensor at high ISO, and faster continuous drive mode at 3 FPS.

pics are up on flickr.

I love it when a plan; or a patio set, comes together.

2007-04-17T16:24:00.000-04:00

You can blame me for the 15cm of snow in Ottawa yesterday. I put together a patio set the previous night, thinking spring had arrived.

In other Ottawa news, I've pretty much booked the entire summer full of plans. I hopped on the Ontario provincial parks reservation website and reserved a campsite every other weekend from the last week in May to the last week in August. if it rains, or we can't make it we can always cancel and get 60% back, or transfer to someone else's name.

Work marches on. I've been hired again till October 1st on a new project at Transport Canada. Things are wrapping up nicely on the old project.

Not much else new. Oh.. Facebook is addictive. everyone and their dog is on there. I've gotten in touch with friends from as far back as highschool. amazing.

Solo Pollo

2007-04-17T16:02:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm back from the Dominican. Pics are up on flickr.

I managed to contract the flu on the germ blender (airplane), on the way down. on top of that, all the dominican bacteria was fighting against the ottawa bacteria. It was germ warfare, and my body was the battlefield. Don't eat the pineapple. Go easy on the fresh coconut.

But other than that, it was a great time. No set schedules, except for the tours we were on. no cooking, no dishes, no chores. Just drink, eat, and lay in the sun. Lots of vitamins (vitamin ARRR!), AKA rum.

Lots of topless women there. some good, some bad. it sort of averages out. I kept trying to trick Loralei into taking my photo with topless women in the background. If shes holding the camera, I don't look like a pervert, right?

The tours were good. The safari tour was the best one, taking us up into the mountains to see a plantation. We bought some very fresh coffee, cocoa, and vanilla. Surprisingly Canada Customs had no issue with us bringing it back. Although, i hear anything made from wood is bad to bring back, so don't buy any wooden sculptures, and definitely no bongos.

The Seona island tour was a waste of money. the tour packed the catamaran too full, so it was an uncomfortable 2 hour ride to the island. then the beach was pretty similar to the beach at the resort we just left. the ride back to the mainland via speedboat was fun, with a couple of stops to feed clownfish and see some starfish.

We also did a walking tour of Higuey, the closest town to the resort. It was ok. kind of nice to see how life is away from the resorts. got to see some of the local culture, a church, some shops, etc.

Picked up some oil paintings there which we still haven't framed. they're everywhere, beautiful and cheap. smaller ones run about $10-$15 USD. the largest one we found went for $200 USD. haggling is necessary, and expected. nothing has a pricetag at the local market. Also, shop around. The shop owners are competitive and sometimes very pushy.

All in all, a really worthwhile vacation. I think we'll be going back next year.

Captain Kirk

2007-03-10T17:13:00.000-05:00

Work gets its own post. Theres just so much crap that's going on. As Simon says, "it's more like disneyland here every day"

Several people at my work have entirely lost touch with reality. from the ex-boss who keeps insisting that every application we deploy must launch in a full screen virtual desktop, to the project manager who hasn't the foggiest idea how to run a team of anything besides oxen.

"full" desktop is a buzzword the ex-boss won't stop flogging. In actuality, he's "full" of shit. the obvious downsides to the desktop approach of deploying apps are this:

if its not full screen, users get 2 start menus. AHH! confusion!
if it is full screen, users lose access to all local applications. AHH! confusion!

The approach of the project has been deploying seamless applications from day 1. he has somehow brainwashed people into thinking a desktop solution is a good idea, and has no actual technical or functional backing for this.

Which leads me to the thin client devices they have at work. a limited number (25-30) of thin client devices were purchased and some were deployed to users. because of the limited functionality of these terrible little devices, full screen desktop seemed like the best solution. until they go to print, or surf the internet, etc.

windows printing subsystem is terrible. if you add drivers you can take down your servers and cause system instability. universal printing seems to work for most things, but thats still got a few bugs. the universal print driver takes the print job and directs it to the locally installed printers, on whatever client machine you're connecting with. the problem with thin client devices is that they only have 256/512mb of space on them. try to print 10 powerpoint slides and your device is toast.

Then there's internet explorer. the problem isn't internet explorer the browser necessarily. the problem is that you can put ANYTHING inside of IE. video, sound, java, javascript, activex. all kinds of bad things. not necessarily bad if any of these were used client side. but definitely bad when someone decides to surf youtube over a Citrix session, or installs some spyware rootkit, or IE hangs and pins a processor. then the user starts another session and pins yet another processor. everyone else connected to the shared server comes to a grinding halt.

So with all the problems with these terrible little thin client devices, people still haven't given up on them. they're running around wasting their time trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole. we already have a good solution. a cheap PC. its less expensive, sometimes even free! you can recycle old computers into thin client devices that don't have the same problems. the idea behind thin clients was to minimize management. well its done exactly the opposite.

On the good side of my career, I won an 80gb iPod. i took my CCEA tests last november and they had a contest on for the first 200 people to get certified. woohoo! just in time for my vacation.

I've also been interviewing for other positions with compugen, the CRA, and squires resources. squires resources is the most interesting one. they specialize in staffing people in tropical climates. mostly bermuda and the carribean. the downside is that it would be full time, and I'd probably need to commit to at least 2-3 years. The upside is I'd never see freezing rain ever again.

I could go on and on about work for days. but i'm pretty sure it wouldn't do me any good, and noone else wants to listen :) I'll post more when someone at work does something exceptionally stupid. so probably this week.

The end of an era

2007-03-10T17:11:00.000-05:00

This might be a bit of a long entry. been putting this off for a while.

I've finally given up the waterbed. I've been sleeping on a waterbed since I was a teenager. Loralei's nagging finally got me to cave in, and get a real mattress bed. We did a lot of shopping around at mattress and furniture stores, but finally decided on one from Ikea. it had the best price, the only bedframe we liked, and the mattress was comfy.

My body has really been adjusted to the waterbed, and its doing all kinds of strange un-kinking since I'm lying flat now. I think its good, I'm not really sure. To go along with the bed, I've been trying this software called pzizz. it works suprisingly well. i was skeptical at first, but i think i'm convinced now. its sort of like a dynamic relaxation tape.

which will come in handy when im on the plan to the Dominican Republic. We're finally heading down to the carribean for our honeymoon. I'm in desperate need of a vacation after the last year of work. the wedding this year was also not exactly relaxing, so im definitely due for a break. we found a good deal on a vacation package in Punta Cana at GoTravelDirect. after much research this was the best deal available. we took the 4 star wildcard, which saves a few hundred bucks. just means they get to pick which resort we stay in. since we've never been there, it doesn't really matter much.

Probably going on a few daytrips and things. as much as i like the thought of just sitting there relaxing, my style of travel usually involves me going out and seeing all there is to see. Also a good opportunity to catch up on some DS games, and destroy my liver with copious amounts of rum. I'm trying to listen to a few pimsleur spanish lessons before i get down there so i'm not completely helpless. im sure the resort staff has a good grasp of english, but when we go to santo domingo, odds are there isn't going to be much.

I'm also trying to learn how to draw in autocad. I'm really lost. i have no idea what im doing, so if you have any tutorial links, post them in the comments. the reason im trying to do this is because i want to build my own poker table. drawing up the plans seems like a good first step. autocad will apparently tell me what angles i need to cut things at, spit out a bill of materials, basically everything. as far as building things, i have NO experience whatsoever. i never took shop class in school, so im clueless there too. if i don't lose an appendage cutting wood with a tablesaw i'll be very very lucky. Simon, this guy from work seems to know his way around autocad so I'll hopefully pick some tips up from him.

First post of the new year

2007-01-29T11:59:00.000-05:00

Phew.

The project I've been working on for the last few months has finally launched. gone production. people actually using it for day to day work. and it does work, with a few small issues. actually fewer issues than the system it was designed to replace.

Previous to it going production it was endless weeks of scrambling around fixing things in a hurry. high stress for months, and now its all over with. supporting a production environment is somewhat more stressful in that if any issues arise it affects people in their work. however change control kicks in which means all we do during the day is figure out solutions, not actually implement them.

Finally got around to buying the Christmas gifts for myself and Loralei. Snowshoes. the new aluminum kind. we did some shopping around this weekend and found out that the ones at costco are almost the exact same model as the ones at mountain equipment co-op, but cost $100 less and come with poles. it pays to comparison shop.

Been using my bus ride to catch up on some retro games lately. playing through a bunch of GBA and DS games that i always meant to finish. riding the bus has its advantages. aside from the smelly people and crowds, its nice to just have a pre-warm bus pull up when its the middle of winter. and not having to deal with other drivers is a plus. i think the bus actually gets me downtown faster than taking the car would because of the transitway. bonus!

Other video game systems are getting some use too. I bought the burning crusade for world of warcraft. its ok. if anything I'm less addicted to wow after the expansion. I also bought a Nintendo Wii, which is pretty fun. i haven't gotten more games for it though. guitar hero 2 is on the go sometimes, along with singstar rocks. after playing singstar on new years i had to get my own copy. its a great party game, since you can pass the mic around to 8 players.

not much else going on, or at least not much i can remember.

Shuffled around

2006-12-05T20:18:00.000-05:00

Work has been pretty insane lately.

I was moved over from my support role to fill in for someone who was working in a development role. I'm there because management fired that guy. no knowledge transfer, no nothing. just "get out.. now". then, after i spend another week on the new project development and start getting up to speed with whats going on, management fires ANOTHER guy. 2/3 of the original design team, and the people who actually know whats going on.. are gone. again, no knowledge transfer, just "get out".

So here I am with the one remaining guy trying to put the pieces together, and come up with a workable solution. try to figure out where someone was at, without ever actually talking with them. wonderful.

Also my days are now filled with meetings. half of which have no actual direct relevance to myself. also the guy driving the meetings doesn't actually drive the meeting, he just meanders and mumbles and doesnt get to the point. one poor guy in the meeting this morning was asleep most of the time. justifiably so, he had no input to the meeting and nothing to take away, so why even be there? I'm going to lobby to be proxied at some of these meetings. why should i sit through an hour long meeting when i have no input, and no takeaway? there literally is no point or purpose to these meetings.

On top of all that, the whole department is shuffling around. the guy who was on production is now working for the project exclusively. One of the helpdesk guys was on the citrix support position for about a week and then got moved to the project. then he got moved back to citrix support after a week of us training him. the insanity never ends!

Ugh, work.

No Love for Atari

2006-11-09T07:32:00.000-05:00

Well, after getting through the horrendous 7 CD install of neverwinter nights 2, i've discovered that it doesn't run well enough to play.

I have all the latest drivers, an awesome (and expensive) month old gaming PC, etc. but it runs around 5 FPS. completely unenjoyable. core2duo 6600 @ 2.4ghz, 2 gb of DDR2, Nvidia 7950GX2.

people in the NWN2 support forums echo the same problems over and over. this is strange because the release of neverwinter 1 was exactly the same way. the game engine was complete shit for at least a few months after release. utterly unplayable. and they've done it again. I guess they're trying to get it pushed out for the christmas buying rush. which is likely more of a publisher thing than a developer thing. so i have sympathy for the developers who were probably forced to push out an unfinished product (that never happens, right?).

So Atari.. die in a fire.

Open letter to Obsidian/Atari

2006-11-05T11:29:00.000-05:00

I hate you.

I recently puchased a copy of the game neverwinter nights 2. the ebgames guy tells me the words I dread to hear. "only the CD edition is left".

7 CDs. I'm going through the install right now and it doesn't even auto detect when the next disc is in there so i have to click the ok button OVER and OVER.

When will you come to the realization that everyone HAS a dvd drive. MAKE MORE DVDs! the CD edition should be the hard one to find, not the dvd edition. everyone that has a really expensive gaming PC to meet your system requirements, already HAS A DVD DRIVE!

The days of digital distribution over the internet are here.. are you suddenly going to leap from 7 CDs to downloading, and pass over DVDs altogether?

What were you thinking?

Hip Government?

2006-10-24T23:03:00.000-04:00

Someone in the government is evolving. how can this be? the government is.. has been the most backwards, most traditional organization.

Garth Turner gets it. he's using the "new media" to communicate with the public at his website, via blogging and google video.

