Mostly Useless Ramblings

2008-04-01T21:19:00.003-04:00

If you are one of the 2 readers that might still be following this blog, please update your bookmarks or rss readers to: http://diminishedeffect.wordpress.com

Down with AT&T!

2007-10-01T12:22:00.000-04:00

This is what happens when you have no real, substantial, competition in your marketplace. In most of the US, as I am led to understand, AT&T is the "last-mile" copper provider, but as is the same with Bell in Canada, they must lease that copper out to other companies who wish to provide services on it to allow for open competition. Problem is, that except in the major markets, they don't have any real competition.

So now they change the terms of their internet service contract to a text that basically says, "talk bad about us and we'll cut you off."

Initially I read this on BoingBoing Saturday when it was posted, and was maddened at least enough to repeat "glad I'm not in the US" a few times, but this morning I've heard about it from several sources again, Stacey's shared items feed, and Leo Laporte's This Week in Tech podcast both come to mind right now.

Good to know that others are jumping on this, not that I'm at all convinced it will change anything.

Mailplane

2007-09-26T12:32:00.000-04:00

If you're a Mac user and a Gmail fan, I would highly suggest you head over and check out Mailplane. This application adds all of the functionality to the Gmail user interface that I've ever thought was missing.

Basically, it's a separate app that presents you with a browser window that shows your Gmail account...all of the widgets of course now use proper Mac styles, and allows more advanced interaction through the use of buttons on the toolbar and drag'n'drop functionality.

For example, need to send a partial screen shot to someone? Start composing your message, click the screen shot button, and drag the area you want to send. Nice and simple.

Have multiple Gmail accounts? No problem, just double-click each account in the drawer to switch between them. (It also offers the possibility to add all passwords to the Mac keychain.)

Full Growl integration is also nice as I use it as my master notifier on my system.

Mainplane is in beta right now (invitation required, but it only took me 24 hours to get one sent to me), it will be shareware when it hits public release. I'll definitely be dropping the small cost on it...I'd argue that it has saved me or Canadian Tire that much money in the few days that I've been using it.

Fixed.

2007-07-24T20:22:00.000-04:00

Okay, so I didn't happen to try that feature out properly before I posted about it. I was always connecting from an authenticated browser session so the image always came up for me.

I've fixed it now by having the camera send pics every minute to another web server and the image you're seeing is coming from that.

I realize the picture is tiny...I'll try to find a way in the future of integrating it onto the blog in a larger format. Watch for the camera moving and scanning the surroundings!

New Feature

2007-07-24T11:04:00.001-04:00

Not like it's all that interesting...but on the right you'll now see a live picture from out the front of my house. I've started mounting embedded Linux network cameras around my property to provide some extra security. (They do all the cool stuff like motion analysis, picture emailing, text messaging, and mag-switch monitoring so they can tell me the open/closed state of the doors in the house.) Yay Linux!

Update: Ooooh, and I forgot the best part. It's also full of PTZ goodness...so if someone is walking up the stairs the camera will move to zoom in on the stairs, take pictures, and email them to me and SMS my cell. Then it moves back to the wide shot again.

Wii

2007-07-14T18:32:00.001-04:00

Okay, Wii = the coolest thing ever. And I got one...just happened into Futureshop and they had one left in their lockup. Now my arms are so sore (after 6 hours of Wii boxing) that I cannot move them anymore.

Ewww.

2007-07-11T10:25:00.000-04:00

It's so humid here right now that I'm sitting here, in my AIR-CONDITIONED lab, and my fingertips are sweating. Yes, my fingertips.

Conversations on a Theme

2007-07-03T21:53:00.000-04:00

For those of you unaware Lennoxville (or, post-LV) types, you should know that the staff at BU is currently on strike. It started last week while I was at OLS. Originally it was supposed to start in August but was advanced because the union said that the administration was going to terminate 15-20 people. It turns out that this isn't true, at least according to the management I spoke to today...it was going to be a very small number of jobs that would be actually 'ended', but there would also be a number of people retiring who would not be replaced. Anyway...'truth' is a very bendy line in a situation like this...there's plenty of propaganda vomit coming from both sides.

I've been writing about this in Facebook, in a group that the Poutine Press set up to discuss (nay, provide groundless support for) and Nelly Khouzam (a prof of mine...and someone who used to head the union) sent me an email last night. Reprinted with her permission:

Dear Scott,

I have just spent some time reading all the material on facebook concerning the strike, and I was quite saddened to read your messages. I think you have a very wrong idea about what the APBU is about and stands for. The records office is actually understaffed, and if the employees who work there did not go as far beyond the call of duty as they do, things would be a lot less smooth than they are presently. The APBU does not protect the lowest common denominator. We work to ensure that everyone is treated with fairness and equity. I have been active on the APBU Executive for 9 years, and became so after I was treated unfairly by the administration, and the APBU helped me. I would strongly argue that I do not represent the lowest common denominator. I understood and appreciated 9 years ago what the APBU stands for and I decided then to put a lot of my energy into supporting and defending their principles. I would also argue that I have done this at no expense to my main job, which is serving the students and accompanying them
in their education and learning at Bishop's.

I would be more than happy to spend time with you, if you so wish, to try and rectify some of the misconceptions you have about the APBU,

sincerely,

Nelly Khouzam
Professor, Computer Science
Past President, APBU
Member of the APBU Executive
Member of the APBU Faculty