I'm sure most people have heard the story, but here it is again. hes been kicked out of the conservative party caucus. his views are not the views of the conservative party. he IS however representing the views of his constituents, which i think is more important. this event has gotten his weblog a plethora of publicity. every canadian radio and tv station reported this story, so there are very few canadians who haven't heard about it.

which is great! in so many ways. He's pretty much guaranteed himself as an MP forever. the publicity was SO good for him, its genius. if he actually planned it to happen this way, kudos to him.

The nation gets a look at how hes interacting with the public. using the "new media" provides him all kinds of benefits. the public gets easily accessable information about what their MP is doing. he attracts a younger crowd of voters by using new technology making him future proof. he gets to have whats more of a "conversation" with the public via the weblog, where people can leave comments and direct feedback for him. this new media also allows him to speak unedited unlike TV, radio and newspapers, who can frequently take things out of context. he's created his own context.

genius.

now if only the rest of our MPs would take this kind of initiative and evolve.

Plethora of Photos

2006-10-13T11:09:00.000-04:00

Just uploaded tons of photos on Flickr, including wedding photos, kitten photos, and some buck 65 :)

go have a look.

Autumn Sweater

2006-10-10T08:10:00.000-04:00

It's freaking cold. Its almost sweather weather again.

This weekend was very productive. I got my WoW mage up to 54, hosted the mother-in-law for thanksgiving, went for a walk in gatineau park, and had friends over to resume our D&D sessions.

I'm always causing trouble. So I decided it would be a good thing if we hosted Loralei's mother and Ghislaine for thanksgiving, rather than going all the way out to her place. Loralei's sister lives right next to us, so it sort of makes sense. Plus it was a clever way to get out of washing dishes at her mothers place (she doesnt have a dishwasher). Everything went really well.

Loralei spent a day and a half cleaning the kitchen up from the disaster area it was, and cooking all kinds of things. I wanted it to be very informal, and relaxed, and i didnt want anyone to do a lot of work, so i thought a potluck would be good. I suggested at first that i prepare some kind of dinner rolls, and the potatoes. loralei said something like "if you want to fuck around making dinner rolls you can, but thats too much trouble for me". So I said fine, I won't. And the next day, shes in the kitchen and decides to make pies, pumpkin seeds, dinner rolls, and cookies.

I also managed to dig up a decent looking recipie for stuffing that involved walnuts. Loralei is always crazy about putting walnuts into everything. cookies, pies, soup, bread... whatever. everything has to have walnuts. so i bring this recipie to her and she says "walnuts in stuffing? thats just wrong!"

Our groups D&D sessions resumed again, after a fairly busy summer (mostly due to the wedding i think), our schedules are starting to calm down again. I was busy for part of the session trying to find some electronic D&D tools to help me out a bit. I came across the hypertext D20 SRD. very useful. I'm suprised noone has tried to create an AJAX app for D20 yet. a character sheet is the perfect application. Maybe I'll give that a go as "my first AJAX application"

I finally got some proper hosting for my website. I'm not using it very much, but its there and I dont need to maintain it. It was pretty cheap, their introductory offer was $20something dollars for a full year, 200gb of space, 2tb of transfer per month. after a year i think the rates go up, but it'll still probably be worth it. I can also host multiple domains and install a bunch of PHP/Mysql software in a couple of clicks. Pretty spiffy.

Anyhow I guess I should actually start work now, this week my only co-worker is home in Regina, so I'm holding down the fort myself. This is gonna suck :)

Now I've got a fork and knife, I'm cut and carried.

2006-09-12T16:06:00.000-04:00

Well, like the title says, now I'm married. it went off relatively smoothly. much more fun and less trouble than i thought it would be. I cried during the ceremony. Who would have thought that between me and Loralei, I'd be the one to end up blubbering? Pictures to follow.

Just got back from a trip to Toronto to see the Virgin Music Festival. It was pretty awesome, I think my favorite show of the 2 days was probably zero 7. they had some technical difficulties, but it was the most entertaining show I saw, despite all that. Gnarls barkey was ok, but not as good live as i expected. c-lo said it was their first time on the road in a while, so i guess they need to get it together. they got better as they went on. The flaming lips were amazing for the 3 songs they were able to do. the show got off schedule, so they only had a half an hour to perform, before the 11:00pm bylaw kicked in and they had to shut it all down, to the disappointment of thousands. kid koala also had an amazing but short set. i think he got 3 songs in, which is a damn shame, cause i really liked his stuff.

I moved my blog over to the new blogger beta. yay they have support for tagging now! (labels). I'll have to come up with some new template thingy for it soon, but so far its a major improvement. i was just about to switch everything over to vox.com since blogger had been so feature-stagnant. i think the new version even supports flickr integration.

more later, gotta leave work now :)

Fireworks

2006-08-01T10:40:00.000-04:00

More fireworks photos up on flickr.

The fireworks competition is on over at casino du lac leamy, and i acutally bought tickets this year. how amazingly organized I am! :) The show was pretty great. apparently germanys supposed to be even better this wednesday. I took the camera and the tripod over, camped out a spot with chairs and all that. shooting fireworks is still insanely hard. its timing, focus, framing, and you have to adapt to the changing brightness of the explosions as theyre going off. i think the next one tomorrow I'm just going to sit and enjoy, and leave the camera at home.

The wedding draws ever closer. everything is going according to plan. more people have actually shown up than i originally thought, but thats a good thing. about 40 people is the final count, which should be cozy. the tuxes are ready for pickup, so i should probably practice dressing. I have no idea how to put on a tux. i hope they give me some pointers when i go pick it up.

My macbook power supply up and died on me this weekend. i guess its a new product so ill give it a bit of space for working the bugs out. they're shipping me a new one by courier, so its not so bad.

I've started a new tech blog about Citrix, and work in general. the name isnt great, but i like the idea. anyone got a better name suggestion?

Hmm, guess i should write about some interesting stuff I've found lately.

Zulupad. its like notepad with a builtin wiki. it even syncs between computers if you sign up for that. great for keeping info organized on a personal scale

Kiko has fallen off of my list since they dont seem to be fixing the bugs that ive reported, or doing any development at all really. so i've moved over to google calendar. it served its purpose, which was calendar sharing during the wedding organizing.

Wetpaint is one of the better new wiki softwares out there. It's got this great WYSIWYG interface. I've tried a bunch, they're all over the place from good to bad, but wetpaint is good for my purposes, and a little more user friendly than the rest. PBWiki was quite good too, having lots more features, its probably easier to manage larger wikis with PB. PB offers a pretty good editor, where you write in simple markup, and has UI buttons for all the features. Also PB has very good security and permissions management. One other thing PB has is the ability to upload all kinds of files to your site, not just images.

Vox is the new web 2.0 Blogging service. It's pretty damned spiffy. it hooks into flickr, amazon, etc. i might be moving my blog over there because blogger is still missing tagging support. so annoying.

And of course Flickr is still in constant use. slickr the screensavers also a good companion, and flickr uploadr. easiest way to organize and store photos hands down. i barely even use picasa now, except for a bit of post processing.

Hopping the fence

2006-07-06T10:30:00.000-04:00

I switched. I bought a macbook. Its a wonderful peice of hardware. Intel core duo processor, wireless networking built in. it can run windows as well as OSX. its only a 13" macbook, i figured i didnt need the pro version. it will do what i want it to do, and i can still do all my 3d gaming stuff on my gaming rig. OSX is pretty interesting, lots of cool software available. i can do all the productivity stuff i normally do, i can fix up my photos, do stuff in openoffice, create DVDs, and surf the web. and now i can do it anywhere i want. this is actually my first ever laptop, so the thing is quite a novelty for now.

I signed up for this movie service the other day. Canflix. Its quite nice. I've been catching up on some movie watching and tv series. its good. its like $20/month or so, and they mail you 3 dvds at a time. theres no pressure to return them unless you want other ones. they also advance process your returns if you go to the website after you mail them. so when your returns are in the mail, so are your new movies. i figure this is actually a better deal than the movie networks. you get to watch what you want when you want (almost). i was evaluating a bunch of potential dvd mailing services like zip.ca and figured canflix was the best. zip limits the number of returns and checkouts you do per month, and each extra one over your limit is $6. ouch. they also dont rent out games, like canflix does. anyhow, pretty happy with that.

Have a new addition to the zoo. a 4 week (I think?) old kitten. been bottle feeding it for a while, and losing some sleep. its becoming self sufficient now and integrating with the other cats. its crazy cute, I'll post some pics up soon.

for canada day we went downtown to majors hill park and saw buck 65 and a few other people doing a songwriters circle. Pretty cool stuff.

Then we went to my office building to watch the fireworks from the 21st floor. it was a nice break from the crazy canada day crowds, and it was much dryer up there. some of my fireworks photos turned out this year, but not too many. I screwed up my focus about 5 shots in, and didnt recover. oh well, theres always the fireworks for the casino to try on.

Back on track

2006-06-07T11:17:00.000-04:00

Yeah, ok, long time no write.

I've left my previous job at general dynamics, and i recently started at transport canada supporting their citrix environment. 1 year to 2.5 year contract, which is long term as far as my contracts go. so im really happy about that. and its just in time to finance the wedding. hooray! now loralei wont have to kill me.

so i did something the other day that i havent done in 10 years. i installed linux. ubuntu 6.06 (dapper drake) was the install of choice, since everyones raving on about it. its really great. except the hardware support. it has issues with my ati card on installation, and has zero support for my creative x-fi. i blame creative for the lack of x-fi support. their linux driver project page says theyre going to release closed source drivers for the x-fi sometime in 2007. 2007?! WHAT? creative is the worst hardware vendor ever. seriously, dont buy their stuff, your onboard sound is just as good, and doesnt cost you an arm and a leg.

anyhow, linux was kind of a breath of fresh air. windows has been getting progressively worse from a usability standpoint, with the advent of spyware, and other annoying applications. i think i could actually recommend this linux distro to anyone who wants to get productivity stuff done. e.g., regular office documents, browsing the web, chatting, etc. not a good gaming platform yet, because of crappy hardware support. transgaming.com is doing some interesting things that let you run windows opengl and directx games inside linux. its a subscription based service, and if you have the hardware to do it, you might want to check it out. unfortunately the soundcard support thing was a showstopper for me in that direction.

no sleep for me last night at all. i dont know how im actually able to function today. loralei brought home a kitten from work yesterday that hasnt opened its eyes yet, and it needs to be fed every hour or two, so the alarm kept going off and the kitten was screaming and i got about 3 hours of sleep the whole night. ugh. but its cute. we might have another addition to the family.

I've been trying to track down the alphabet of manliness for a couple of days now. chapters doesnt stock it yet in the local stores. the one down near the ikea has 6 copies on order, but has no idea when they're coming in. how useless. the lady suggested that i keep phoning back to ask if it was in, i said no. online ordering it is. that does it, i'm never going out in public again, i can get better service sitting at my house in my underwear.

Economic impact

2006-02-26T09:46:00.000-05:00

Since I've been playing world of warcraft a lot more lately, I've been noticing some interesting aspects to the game.

The game world on a server is a micro-economic system unto itself. people are buying and trading and creating new things all the time. in this economy there is definitely a few places where you can basically be a middleman and profit. Identifying and controlling certain aspects of the economy is key to your success. I think i now find this the most interesting aspect of the game.

I've found a few spots in the economy where I can make a huge profit margin, and a many more where i can make a slight margin. For instance, if i spend my days fishing and cooking deviant delight (turns you into a ninja or a pirate), then its ALL profit, at an average market price of about 1g per stack of 5, thats about 5-10g per hour. but then the market has a saturation point, you can't sell 10g worth of this on a typical day. weekends move things in the market faster because of increased population.

Another good example of how to make a tidy profit is enchanting, or disenchanting. my leatherworker can buy stacks of thick leather on the auctionhouse for about 50-70s per a 10 stack. i can turn 5 leather into a headband, that i can either sell to the NPC merchant for 44s, for a quick profit, or turn around and mail it to my enchanter, who disenchants each headband into about 1-2g worth of raw enchanting materials.

Another market I'm in is bag containers. my tailor can buy the materials needed at slightly less than he can sell the bags for, and make a minor profit. only problem here is that again the market gets saturated. people only ever want 4 of your bags, however people are making new characters each day, which creates new demand at a fairly steady rate.

Its also quite fun to control the market values if youve got spare capital. lets say you do a search on the same item your selling, and some fool is trying to undercut you, seriously below market value. sometimes people will even put things up for less than cost. buy them up, and now your price is the lowest price, and you can resell their things later on for a small profit.

So to keep track of average market prices would be a complete pain in the ass, but there is an addon called Auctioneer that does all the math and statistic tracking for you automatically. its quite nice, and saves endless hours. i doubt id be spending my time as an auctionhouse whore if it werent for this little gem.

PvP is starting to suck, since i hit 60. the horde had incredibly good teams in the 50-59 bracket, but in the 60 bracket, we hardly ever win. I'm not sure why this is yet. it could be many things. lvl 60 players often have access to voicechat, ventrilo, teamspeak, etc. and are therefore more organized in certain instances. one might also argue that because the alliance player population is about double that of the horde, they have larger guilds, and therefore more opportunity to get organized. and it also follows that the more organized they are, the better they do at raids, and therefore they get better equipment.

Once upon a time.

2006-02-22T10:12:00.000-05:00

Oh and reading back in the blog it seems I never made a post about the tremblant trip this january. It was great, with a few exceptions. we were invited to go to tremblant for a weekend with Aaron (the other aaron), nick, and some unknown number of other people. communicating details wasn't well done this trip, as with other nick-scursions. the "chalet" was a pretty old house, with some pretty busted up furniture, some old used appliances, and about 8 twin beds (without sheets), and a couple of couches, a fireplace etc.

ok it wasn't bad, honestly, it just wasn't what i pictured a chalet to be. i picture a chalet to be a log cabin of some sort, with a bearskin rug in front of a fireplace, with brushed aluminum appliances, comfy beds, towel service, preferably at the bottom of the ski hill, so theres no need to park the car, and you can snowboard or ski to the back door of the place you're staying at.

what it actually was was some cheap furniture thrown into cheap house. you know the kind with the really thin walls. perfect for a college drunk-fest where people are just going to either toss their cookies up on your furniture or damage it. not so good for a relaxing snowboarding weekend.

so the unknown number of guests turned out to be about 12-14 people. ok so, 8 beds 2 couches, 12 people, and one bathroom with a barely-working toilet. needless to say the next morning, the lineup was huge.

and the directions, let me talk for a minute about nick and directions. let me say nick is not the best navigator in the land. he has been known to hold maps upside down, and get confused about which way was north. many many roadtrips with him has taught me this. to start off with, we ride from the perkins in ottawa, where we were all given maps. innacurate maps in several important ways. firstly, the people planning the trip weren't going to follow the map exactly, and this wasnt communicated, because partway through, the route on the map uses a ferry ride across the ottawa river, which doesnt run in the middle of winter. After a few hours of driving this detail emerged from nicks memory. secondly the map was innacurate in that it wasn't a map with a real destination. we follow the map carefully, and arrive at: a stop sign, on a road in the middle of nowhere. it is at this point we figured it would be best if we called Aaron. apparently they didn't know which cabin they were getting till they got there, which seems odd to me.

Anyhow, blah blah blah, long story short, we stay the night we live through it somehow, with a few extra bedbugs due to there being no sheets to sleep on dirty matresses with. my legs completely failed me about 3/4 down the tremblant hill, and i had to walk the rest of the way, loralei had a great time snowshoeing, Phil got a royal flush playing poker, and we all made it home allright. Also somewhere along the way I managed to overflow the dishwasher with detergent bubbles. Never ever transfer dishes from a soapy sink into a dishwasher, without thorougly rinsing them first.

This goes right in the books with the other nick-scursions such as the time he got left behind in algonquin park when we checked out the crater, the invisible chilli, and the guiness stew that never was.

Neighbors? I have neighbors?

2006-02-22T09:07:00.000-05:00

And here I thought I was alone in this city.

Since we've moved into the townhouse, I've noticed something quite strange. Our neigbors are saying hello to us, and coming over to talk. Weird. At the apartment, we NEVER saw our neighbors, let alone held conversations with them. well, not entirely true, we occasionally saw our neighbors when they hogged the one washer and dryer every week with 6 loads of laundry.

I'm a little wary of inviting people into my place that i dont know, because ive got lots of nice things that people would love to grab and run out the door with, or come back for later with their friends. I was actually a little afraid of the movers, or the satellite guy when we moved in. honestly, they get to see all of your stuff, your home theatre, your computers, etc. if there was a group of people to "scout out" a robbery, these people would probably be the best qualified to do it. granted i've got home insurance, so hopefully that would cover my ass, but who really wants to go through that?

Snowboarding isn't going so well these days. I haven't actually been to the hill since the tremblant trip in january, and its almost the end of february. the move, the flu, and various injuries and bad weather has kept me away from the hill. I should go this week cause I'm feeling better and I'm mostly done of the move, but I'm finding a lack of motivation.

Snowboarding isn't the social event i thought it would be. i thought we'd get together and have some beers and share the lift together, and teach each other techniques or whatnot. but thats not really what happens when you're learning to board. what happens is you're on your own, your friends are visible for about 30 seconds after you get off the lift, not to be seen again for several hours. no beer consumed, no fun times had. because i'm alone on the slopes 99.999% of the time i figured if i was boarding solo, i'd just bring my ipod. but im afraid someones going to slam into the back of me or yell at me to get out of the way of something, so i can't put earbuds in, and board to the music till ive learned a bit more. Oh well, maybe I'll get better and start having fun someday.

Rotten Apples

2006-02-22T08:15:00.000-05:00

I don't know how many of you actually deal with mac users, but they're everywhere. and theyre smug. theyve been claiming for years now that MacOS has no viruses. and there's a good reason for that. noone wants to build a virus for an unpopular platform. everyone wants to write for the mass market where they have a much better chance to spread. The macs lack of viruses and exploits isn't due to it being superior in any way, its merely a matter of popularity.

Anyhow, recently, in the last couple of weeks hackers have taken it to the mac users and developed some trojans and viruses of various sorts. so smug mac users, up yours. you're just now starting a long journey down a road where hackers poke and prod your every orifice. windows users have been experiencing this for ages, and we're adapting. we have virus protection, automatic updates, etc. you have none of this. as my friend frank used to say.. "good luck."

Also in other mac news, apple has switched their hardware platform recently to intel. theyre selling intel notebooks and intel workstations, claiming theres up to a 4x increase in speed. which is completely contrary to the argument that all mac users everywhere have put up, that their old risc processors have always been faster than intel.

Since apple has switched over to the x86 platform, there are a few things to keep in mind. x86 is cheap, anyone can get their hands on one for a couple hundred bones, unlike risc. because its cheap, its the platform of choice for windows and linux users alike. because of the large userbase, the hacking community is also quite large. because the hacking community is quite large, they've already developed a way to get MacOSX to run on just about any old x86 box, and doesn't require apple's special hardware anymore. Linky

This is quite interesting. apple has always needed to tie together its MacOS with its own proprietary hardware, and in doing so, makes a larger profit. however since its development for the x86 platform, theyre going to have a very very hard time preventing it from running on generic non-apple branded computers.

Not to say that this isn't a good thing. its great for the users. budget conscious users get to try out MacOSX on their own hardware, and if they like it, great. more power to the MacOS, windows could use a bigger competitor. Apple also makes some really great hardware solutions, elegant, solidly functional workstations and laptops that anyone would love to call their own, so I'm not sure theyre actually going to lose much business on that end, its just that theyre competing in a larger market now. instead of a big fish in a little pond, they're a medium sized fish in a gigantic pond.

Pushing the envelope too far.

2006-02-15T13:06:00.000-05:00

I felt a rant coming on, so rather than blasting it at nick, I figured I'd vent on here.

Game developers (some of them) are pushing the envelope in directions and distances it shouldn't go.

I'm pouring over the latest hardware reviews in search of a great new dual core CPU, and they benchmark on some pretty intensive applications, and some new games. what i'm seeing is the latest, most expensive hardware will not run some of the games developed today at high quality settings.

I think some in the game development community aren't hitting the target. they should make their target a beautiful, fluid game that runs on the highest end systems they can buy at the time of release, with all the settings turned on. what some are releasing is games that run like ASS, and dont look any better than the last generation of games, because you have to turn off all the nice stuff.

Look at F.E.A.R. for example. I own a pretty great gaming system, and with decently high detail turned on, it runs about 10 frames per second. thats a slideshow. Another good example of this is call of duty 2. it's based on the ancient quake 3 engine, and it chokes my system to death drawing a few soldiers.

On the other side though, games like world of warcraft, guildwars, unreal tournament 2004, battlefield 2, and halflife 2.. they all perform well on this generations harware, and they're gorgeous. of course the beefier the hardware you get the better it performs, but you never feel like you're compromising if you bought a decent gaming rig.

My theory is that game developers have been running on the theory that processor speeds double every year or so. this hasn't been true for quite some time. sure, systems are still getting faster, but not at the same rate. by the time some of these games get good enough hardware to run them, the game will be old and obselete. how worthless is that?

thats my rant for today.

V-day

2006-02-15T10:16:00.000-05:00

I forgot to write about valentines day.

We spent the evening at home, and i picked up some salmon, asparagus and wild rice for dinner in by candlelight. I baked the salmon with a maple glaze, very tasty. i picked up some roses and some festive decorations for the table, and it was a nice night in.

For dessert i made poor mans pudding. something marjorie made for us when we were in PEI for christmas. brown sugar, butter, water and vanilla to make a syrup base, then you make dough with flour, white sugar, butter, milk and baking powder. i added some cinnamon and rasins in the dough just to be different. you plunk the dough on top of the boiling syrup and in 20 minutes or so you get this wonderful bready-syrupy mess thats great for dessert. Apparently an old quebec favorite during the depression. Pouding du chomeur.

We also got to catch up on last weeks lost episode, since we didn't have TV hooked up last week. to quote Quagmire "I like where this is going, giggity giggity!". I can't wait to watch the new one tonight.

Moving in.... for the kill?

2006-02-15T09:56:00.000-05:00

Almost done moving.

This past weekend just about everything got done for the new townhouse. the movers came and did their thing, the rogers guy hooked up my cable internet, and the satellite installer guy mounted my dish and ran cables.

I was worried that i wasn't going to get everything packed up and ready for the movers to take when they came on saturday, because i had the flu mid-week last week. but a couple of nights hard work on thursday and friday pulled it off, and mostly everything was sorted, boxed, and disassembled. they did all the heavy lifting, and were really good about it, except they werent smart enough to get my giant leather hide-a-bed downstairs. they got it part way without really thinking about it, and then being stuck, just backed out and said forget it.

me: want me to take off the railing on the stairs, so it wont be in the way?
them: no, no, it won't even come into play, you'll see.
ten minutes later, and after much grunting...
them: ok lets take off this railing, its stopping us from taking it down the stairs.

me: what if you turned it around this way, and then that way?
them: listen, we do this sort of thing every day, just stay out of the way and shut up.
ten minutes later... failure.

geniuses they are not. after they left (I told them to leave the railing off), i took out the mechanical bits inside the couch that made up the bed, and with loralei helping, i easily got the couch downstairs. all it took was a bit of forethought and measurement.

the cable guy from rogers was probably the most rude cable installer I've ever had. he comes in and says "where do you want the modem?", so i take him downstairs and show him the demarcation point, and he says "i just need to know where you want the modem". well, i was getting to that. fine, here, in the computer room. figure it out for yourself. and he did. most other cable guys at least try and chat you up for a minute while they go about their install. maybe he was late or something.

the satellite installer guy shows up a little later, which is good, because the movers had finished and i was still getting the tv set up and all that. had to coordinate with the superintendent, to make sure he was going to mount it properly. so its mounted on the brick in front of the townhouse now, quite solidly, and out of the reach of hooligans. its also aligned properly with this guys spectrum analyzer, so we should never have outages in bad weather again, in theory. he used the existing cable running upstairs rather than fishing another cable through the wall. some kind of multiplexer that allows my cablemodem and the satellite feed to work on the same wire. fancy stuff.

the projector room is set up nicely now, but the only problem is the wall im using for a screen is unevenly shiny. someone did a half assed paint job there and I'm going to need to re-paint in the springtime. After some research, I've determined light grey paint will work the best with the projector for good contrast. repainting other rooms is a possibility too, but maybe its better to wait till the wedding is over and done with.

Pwnage

2006-02-06T08:12:00.000-05:00

Back to work again, I'm exhausted. I've been moving incredible amounts of stuff all weekend into the new place. I haven't had this level of physical activity since.. well, the last time I moved. Nick was nice enough to lend a hand moving boxes and boxes of stuff saturday and sunday. After more or less moving boxes constantly for 12 hours a day, 2 days in a row, I had to come into work last night to do some server maintenance for a couple of hours, and give my brain a workout. all went smoothly.

So now we've got enough stuff to actually live in the new townhouse. bed, bathroom, computers, kitchen. I'm sort of piggybacked on my neighbors wireless internet router for the time being, until rogers comes to move the internet this saturday. Suprisingly I'm able to twist the anteanna just the right way and get 100% signal now, which is probably better than my neighbor is getting out of it. I also won't have satellite TV till saturday either. I've hired someone to come set up the dish, which seems like a lot less hassle than actually doing it myself.

Went to costco this weekend with the membership and got some storage racks for the basement. my friend here at work has these things called gorilla racks, which are these enormously heavy steel and pressboard shelving units. so there won't be any complaining that we dont have anywhere to put things in the storage room. they can apparently also turn into a workspace too, if i ever decide to become a handyman.

So all we're missing is the heavy stuff. the couches, the kitchen table, the dressers, the bookshelves. thats where the movers come in. there's still lots of utter crap that we don't really need. i think a good lot of the "stuff" thats left in the apartment right now isnt really necessary, and we need to throw it all out.

In other uninteresting news, I've still been playing world of warcraft the last little while on and off. Playing pvp on the evenings and weekends when i have a spare hour. I play the horde faction, and I've noticed something: The horde always wins. My theory goes like this, the horde are played by more mature and skilled game players, who have a sense of need to get organized and accomplish the pvp goals. the alliance faction are played by a larger percentage of children, who run one-by-one, headlong into the hordes organized, ruthless band of bloodthirsty competitive gamers. I can say this because out of the 50 or so pvp matches I've partaken in the last two weeks, I have lost a total of 1 to the alliance. Others might argue that the horde has overpowered characters, but i think its balanced, and the only real difference is player skill.

To those not in the know, the horde is comprised of mostly monster-esque characters. orcs, the undead, trolls, and the tauren. whereas the alliance is mostly human-ish: humans, dwarves, gnomes, night elves. more pink squishy sorts. I think children are more often than not are drawn to playing alliance. its also a well known fact that on most servers the alliance faction is overpopulated compared to horde, on about a factor of 2:1. so we're the underdog, and we still win. go figure.

Mustn't sleep... Must monitor core

2006-02-01T12:23:00.000-05:00

Work is pretty slow here for the last couple of days. I'm not on the critical path for anything. I've put the ball in everyone else's court. Yesterday after 8 hours of browsing the web I was quite literally falling asleep at my desk. I actually prefer to keep busy, it makes the time go faster, and gives me some sense of accomplishment. But I guess everyone has days like this at some point. Maybe I've been too productive?

We finally got around to playing betrayal at house on the hill this past weekend, which was quite fun. gameplay goes along and you discover new rooms, flipping over tiles, with random events and items and whatnot. eventually the haunt phase begins, and one of you goes insane, and basically turns against the rest of the players. however what that scenario entails is also entirely random. they have books full of about 50 scenarios, and which one is determined by what room you were in and what omen card you drew last. The traitor gets his own book, leaves the room, and the rest of the players read their survival book and try to sort out a strategy to stay alive. Theres a lot of dice rolling, and some easy-to-do stat tracking with little sliders. its sort of like DND lite. very lite. It's also very easy to pick up and learn despite the intimidating number of peices included in the box. plays in about an hour, so we got a couple of plays in that night.

So we got the keys for the new townhouse now. we've been preparing the place and making it livable. replacing lights with new energy efficient compact florescent bulbs, putting up curtains, getting organizers and shelf units for the new space. the movers aren't scheduled till the 11th, but we're slowly moving things over just to get the clutter out of the way. Looking good so far.

This weekend I also got a costco membership. I've missed going to costco. its an interesting way of shopping. most of the time you can never get exactly what you want there, but you can certainly get your needs covered. in bulk. With the new place, storage space isnt so much or a problem, so costco started to look more attractive.

Movin on up

2006-01-23T08:12:00.000-05:00

We're finally moving to a townhouse!

Loralei and I have been looking around for one for a little while now, and we've finally decided on a place. Its a townhouse down on craig henry, with 3 bedrooms, 1.5 baths, a huge finished basement, brand new washer and dryer, dishwasher, and just about everything is bigger than our current 2-bedroom apartment. Hardwood flooring throughout. we'll finally have somewhere to store our clutter! the dining area isnt going to be cramped, and the entertainment center is going to be better than ever.

We kind of wanted to move mid-march, so maybe a half month overlap between the 2 places to save rent. however this place is available immediately and its perfect for us. the rental company is kind of anxious to start renting it, and it is a good deal at $948/month. only about $100 more than we're currently paying, for about double the space. so we took it for february 1st. this way we get lots of time to organize and plan things and move at our own pace. Although i think a moving company will be involved to get most of the larger stuff, and anything we can box up for them to take over.

Now we just have to deal with the logistics. how is the projector going to be set up? how are the internet and satellite feeds going to be run? Like to be able to make the switch over as quickly as possible, but its not likely going to be up and running the same day.

I'm excited, as i always am for a move. its always a fresh start. this time its on a grander scale though, it will feel more like a home than an apartment ever could.

In other more boring news, I've been back at playing world of warcraft. Its a fun distraction. You get this "rested" bonus that builds up every time you dont play. its been accumulating for months now and it took me work through it all, but it got my character to almost level 58. they provide the bonus for the casual player so he can catch up a bit easier to his harcore friends who play all the time. With my luck though, I'll just hit 60 when they raise the level cap to 70.

Home on the range

2005-12-21T22:24:00.000-05:00

The title says it all. Finally home after almost 3 weeks straight on the road. Got back from calgary the night of the 9th, and left on the 11th to my parents place. left there on the 20th via the train and got home the 21st.

The train ride was nice, although not particularly restful. i think i would have gotten almost as much sleep in coach, but i guess i didnt have to deal with as many annoying people, so it was worth it. on the way back we got to ride in a newer train, with many fancy new features and a slightly better suspension. flat screen tvs and a nicer bar area to relax in, but no dome car unfortunately.

Family seems to be doing allright. mom and dad have more cats than ever before, topping out at 19. its only a matter of time till they round up to a more even 20. still not going to exchange gifts with them, the donations will have to do. however i did get things for loraleis family. the shopping experience this year was almost completely unenjoyable, im not sure im willing to do that ever again. it was nice when i didnt have to go out into a crowded mall searching for inspiration while dealing with the general publics stupidity. donations all around next year.

All the christmas shopping is done now, and its a damn good thing. getting anywhere in ottawa when its snowing takes about 5x as long as it should. people here are bad drivers, and the snow accentuates that fact. im sure people everywhere are bad drivers, but the worst driver is always in front of you somehow.

I finally got my xbox 360! it arrived just as i got back from calgary, so i really only had a day to play with it and then i hit the train for pei. but now i finally get some time to play it and relax. its a great console. i picked up a bunch of games: call of duty 2, project gotham racing 3, cameo elements of power. all pretty decent. also picked up a bunch of older xbox games to add to my collection: jade empire, the grand theft auto trilogy, halo 2, SSX on tour, and crimson skies. all of them work except for SSX on tour, which will probably be working shortly. they update the emulation software for the old xbox fairly frequently.

Xbox live is pretty impressive. i like how it keeps track of all your acheivements. its how online gaming should be done, with voip and email and all that good stuff. it remains to be seen how well sony is going to do online gaming with their console, but i think its going to be pretty hard to beat live. a consistent online gaming environment is paramount to success of any nextgen console i would think, and i hope sony gets it right this time.

so the controller is wonderful and wireless and ill never ever go back to wired controllers again. the headset pops into the controller and its all transmitted wirelessly too. it even goes so far as to separate the voicechat to only be heard through the headset and not the speakers. i like how microsoft is selling all these little games now through live arcade (eg: bejeweled, hexic, etc.) i think theres a great market for them, and the muliplayer matchmaking from live makes it that much better. just download and play in about 5 minutes, now you'll never need to leave your flat. the icing on the cake though is gauntlet and smashtv are now on live arcade and with full multiplayer. i remember how hard it was to get 4 players to play together on the old arcade machines, but now its a snap.

missed out on snowboarding for the first time today. i was going to wait for nick to get home to go to pakenham for some night skiing since the conditions are PERFECT. however i was off at 3:30, and nick didnt end up getting home till 7:30, and night skiing ends at 10, so there was no point in going then. let this be a lesson to me, never wait for nick to go snowboarding. nick will be at least an hour later than i think hes going to be, and ill end up wasting my time. oh well, i guess tomorrows another day.

work is slowing down, unsuprisingly. next monday and tuesday are stat holidays, and most people have the rest of that week off. someones bringing in their 360 to hook up to the projector at work, since there wont be anything to do, but we all want to bill for the time anyhow. today was more drinks at lunch, to celebrate the winter solstice. apparently christmas may have originated as an innacurate solstice celebration, back in the day. or was conveniently moved to co-locate with a solstice celebration. ill drink to that.

On the road again

2005-12-06T18:49:00.000-05:00

Life on the run.

I'm out in the Calgary office of GD right now. fun stuff. It's good to get out and see a new city.. Calgary seems pretty great. Who knows, might move out here someday. You can never really complain about canadian cities, theyre all pretty nice in their own way, none of them are particularly dirty or dangerous. and theyre all usually no more than 20 minutes to a decent park for outdoor adventures.

Banff in particular is quite amazing, one of the highlights of my trip out here. went up on the gondola and dunked in the hot springs. I'll definitely be back to explore this summer at some point, and I'm bringing my hiking legs with me.

So I'm staying at the quality inn here in calgary, which really is a misnomer. It's not very quality at all. but it is cheap. and all i really need is somewhere to rest my head.

Another good point for calgary is that Alberta has no PST, and it made it saved me a few bucks when I did all my shopping out here :) The problem now becomes how do i get all this stuff back? I was considering abusing the interoffice overnight freight, but i guess i should stay above board.

Calgary has a pretty enormous game store, the sentry box. I picked up a few games that i havent been able to find in ottawa's fandom II. considering this was following a previous game buying binge, ill have new games to play well into the new year.

After all this running about to calgary and whatnot I'm more than ready for vacation, which starts this friday. taking the train home which should prove relaxing, maybe ill get to crack a book for a change.

Battle.net blues

2005-11-10T07:25:00.000-05:00

So since I've been playing Warcraft 3 on battle.net, I've noticed a few things.

Most everyone on battle.net is a kid, or at least acts like one. impatient, immature, ignorant. They also fall into 2 categories from there, which is "pro" or "noob". im afraid im in the noob category compared to some of these lifetime battle.net pros. I'm sure theyve been there since the day it came out. but there are worse noobs than me, unfortunately.. and whenever i get in a game with them i have to smile because they make me look better ;)

The downside to legitimately purchasing blizzards Warcraft 3 is that since they have battle.net, they eliminated the ability to connect peer-to-peer tcp/ip connections. so no more "lan" games with your friends across your internet connections. although I think I've figured out that we can hook up a windows VLAN, and that might actually work. but its a much bigger pain in the ass than the ability to connect to a specific IP. battle.net is also not that great when it comes to matchmaking or finding the games that you want. its uncategorized, so basically thousands upon thousands of people get put into the same chat room.

the custom games is where my interest in warcraft 3 really is. the original game is pretty boring but people have come up with some ideas to add depth of gameplay and replayability to it. one particular favorite map, dota-allstars, is obviously the most popular custom game online. but there are lots of other interesting ones. TD (Tower defense), where you basically build towers and defend waves upon waves of enemies. there are many different flavors of TD, they're all pretty good, and i dont have time to try ALL of them. theres also something called battleships that i really like. basically DOTA and Battleships! take out the tedium in a warcraft game. you just control one hero or ship, and the computer takes care of unit production, so theres basically an equal force of baddies streaming out from opposing forces and cancelling each other out, except for your intervention. you only control your one unit, and its upgrades, and try to stem the tide and give your side an advantage.

So I'm determined to learn how to snowboard this year. I've done some reading on how to teach yourself basic turning and control, so i guess ill just go from there. in addition to that, the people i met at the LAN party last week are planning on going weekly, so i think ill try and join that group. going out soon to buy a board, bindings and boots. possibly goggles too. i didnt have much trouble learning skiing, and i was really enjoying it except i didnt really have anyone to go with the past 2 seasons. Loralei won't come within 1km of a ski hill ever again, no matter how much i nag her. she had a bad experience on the bunny hill once and figures thats the end of it. i figure everyone falls down their first day, but i guess it deters some more than others.

Gaming Spree

2005-11-07T14:36:00.000-05:00

So, I've almost started a new job. it all depends on me getting the controlled goods clearance, which shouldnt be a problem. the interesting bit about this contract is that theyre paying me weekly. im used to getting paid with a 2 month delay, so its definitely going to be different... but good, especially since christmas is coming up.

I should be saving my money for a proper house, but i think we may end up renting a townhouse just for convenience for another year or two. I was talking with melanie, loraleis sister, and shes only paying about 90 bucks a month more than what im paying now for my 2 bedroom apartment. and for that she gets a full townhouse, huge basement, washer and dryer, dishwasher, and more living room, dining room, etc. basically more of everything. which would make life so much more comfortable till i get enough saved up to buy a house.

of course when i know ive got money coming i have to go out and spend a bit, because ive been holding out trying to conserve. so i got a new creative X-fi soundcard, a few pc games, and some boardgame expansions.

for the creative x-fi soundcard, i just bought it to replace my onboard soundcard which might be good, but it has bugs and they havent updated the drivers in a year. so i decided id go out and get something that will hopefully last another oh... 10 years or so. soundcards dont really change that much so it wont likely be obselete for a very very long time.

as far as how i like the card.. i don't. its better than my on board one, but its not necessarily good either. it sounds nice, but it took me about an hour to get the speakers set up properly with it. instead of installing software from the cd, i figured id just go download the new stuff from their site and skip installing all the crap. WRONG. apparently the software you download from the website doesn't have even a basic speaker connection test, and a lot of the options arent available. so back to the cd, and then update, theres an hour wasted. the card itself sounds good, but the software is crap. i dont need another media player/music library organizer, why does everyone think i need another media player? and as far as the actual hardware goes it was pretty simple to set up except it has one less jack in the back than the audigy and sblive and every other soundcard. which is exactly one less than it needs. bastards!

my audio connection is discreet 6 channel, meaning that 3x 2 channel wires go between 3 jacks on the soundcard, to the speaker amp. no problem. but theres only 4 jacks. so..... where do i plug in my headset? i can either plug in my headphones, OR my mic. not both. ONE MORE DAMNED JACK. of course if i had payed out another 100 bucks to creative to get the next step up, i would have gotten a front panel that would be worthless except for it would have the one more jack that i need.

another knock against creative and their shitty soundcards is their lack of proper dolby digital encoding. they have a digital spdif output on the back of their card, but this only supports 2 channels, unless youre playing dvds and passing the DTS/DD signal through. this hasnt changed in years. i have an onboard nvidia soundstorm which does dolby encoding, which was GREAT! one wire, 5 channels, fucking fantastic. why hasnt creative done this? it seems like the obvious choice since a ton of new speaker sets support digital, why not make use of it? IDIOTS.

anyhow thats my soundcard rant, i hate it but ill probably put up with it for another few years.

new expansions for memoir 44 the military strategy boardgame came out. i got 2 of them but i didnt buy an extra board. new miniatures and new scenarios and terrain tiles. fun stuff.

also picked up an expansion for puerto rico which adds a bunch of new buildings to the game. definitely increased the replay value there. i think its still tops on my list of favorite boardgames of all time.

i went to this lan party this weekend, which was kinda fun. i havent done that in ages. got to play some warcraft 3 on the lan, and some unreal tournament 2004. i had so much fun with warcraft 3 and the custom games that i had to go out and buy myself a legit copy and get on to battle.net :) other legit purchases include neverwinter nights diamond. it includes the original game and 3 expansion campaigns for the low low price of $30. now it is a 3 year old game but its a fantastic adventure engine, which has withstood the test of time. and you really cant beat the price for the amount of content you get. now if only neverwinter nights 2 would come out it would be even prettier than the engine they used for knights of the old republic.. droooool.

Take this job and shove it

2005-10-20T15:58:00.000-04:00

Well, i finally got around to quitting my crappy old job. i was a softie about it though. they really wanted me to stay, so i stayed an extra week beyond my 2 weeks notice just to help them out.

what i found really ridiculous about the whole thing was the building pass. at dnd, things are pretty locked down, so you can't really go anywhere without a building pass. cant go to the kitchen, cant go to the can. i waited 2 months to get a building pass, and there was still no sign that the process had even started. with no building pass, work=jail. except that in jail you dont need an escort to go to the bathroom.

so i did a few interviews around ottawa, and im getting more calls every week. things are looking up for getting another job in the oct-nov timeframe, which is good, more money for christmas! i still havent decided what to do gift wise for this christmas. the donations thing is kinda good, but it sort of changes the feel of christmas a little. last year i donated all my gift money to heart and stroke research, cause my dads got a bum ticker.

so other than that, ive been catching up on my gaming lately and taking it easy.

watched a few movies lately.. since we visited the pacific mall in toronto and got some "discount" dvds. for whatever reason we picked up "alexander", which wouldnt have been worth it if it was free. in fact i want the actors to pay me for the time i wasted watching it. boooooring. and it was also quite gayed up.

on the flipside, the warriors, is one of those retro movie classics that recently got a special edition released because of rockstar toronto making a video game out of it. pretty rockin if you like 70's street gangs beating the hell out of each other.

have a big pile of movies we haven't gotten around to watching yet either, i think next up is layer cake.

and with the christmas rush of video games this year, i decided id blow a few bucks on a new dvd-rw drive. my old 4x was a bit slow, so i picked up a 12x. i was a bit hesitant thinking my 4x media likely wouldnt write at full speed, but to my suprise the drive writes on my kodak media perfectly at full speed. which is good considering i just bought about 200 of them.

i think ill try to update this thing more frequently than every 3 months.. maybe once a week is a good target to aim for :)

Battlecrack 2

2005-07-11T11:10:00.000-04:00

So I've been addicted to the new Battlefield 2 like it was crack lately. even though it has some pretty horrible bugs in it, which I will go into here shortly.

1 - server browser in game doesn't work. it freezes up for long periods of time doing the simplest of things, such as sorting by ping. some of the filters for the server browser also don't work.. the actually have no code behind them whatsoever. so you want to see no full servers? thats tough, that checkmark box hasnt been implemented yet, but we put it there for you to see, because we're planning on making it functional later. maybe. if we feel like it. the server browser from bf1942 never got fixed, so i dont know how much hope to hold out for this one.

2 - server lag issues. really great ping times to servers, but the hardware that some hosting companies are putting these servers on is woefully inadequate. also some new memory leak issues causing server slowdown over time has been proven, but thats the server hosting companys fault for not regularly restarting the servers. and EA's fault for not testing for memory leaks.

3 - allies appearing red (as opposed to blue), which results in several people teamkilling them, over and over and over. this bug happens sometimes when the server switches your team for you, or you try and switch teams. either way, its really annoying when it does happen, for all parties involved.

4 - public servers full of idiots. lets break this down into sub-sections

a) when laying landmines around to protect a particular flag from armored vehicles and buggies, your teammates get to see a big red skull and crossbones indicating where the mines are. so theres NO EXCUSE when people drive transports full of your teammates over these mines, giving you loads of teamkills. public server morons head towards the red skull and crossbones as if they were pinatas, and they get candy when they run them over.

b) also, theres a choice of whether or not to punish a teamkill in this game, but public server fucktards ALWAYS punish. which results in you getting kicked off the server for their own stupidity (in the case of landmines, and claymores) also a kudos to those teammates smart enough to wander aimlessly in front of the tank/apc/jet you're driving.

c) team balance and sportsmanship. there is none. there is the odd time ill get on and have a good even fight, but a lot of the time, one team totally dominates the other, round after round, map after map. a word on sportsmanship.. its not sporting to totally dominate one team back into their only uncappable flag, and then artillery that flag continuously, when the team has already failed miserably. but there is no such thing in online gaming because its full of idiots.

Another lazy weekend. played some pirates cove, and decided I was too lazy to drag my ass out to bluesfest to see neko case, the sadies, and several other misc. acts. Maybe I'll get down to it this wednesday and thursday when buck 65, the dears, and some other misc stuff happens. I'm always so lazy in ontario summers. its either way too hot to do anything, or its raining. i miss the pei weather. I only actually go outside in the spring or fall, and skip summer and winter almost entirely.

speaking of pei, I'll be taking the first week of august and heading down with nick, casper, and loralei. i think a rental van might make the long trip more comfortable, so thats one possibility. and itll save me some miles on my car, so thats a good thing too. I dont think i did a summer trip to pei last year, so im really looking forward to it this year.

More project updates

2005-06-09T08:06:00.000-04:00

well, I got some more work done.

the phpirc client is in a working state, although it still needs a lot of work done to it. add some commands, better support for multiple channels, and a nicer interface.

i finished modifying imagevue so that it works with my rogers photo site. my scripts actually go out and parse rogers site and grab all the important data, and output .XML, which imagevue then uses. I'll release the code to parse rogers site to .xml soon. unfortunately, my site isnt the best to demo the technology on, because on rogers, all my photos are between 2 and 5 mb (HUGE). if you were to have a look at it, i suggest starting with "other peoples european pics" because theyre at least in some smaller format.

I may tear down my rogers site and re-upload everything at a reasonable size at some point.

It's also quite slow. retrieving and parsing each album takes some time, so i just have it cache the .xml files locally. also when creating the thumbnail pictures the first time its viewed, it has to suck the whole image down to the webserver and resize it. but after that its fine. one could go to the trouble of pre-creating all the thumbnails, but its going to happen automatically anyhow.

Also, after i posted the CSS mockup of tomes, i looked at it in IE and realized that its not the right version i posted. i had made one that looked almost exactly the same in IE and firefox. ill find the correct version and replace it soon.

Projects update

2005-06-07T08:40:00.000-04:00

Just a quick post about what I've been working on lately for kicks.

I created this script on friday night when i couldn't sleep. It takes animated .gif files and converts them to halflife animated textures for use as sprays in counter-strike: source. the interface isnt too fancy, but it gets the job done. ordinarily converting animated gifs is a pain because you have to resize and split the image into .tga's, then download the source sdk and figure out how to use the resource compiler. this automates that whole process, so im going through and converting some of my favorite animated gifs from ytmnd. :)

Another project I've been working on is PHP:IRC. An IRC client written in PHP as the name might suggest. I've based my code on the current php:irc applet, and more or less re-wrote the whole thing to a working state. its functional now, but i need to add a few more things in and pretty it up before showing it off. i'd say this is the project ive learned the most off of, because ive never done a streaming html page before, or 2 scripts sharing session variables in real time (needed for posting the input). The main reason for this was the lack of a working web-based irc client. by web based i mean the webserver makes the connection to the irc server for you, circumventing corporate firewall restrictions. the applet from sourceforge was in an unworkable state previously, which is a terrible thing for something thats released to the public. i also tried cgi:irc, which isnt portable to windows, and im definitely not wasting my time writing in shitty perl to fix it.

Yet another project i haven't finished yet is a small script that goes to my rogers photo site, retrieves all the albums listed there, and retreives all the images in the album. fortunately yahoo/rogers has no referrer protection (yet), so this allows me to create my own front-end for my rogers photo storage, so i can make it look like whatever i want, and still have all the data pulled from their servers instead of wasting my bandwidth. im still undecided as to where to go with this, maybe exporting to a standard .xml data to suck into some other album such as imagevue or something. or i could create an album script again, from scratch, with CSS and XML support and all that.

Oh and speaking of CSS, here's the mockup of tomes2 I did in CSS. its much smaller and easier to work with (code wise), and it more or less replicates all formatting from the current tomes site, and is compatible in both browsers. it took a little doing, since IE is buggy when it comes to CSS interpretation. firefox is right on the mark though, so I develop with that then work back to IE.

More to come. I'm really enjoying getting a few of these scripts done, theyre fun to work on.

The cycle continues

2005-05-24T11:27:00.000-04:00

Long weekends rock. It should be monday, but in fact its tuesday, which means the lost finale is tomorrow. (I had previously been mistaken, i though the lost finale was last week)

Good long weekend, got lots of gaming in, and a bbq over at jeremy and lauries place. fishtanks are now cleaned out and have fish in them, although i think one has a slow leak. kind of annoying.

saw starwars, and hitchhikers guide to the galaxy this week. starwars was good, it was the story i was expecting with great special effects and visuals. hitchhikers guide wasnt as good as i thought it would be. but its not a bad movie. because of the length of movies, they had to cut a LOT out. unfortunately most of the funny bits were in the dialogue they cut out, so it doesnt have the same effect. but it is cool to visualize, and the selection of actors was good.

more about starwars.. they created an animated series to fill in the gap between episode 2 and episode 3, so some people might have been lost as to where the movie was starting, but i understood :) "clone wars" the animated bit was annoying to watch on tv because of the short animated bits preceeded and followed by annoying commercials and animated intros and outros. a lot of filler and very little content. but when you download them from the internet, with all the crap edited out, it makes for a better viewing experience :) i can only hope the starwars tv series is going to be good, but i have my doubts.

So after lost is done, tv is done for the summer. thats all ive been watching anyhow. not many shows worth watching these days. the new family guy episodes and office kind of interest me but not enough to actually go out of my way and turn the tv on.

I've been doing a lot of scripting work lately. writing visual basic document automation for the project at work. there tends to be a lot of monotonous tasks that can be performed by VB quite easily in our documentation work. and the more automated we can get the documents, the better, because it eliminates the human typos... or at least, it propagates them exactly as they were :)

And in other projects ive picked up someones project called php:irc from sourceforge. its an irc client that runs server side. so the jist of it is that you can still irc even if your network administrator doesnt allow irc ports out from your network. its quite a mess, so theres a lot of work to be done, but its a good pet project to work with, and it gives me some practice working with a streaming page that i havent really done before. the project is loosely based on cgi:irc, but thats perl (yuck), and written using un-portable unix socket code. hooray for stinky, bearded, smug unix nerds. you can take your unusable OS and stuff it.

I'll post a link to the project when im done. and some other stuff im working on like my adventures in CSS. soon.

in other creative news, i took the old keyboard that someone had left from the other apartment, and got a midi to usb interface cable.. and hooked it into fruityloops. now all i have to do is learn how to play the keyboard again. fruityloops is really really great though for sequencing, and it makes the keyboard extrordinarily useful, as it has a ton of drum synths, samples, and other stuff that make the creation process very easy. and enough features to make it very flexible as a professional production studio.

And i bought myself a pen tablet. i dont know if ill use it much, but i have been doing some pixelart and other things, so im going to try and do some drawing on the PC and see what i can come up with. also a lot of practice there to be done. but maybe someday ill come up with something good, who knows :)

I thought it'd be fun and exciting, you know, like that movie, "Spaceballs"

2005-05-16T12:50:00.000-04:00

It's going to be an exciting week i guess. :) Lost season finale, starwars episode 3, and battlefield 1942.

Lost: WHATS IN THE GODDAMN HATCH ALREADY?! the writers have danced around the hatch for enough episodes. just open it. it better be open the next episode or im going to stop watching. ok well, theres not going to be anything to watch all summer anyhow, but it would be nice if they got a little bit of resolution going in that dept.

I say evil clones of everyone that died on the island are going to pop out of the hatch, so they can work boone back into the plot somehow. I also have a theory about the whole island and the giant monster rustling the trees. if youve ever played the game "black and white" it seems there could be some similarity there. some greater being leading locke around, a giant monster, etc. sort of seems similar to me.

Starwars ep3: again, resolution. everyone needs to know where darth vader came from. the only issue is now, what is lucasfilm going to work on after this series is done? are they going to re-do episodes 4-7? maybe if they take long enough re-doing each episode, and as technology advances warranting another re-doing, they can create an infinite loop. constantly releasing newly redone episodes, and making money. oh wait, theyve already been doing that.

Battlefield 1942: another match, this time omaha beach. its going to be rough, but i think we can pull off a total victory with the right strategies. allies are the ones going uphill this time, so we really have to make use of the artillery on the ship to clear the way for us to get up the hill. and acheive the right balance of snipers to assault classes. sometimes its hard to convince people to give up the sniper kits, but taking assault kits is really the only way to make progress up the hill.

Winning streak

2005-05-06T08:26:00.000-04:00

Yes, that's right. the allies at iplay are on a winning streak! 4 games in a row now and counting, thanks to our new player "lachesis". shes the suprise talent that gives us the edge, and everyones talking about her :) just finished another round last night. it seems these days every single match is a drag-out dirty battle. its very even talent-wise now, so its more or less whoever comes up with the best tactics for the map wins.

battlefield 2 is coming out soon, i can't wait. also, i should pull out battlefield vietnam.. i bought that game and its just been collecting dust. ive been on a bit of a gaming spree lately. i finished off command and conquer generals, all 3 campaigns, and ive been tearing into star wars: kotor, and im about 40 hours into that one. its really enjoyable, and very similar to bioware's other d20 title: neverwinter nights, except with a better graphics engine, and everyone has voice actors. after that, kotor 2 is kicking around somewhere and needs finishing, and maybe ill work my way through some old snes roms.

Speaking of starwars.. the new movie is out soon, episode 3. which should wrap up the whole series quite nicely and answer all my questions. everyone wants to know how darth vader came to be, and what hes got that life support suit for. i know im excited, and i cant really say that about many movies these days.

i think i finally figured out a use for the psp. i haven't actually found it good for anything, because as far as an mp3 player goes, i've already got a better mp3 player (ipod shuffle), and as far as a video game system goes, ive already got a big pile of those with nicer graphics.. and i'm never really in a position to play a portable system: i never ride the bus... if i go on a roadtrip, im stuck driving... and if ive gone camping, i've got better things to do. so here goes, here's the only use for the psp.. bringing inappropriate internet videos to work and showing them to coworkers. that's it, that's all. it serves no other useful purpose in my fleet of technological gadgets that something else doesnt do better. and for that one purpose, i still can't justify 300 bucks. sony is off their rocker. i think as far as gadgets go, the people who buy those gay segway things, and the people who buy the psp, are an overlapping market. people who buy technology just for the sake of having it, not because it serves some actual useful purpose.

apparently Q6 is over now. its unfortunate that they closed the contest already, as our team was rising in the ranks. i think it should be a continuous thing, reset the standings every month or something. especially since it had a rough start, and now theyve got all the servers they need to handle the load, and like a week after they get it set up its done. our final rank is something like 172 out of 41,380. not bad, but we could have done better. i demand a rematch :)

my experiments with CSS are going fairly well. i was able to duplicate a couple example site layouts without tables almost exactly as they were. as with everything new though, theres catches. things dont work exactly the same as their html predecessors, so you have to make adjustments. also, theres browser compatibility, not every browser interprets CSS and html to w3c standards. mostly IE is the one with the bugs, and firefox seems to do ok. anyhow, the best part of doing all the formatting and layout in CSS is that it makes your content easier to deal with. scripting inline php with basic html, and then doing all formatting in CSS is so much easier on the eyes. its also more efficient code-wise as you consolidate repetitive formatting into classes and things actually inherit properties from parent objects.

Work is interesting these days. 3 people got laid off yesterday, so thats a bit of a shake-up. i dont think they were really happy here anyhow to be honest. i was assured my position was more long term, so thats good news. its hard to plan your life around your work in 4 month intervals. such is the life of a contractor.

Masochistic Gaming

2005-04-07T08:12:00.000-04:00

Yep, it's time for another corporate league session at iplay. Somehow we always get our monkey asses beat. sometimes worse than others. but i keep coming back for more, so i must actually like it deep down inside. i suppose more practice would make things better, or learning some new strategies. it seems whoever owns the skies in most of the games, dominates the other team completely.. note to self, learn how to fly in bf1942... better. last time the best 2 pilots got teamed up and you would basically die as soon as you spawned, or if you lived that long, youd have a bomb dropped on you the instant you climbed in a vehicle. boom, dead. there was really no hope of any kind of effective counter-offensive. oh well, I'm trying to recruit a new player for our team, and hopefully that works out well for us :)

Work is going really, really slowly right now. And I'm SO bored. I'm trying to be a little pro-active with the process since theres no actual work to be done at the moment. we have sharepoint here at work to work as a document repository and version control system, but up until now we've been doing manual versioning. i guess noone either got the concept of automatic version control, or they didnt trust the computer to do something that wonderful and not screw things up. so we're trying to implement a check-out, check-in system that will solve some of our revisioning "issues". working on the wrong version of a document, etc. also a solid planned directory structure will help things not get too messy, like last time. i think this would have saved some people hours of lost labour if they had actually come up with a process last time.

Anyhow, work has also become a little like survivor now. michel, one of the original guys was laid off last week, and there may be more to come. im pretty sure im sticking around from all the signals ive been given, but you never know. there's this bi-polar guy working on the same project as me, and while hes entertaining, hes not the greatest guy in the world to work with. so my money is on him.

Anyhow, with work being so slow, I've taken to surfing the web a lot. and since I'm almost completely bored and sick of that, I think I may just decide to start doing some more worthwhile project with my time. All my old php stuff is more or less gone, or i have outdated backups of it, so maybe i could get started on new versions of that. i think i should really wrap my head around some CSS stuff first though. i've been checking out CSSzengarden and i've been really impressed with the designs people come up with, and I think my next project will definitely separate the content from the design in the same way, so i can update the design at any time. I've done some pretty basic things with CSS before, but you can do so much with it, that i really have to do some more research and study. God knows my blogger could use a new CSS template.

I've actually been getting back into a better workout schedule lately. I'm trying to go 4 or 5 nights a week to do weights again, and cycling into work at least once or twice a week. the trip to work is about 45 minutes, so it's a decent ride. I've already done it twice in the last 2 weeks, so hopefully my joints will start getting used to the idea. still recovering from the flu though, this thing seems to be sticking around a week after the initial fever. it doesn't slow me down much, but im still sniffling and coughing on occasion.

And in music, FischerSpooner came out with a new album i thought was pretty solid, so I'm liking that. and sage francis is coming to town pretty soon, so thats another concert to look forward to on top of moby and buck.

The Life and Times of Phoebus Brumal

2005-04-06T08:52:00.000-04:00

Another year, another birthday. Time sure flies, its hard to believe given my current maturity level that I just turned 29.

Loralei was nice enough to organize all my friends together for a suprise party that night, and we all went out to lindenhoff for some german food and beer :) and played some german games later on.

Speaking of german games, Fandom II has been hit a couple of times recently for some new purchases. Jeremy picked up Around the world in 80 days, which is a solid title, and I think it will turn out to be a classic. it plays in under an hour, and has great strategy and mechanics, but isn't too complicated so you dont have to spend a lot of time agonizing over your turn, or learning the rules. I picked up a couple more card games, Bang!, and Sole Mio, along with a good 2 player game: gone fishing. and in the more hardcore section, Puerto Rico, which the box says takes between 90 and 150 minutes to play. Bang was a particular favorite when I played it, because of the hidden roles each player gets, and how gameplay progresses because of that.

So I've been hooked on lost lately. I downloaded all the old episodes and caught up with the series, so now i can watch the rest of it on wednesday nights and understand whats going on. I'm really suprised that this TV show has me this addicted. Nothing new on TV has captured my interest for quite some time. TV is usually devoid of any actual content, favoring crappy "reality" shows with shoddy, coached melodrama. or tepid sitcoms. worse still is the low budget TV series genre such as alias, or stargate, or relic hunter.

In internet news, google maps recently added satellite texture data to its already phenominal mapping and directions service. goodbye mapquest. my cousin is actually going down to work for google in california soon. sounds like a good plan, especially since theyve got so many good products now, google search, maps, picasa, blogger, etc.

girls!! drink!! feck!!

2005-03-17T08:12:00.000-05:00

Happy St. Patricks day to all!

I think this year, instead of going to a crowded irish pub, I'll try to have people over to have a pint, and do a father ted marathon. I've gotten seasons 1-3 off of digital distractions, and i'm working through them slowly. and any excuse to get some people together for games.

Speaking of games, I've been hooked on Gran Turismo 4 lately. Jeremy is also working along on it, at almost the same pace, so we can compare notes. I was thinking about getting a driving wheel and pedals for the game, since it would be really fun, and would make the rally courses easier to navigate. but then, i might just feel silly buying a wheel. I'd like to have something that is compatible with the PS2 as well as the PC, so i can hook it up for driving games there too. I'll have to do some research.

And on the board game side of things, I finally got to play a full game of Franks zoo. It's a fun little card game, with a good theme. I haven't quite figured out much strategy to it, but its fun to play anyways. and if you get tired of playing it the normal way, you can change it up by using the rotating partners scheme. like all good german games, it has a come-from-behind mechanic, such that the last place person leads out.

Not much is new, really. Other than that. Moby's coming to montreal, with buck 65, so I'm really looking forward to that show. Mobys on tour cause of his new album out this month, hotel.

Work is going allright. my friend from work, joe, has moved on to another gig. at about the same time, my other friend and ex-coworker phil started working in his place. so its nice that i have at least one good friend at the workplace these days.

Thats it for now.

Vanity Issues

2005-03-02T11:27:00.000-05:00

Ok what the hell is up with internet people. they take far too many pictures of themselves. I understand narcissism, but if you're really narcissistic, do you really want to share yourself with everyone else? every time i see some teenager taking a picture of themselves out at arms length making faces into the camera, i want to reach through my monitor and smack them. you don't need a new picture of yourself and your dog up on the internet everytime you or your dog get a haircut. unless its a dyed-red, spiked, 12-inch mohawk, or a mural of some kind shaved into the back of your head, with appropriate coloring.. perhaps a nice sunset, or a picture of j-lo choking on a peice of broccoli (I'm cheering for the broccoli). that might be at least somewhat interesting to the rest of the world. Noone except your closest friends and relatives care about you or your dog or your mundane haircut, or your baby. yes, you have a baby, congratulations, you have fulfilled your genetic imperitive to breed and buy a minivan. let me know when you do something that not everyone else on the planet can do. or if you can't do anything interesting, maybe your baby can. If your baby can outdo Cut Chemist on the turntables, then drop me a line. If it just sits there and drools and gurgles and cries, I'll continue to not give a shit.

Which brings me on to another subject about crying babies in public. Do you think it would be rude to offer ballgags and/or tranquilizers to parents who don't have any other way of silencing or controlling their own children? I think it's rude to let your children run wild in public, but maybe thats just me. Unless it's a playground, then it's fair game. But if its a mall or an airplane, bring the ballgags and tranquilizer darts.

Ok that's my vile spewing for today. I'm sure I've violated and taken the odd picture of myself in the past, but im growing old and bitter now, so no more.

In other news, I continue to be amazed at the airtime and print given to the horrid opinions of , well, just about anyone on CNN, but especially Ann Coulter. How can someone so brash and obviously off-center be given press time? I guess ratings is the answer. It's like why don cherry is still on hockey night in Canada. But isn't there some factual news stories you people in the press could be working on instead of wasting print and airtime on garbage opinions? She isn't even a politician, so in the end, she doesn't matter. Either you're in the game and you matter, or you're not in the game and noone gives a shit. Sometimes even if you're in the game, noone gives a shit. If you just wanna run your mouth, and not be an actual politician with real power, then you can just fuck off and get off my TV and out of my newspaper. Stick to your blog, like every other person with an opionion that doesn't matter. I guess if you're right wing you could apply the same to michael moore, although he seems to be in the press a lot less then Ann is.

And as far as my life goes, nothing new to report really. Work continues. Spent a weekened up at a hunt camp which went ok. Good weather, some snowshoeing. Picked up Carcassonne: The City, which is pretty much like hunters and gatherers, which I already have, but it adds a couple of elements to keep things interesting. Me and Loralei seem to play this a lot 2 player, and it works out great. I've also been listening to George Carlin's new audiobook. Thankfully it's him reading it, otherwise it just wouldn't be the same. It weighs in at a hefty 7.5 hours, so I've been listening to it in the car for almost a whole week without any of it repeating. Probably the reason I'm starting to get bitter and opinionated.

Thats it for now.

Blatant Intolerance?

2005-02-17T14:27:00.000-05:00

Same-sex marriage is quite a hot issue these days in Canada. After reading a story from CBC today about how people on the opposing force were going to start putting up lawn signs, I was compelled to write this letter (likely falling on deaf ears) to www.defendmarriage.ca:

Hello,

I'm afraid I can't understand how this sort of organization can exist in a free and liberal country like canada. I am shocked and apalled by your outright intolerance for people who have a different opinion than yours. Freedom shouldn't be limited by people like you. Freedom in this country allows all kinds of wonderful different cultures and religions to coexist, even if they dont have the same opinion. and that's all this is, a question of coexistance and tolerance.

the people you want to deny freedoms to aren't going to offend you by coming over to your house and having gay sex on your lawn. they are going to have their special relationship with the people they love, theyre going to likely keep to themselves, and the priest/minister at your particular church isnt going to be the one marrying them anyhow. nor will anyone be prosecuted for refusing to perform marriage ceremonies. there are people willing to perform the ceremonies, and theres no reason anyone should be forced to do so, let alone anyone wanting someone unwilling to actually perform said ceremony.

Your ideas that homosexuality and gay marriage isn't "moral" is based upon your religious convictions that not everyone shares. You don't see a lot of religious intolerance going on in canada do you? this is what you're practicing. the separation between clergy and government has been apparent to everyone for some time now, except you, who insist that they are still linked in some important way, and that your beliefs should be the ones that the government uses in creating law, when they are just as legitimate as anyone elses. This is a democracy and not a church-head government.

I myself, am not gay, but I will fight for the rights and freedoms of anyone who is being opressed by such nazis as yourselves.

I also recently learned that my sister was on the opposing side of this issue, and I'm not quite sure how to feel about that. If I have a discussion with her about it, will it be a standing issue with our family?

Anyways, post your comments about it if you're reading this.

High Seas Adventure

2005-02-14T09:04:00.000-05:00

Another crazy weekend passes.

Friday I broke down and finally got myself a new car stereo. I've been reluctant to get one since I don't like my car getting broken into. And the more flashy stuff you have for your car, the more some young punk wants to smash your windows in to get it. I went to future shop and had the guy over there put in the stereo. I could have done it myself really, but I dont exactly have a nice warm garage to work in, do I? I got a Clarion MP3CD deck with a removable faceplate, and a matched set of Sony speakers. Not too expensive, but a whole lot nicer than the stock stereo. I found it was hard to get specs on the stock stereo. I couldnt find what wattage the speakers/deck was, what impedance, or anything. Till I took it all out :) my old speakers were an unimpressive 15W. my new ones are 50W. Ok, I know, speaker power doesn't equal speaker fidelity, but these really are a whole lot nicer sound quality wise. The big selling feature for the new deck is that it has AUX input, so I can hook it up to my iPod shuffle.

So, after the stereo was installed, myself, Jeremy, Laurie, and Loralei crammed in the car and went off to montreal to see Neko Case. After some mis-navigation, and some parking adventures, we finally made it downtown in time to catch the last few songs of the opening band, so we didn't miss much. We were able to squeeze down to front-and-center without much trouble at all, so we had a great up close view of all the stage happenings. I forget the name of the openers, but they were pretty good. some technical difficulties happened to them with a couple of shattered drumsticks, but they kept on kicking. Then the Sadies came on stage and played a thorougly impressive set. This was the first time I've seen or heard the Sadies, but now I'm a fan. Then after a short break, Neko came on stage with the sadies backing her up. Her set this time was almost completely different from the other times I've seen her live (this was #4). She had a ton of new material to present from The Tigers Have Spoken, and some stuff that hasn't been recorded yet. All very nice, she never disappoints, especially in live shows. If you get the chance to see her live, you will certainly get your moneys worth.

Saturday was being lazy and playing Sid Meier's Pirates! for the morning (what pirates?). Quite a well done and addicting game. I'm really impressed with it in all aspects. It's got nice graphics, it's very open-ended gameplay, and nice mechanics. You can play through it however you wish, being a trader, a feared pirate of the carribean, choose to work for one nation, or all of them. Cities and settlements flourish or suffer based on what comes their way as far as immigrants, trading ships, payroll, grain, etc. so what you escort, or what you pillage has an immediate effect on the environment. there's a good variety of missions and things to keep you occupied. the game starts out nice and easy, and gives you the option to ramp up the difficulty when it feels you're ready. Like all Sid Meier games (Civilizations, etc.) there's too much detail and depth to cover here. It gets a 9/10 rating from me :)

Late Saturday afternoon was going down to see the ice sculptures from winterlude. It's been warm the last week or so, which isnt so great for the sculptures. So some of them were a little droopy, but there were still some in progress that looked very sharp, and some of the smaller ones were in good shape. I'll be posting some pictures on the rogers site later.

Sunday morning was crepe-fest at our place, and we tried out a whole bunch of sugary fillings. Apples, cinnamon and brown sugar. Nutella and banana. And our try at the kilaloe sunrise (sugar, cinnamon, and lemon juice) a popular beaver-tail flavoring. More Pirates! followed the crepe sugar shock.

Sunday night was gaming over at laurie and jeremy's place. ate some awesome lasange and played a couple rounds of bohnaparte and mystery of the abbey. Broke out Bohnaparte for the first time. It's an interesting add-on for Bohnanaza that adds a layer of complexity to keep things interesting. Mystery of the Abbey went really well. That game depends mostly on the players to make it interesting, and we were in good company there.

So with the crazy schedule going on lately, I think I really need to take a night or two to exclusively clean the apartment, there's just been no time for anything chores related, so things are falling behind.

Good times :)

Gaming Spree

2005-02-11T09:00:00.000-05:00

The boardgame streak continues. I picked up a bunch of new games that I'm fairly impressed with last weekend. The problem now is that the rate of new games coming in seems to be so high that we haven't even played all of them yet, let alone played them enough to start getting more strategy. Some highlights of the new bunch: Pirates Cove, Mystery of the Abbey, San Juan, Memoir '44, and Groo the Game.

Sadly I couldn't stop myself from ordering even more, and doing even more research past that to plan my next 5 or 6 game purchases in the next few months. There are fantastic resources on the web for boardgames right now at Boardgamegeek, and a few other sites where veteran gamers give insights into the good and bad of every game.

I've been itching to play unreal tournament 2004 again, if I could only convince some of my friends to play along with me, but they seem to have no time for me these days. Also, world of warcraft has kind of gone by the wayside. Lately I haven't played for weeks at a time. I usually only play when Nick is online with me, so that we level at the same rate. but he's been too busy to log on, so I don't bother. Kind of a waste of a montly subscription when you only play a couple hours a month. Oh well, maybe someday all our schedules will calm down a little.

In work news, my contract has been extended for another 3 months past march, which lands me in July. Hoping for another extension past that, because the job market in Ottawa in July is deader than ODB. It would almost make sense to try to get another contract elsewhere, for a longer period now, while the jobs are available this spring. But at least this is a 3 month guarantee, so I'll take what I can get. I still have the option of taking another position and ditching this contract, but thats kind of burning my bridges, and in a small IT community like Ottawa, I'd hate to do that. Everywhere I go, I meet someone who was working with me on another contract.

The new phoneline with Vonage is working great. I really like it. I think I'll be switching off the old phone soon. It's too bad they couldnt carry over my old phone number, but I guess I'll have to do my best to let everyone know about the change, and/or have sprint forward all calls for the next few months to the new number.

Everyone needs to STFU

2005-02-06T08:58:00.000-05:00

Especially when I'm trying to read damnit! everyone at work keeps on flapping their gums while im trying to work, and I could barely drown them out with my ipod. And everyone else seems to ignore the fact that I might be busy reading or doing something important. At least just ask if I'm busy before yapping away for god sakes. Then they get pissed off when I don't listen to them, or only get half of what they're saying because im trying to pay attention to what I'm doing.

Television rules the nation

2005-02-03T19:11:00.000-05:00

Who has time for TV these days anyhow? The title of this post is a reference to Daft Punk's soon-to-be-released album. The new album is relatively simplistic electronica, but still attractive somehow.

So, I've been really busy. mostly with work. But I started going to the gym 5 days a week, so that really eats into my time. spend about 1 1/2 to 2 hours per session, it really adds up. its fun though, and I'm getting in shape gradually.

At work, for some reason, I keep volunteering to take on new work. So as soon as I'm done of one thing, I get 2 new tasks to take care of. Apparently I have to make it look like I'm more busy than I actually am.

I signed up for phone service with Vonage. It should be cool, but ill keep my old phone until im suitably impressed with it. all the features seem nice, and Loralei can call her sister in London for free. VoIP is the way of the future :)

Crowds

2005-01-31T08:00:00.000-05:00

I hate crowds. mostly. Specifically the ones on the canal this weekend. they're not the worst crowds ever, because mostly, theyre nice people out to get some fresh air and have some fun. they're friendly, they'll talk to you. but they'll also go the wrong way and try and run you down on a pair of ice skates. or step directly in front of you, oblivious to anything around them. i guess its the same with ottawa drivers too. twice this week i almost got in accidents, and it wasn't just "oh that guy is driving a little agressively", it almost seemed if they were gunning for me.

first this lady doesn't get into the turning lane all the way with her enormous gas guzzling mini-van, blocking my entire lane, forcing me to brake to a complete stop, while she chats on her cell phone. second, this guy pulls over and cuts me off, and i brake as hard as i possibly can, and barely miss him. he's oblivious to the fact that he almost caused an accident. shoulder check for god sakes! this is the kind of thing that causes road rage.

So in better news, I've gotten my new iPod shuffle. i realized after i ordered it that i should have gotten the 1gig model instead of the 512mb, because it's a better value. but i was very excited, so i was just pressing order buttons as if it was going to be impossible to get in 10 more minutes. Nevertheless, it is a wonderful little music device. im really impressed with battery life, capacity, convenience and weight. its the perfect companion for a short road trip, or a long cycle/jog/skate/ski. it comes with a lanyard to wear it around your neck with, and a set of white earbuds which are quite comfortable and stylish. if you get one, put the foam covers on your buds, they're not just for comfort, they help the sound quality.

and in other purchases, after a breif and painful skating session on the canal on saturday.. loralei and I decided that it was time for new skates. so sunday we went shopping for new skates, and got a couple of really comfortable pairs that should last us for 20 odd years or so. till they come out with hover-skates or something at least. this weekend was actually my first time on the canal skating, and the first time I had been on skates for about 8 years. so it was a learning experience, but no major spills or anything. the weekend weather was nice and warm to allow just about everyone to get out and enjoy a breif break from the cold to enjoy some winter activities. speaking of other wintery activities, winterlude starts next weekend. I'll be all set to go out with my new canon and the tripod. I kind of have to restock my pictures folder after having the HD crash a while ago, so this will be a good opportunity.

Work is getting a little hectic. finishing up reports here and there. communication is a real problem here at work, getting everyone "on the same page". so often you're working on a document that the requirements have changed for, but you have no idea. kind of frustrating, but I've just learned to accept that kind of disorganization here. what else can i do really? get upset? im afraid other people here are doing enough of that, and it never seems to get them anywhere, except one step closer to a coronary.

That's it for now.

Picasa

2005-01-18T19:56:00.000-05:00

The photos below were just to test out the new toy I downloaded today. Picasa. It's this REALLY nice photo program that lets you optimize, edit, blog, share and do whatever to your photos.

It's so nice, words can't even describe how nice it is. You should just go get it yourself. It did such a nice job of organizing all my photos and publishing them, and fixing the color/contrast, etc.

The best part is that it's owned by google, so it ties into my blog on blogspot, my gmail account, and another program called "hello!", which lets you share photos and chat.

Get it! That is all.

2005-01-18T19:54:00.000-05:00

the rear end

2005-01-18T19:53:00.000-05:00

Whoops!

Holiday recap

2005-01-07T08:32:00.000-05:00

Well, the christmas tree went down last night. I guess that signifies that the holidays are officially over with.

I've been in holiday mode for an entire month. I've had my fill i think by now. every year theres so many families to visit, and too many friends to make the rounds with. I drove back to PEI for christmas again, which was a little tricky driving in some parts.

I keep saying that the next time I drive to PEI, I'm just going to get a big cushy rental car with unlimited kms for a week. just to make the drive more pleasant and comfortable, and to save wear and tear on my own set of wheels. maybe a big suv, or a cushy luxury sedan. heck even a minivan would make for a great roadtrip ride.

Anyways, got a lot of snow dumped on me on the monday of the PEI trip. 30cm in one day. the trip was very short to begin with: driving down friday and driving back tuesday. so monday was really the only day when i would have had a chance to visit with friends, since christmas and boxing day are always spent with family. so i didnt get a chance to see any of my friends really. I also didnt go to any boxing day shopping due to having no sunday shopping in PEI, and then the blizzard on monday. So I missed out on the future shop sales. Usually the future shop in charlottetown on boxing day is like a techgeek reunion. Usually Joey and Steven are there, and Sarah and Justin, and a bunch of people from Holland College.

Ate way too much. Especially at the Ottawa family get-togethers.

Couple of good things in the present dept. this year. I got Cranium, a neat board game which is sort of a combination of a bunch of other games, so it has some variety. it's well done. I actually ended up playing this at Jeremy and Laurie's place about a week before, but now I have my own copy :) My family and I are giving donations again this year instead of the commercial christmas the rest of the world seems to be following. which is cool. I'm giving away my donation this year to tsunami victims. last year it was the heart and stroke foundation. I already explained giving away christmas donations in another post in my journal, although that post is now gone because of the HD crash, so maybe ill explain it again next christmas, or some other time when im less lazy.

I also scored a breadmaker, a blender, and a rice cooker. I've been keeping busy in the kitchen making loaves of this and that, and a pizza crust. its quite nice. it may eventually fall into the "i never use this kitchen device" dept. but it's fun for now. as far as the blender goes, I havent tried it out yet, but I'm really hoping it crushes ice well. you know for margaritas or other girly drinks. there was this blender casper's dad had at his house one year that was amazing! it was like 5 horsepower, and would suck ice down and shred it in about 2 seconds. really impressive.

that's it for now. maybe more later. back to work. zug zug

I'm a convert!

2005-01-05T08:26:00.000-05:00

Allright! you mozilla geeks win. its been a long uphill battle, but you finally won me over. I'll admit that firefox rules, and is now my default browser.

They finally got the rendering right. i have to say it does just about everything perfectly.

security, bam! its all about security. most people develop their hacks for IE, so firefox is tight right now, and IE is old and busted. no popups, no sneaky script backdoors, no spyware, no bogus activex controls, total control over what can be done via scripts. etc.

and people are actually programming useful extensions for firefox. this is what really won me over. there are lots of great extensions that make your browsing experience a whole lot nicer. lots of "it would be great if i could..." type of things.

theres also lots of tweaks to it, such as the pipelining and the inline autocomplete. and lots more i havent found yet.

Another great thing I've started using since i switched to firefox is RSS feeds, which are hooked into live bookmarks. you basically maintain a list of your links online, with tags to categorize things. which ends up being better than bookmark folders, because some things will fit into more than 1 category sometimes, and you can just add more than 1 tag to reflect that. it's a little difficult to wrap your head around at first, but its very nice. best way to have your bookmarks with you at all times.

I'll post later on about the holidays, i just had to put that blurb out there.

Happy Holidays

2004-12-16T11:16:00.000-05:00

The company christmas party happened last night. the venue was quite nice, big daddys crab shack on elgin st. so lots of cajun cuisine, and an open bar. it was better than a lot of christmas parties ive been to, since most of them take place in some very sterile hotel conference room. this place actually had atmosphere.

I think I'm spoiled as far as christmas parties go. IT companies always have nice fancy dinners with the open bar. of course they can afford the open bar for all the cash they make off hiring consultants out. My fiances christmas party consists of them closing the shop at lunch for an hour or so to have a sandwich in the basement. thats not saying one will be more fun than the other, but obviously the logistics are quite different.

I managed to catch the beastie boys concert at the corel center, i guess its almost a full month ago now. it was a good show, with a couple of suprises. the crowd wasnt as enthusiastic as i thought it might be, unfortunately, and that kind of detracted from the show. i think id rather see them in new york or somewhere with a bigger, more energetic fanbase. i was kind of suprised though, ottawa does have a couple of bboys and bgirls, which got up on the stage to show off their stuff. id love to learn how to breakdance, but i really think im too tall and clumsy to do it. id be happy if i just learned how to do a windmill.

I got the car winterized now, so snowtires, oil change, and a couple of small things fixed up. the garage is still amazing, japan auto in ottawa. very honest people, very upfront about their work. they're not what I've come to expect out of a garage at all. the downside to this is that they are always very very busy, so i think i had to book a week and a half in advance of my appointment. well worth it though.

Speaking of automotive troubles, i had an interesting experience when the canadian tire car battery i had installed in my car died the other day. i went to pick up loralei from work, shut the car off for a minute and it wouldnt start up again. i was lucky i was at her work, so one of the receptionists there was very trusting and lent me her car to go get a new battery. i managed to install it in the dark somehow, and was on my merry way again. thanks Allison!

What else is new.. hmm. I've just been playing world of warcraft with nick. its an interesting game. very well designed UI, and nice content. sometimes we get the headsets going and talk to each other over ventrilo instead of typing, which makes things easier. and in other news, board games/card games are making a comeback! im addicted to them now. i havent played any board games for years, but nick has introduced me to the games section of fandom in downtown ottawa. its cool to get together with 5 or 6 people and be able to play together, and all have a good time. this is one of the few ways that really works, and noone is left out.

Work is humming along, and I'm starting to get settled in here. it goes till the end of march, but depending on how things work out, I might be working for HP for a long time, on other projects, or different aspects of the same project. should be good.

You Have Bad Taste in Music

2004-11-15T22:08:00.000-05:00

This guy has an amusing schtick going.

Beer beer beer tiddily beer beer beer.. etc.

2004-11-15T21:56:00.000-05:00

My recent excursion to europe has opened my eyes to how good beer can actually be. specifically in Germany.

I was elated to find that my local LCBO carries a wide selection of imported german and dutch beers. My new favorites are: lowenbrau and grolsch after much sampling. aside from the great taste of german beer, you may find it interesting that due to the german beer purity law of 1516, the beer brewed there contains no preservatives, and hence a better flavor, and fewer hangovers (in theory). that does however lower the shelf life, but really, drinking this stuff before it expires isn't a worry. it'll be gone before you realize it.

Apparently scientists have found that drinking a glass of beer a day has generally the same healthy effects as having a glass of wine a day. of course having more than one negates any healthy effect that may have been. but who cares really? whats the point in living a long life and not really enjoying yourself once in a while.

Cheers! Prost!

Recent recap

2004-11-09T20:30:00.000-05:00

Well, since I haven't written here for oh.. 2 months or so, I might as well do a short recap on whats been going on in my life.

-Went to europe
-Got engaged to my gf of 3 years
-Finally got a job, after 7 months of unemployment (just in time for christmas!)

The trip to europe was really enjoyable, it was with contiki, so everyone was around my age range. there were a lot of friendly aussies, and a few people from the states, and a few south africans, which was pretty much it. oktoberfest in germany was likely the biggest highlight, getting smashed on local german beer, singing drinking songs with thousands of other people and the oompha band. riding rollercoasters and having wurst. then of course the rest of europe was almost as interesting. since it was a younger tour, everyone was very spirited (read: drunk), so it was more like frosh week at a university than a tour really. anyhow, i'd highly recommend contiki, it's a blast.

The engagement, not much to say about this one.. we're engaged now. wheee.

The job market has been crazy good in ottawa lately. lots of people planning 2003 infrastructure upgrades, which is where I come in. I think I've had 6 interviews in 2 weeks, and that's after not having any interviews in the last 6 or 7 months. when it rains it pours. hopefully this will carry me through for the forseeable future, i'm not sure i really want to spend another entire summer doing nothing at home.

Another thing I wanted to write about is how dissappointed I am at the results of the election in the US. I was really hoping for a left wing government down south so that Canada wouldn't get blown up with the rest of the continent when GWB kills one too many arabs. I also question the legitimacy of the election results. lots of claims of vote fraud coming out now. yes, i am a raging left wing michael moore fanatic.

A new beginning

2004-11-09T13:55:00.000-05:00

Well, here I am.

After the hard drive crash, i decided not to restore my old journal, because my last backup had been too long ago, and i just lost too much.

This thing thing should work pretty good though, granted its not my own code so i cant take some sense of pride in that, but it at least shouldnt crash, deleting all my entries. and i dont have to host it on my cable.

I'll write more later on. yeah i know, sucky default template for my blog, but it'll do till i get my own.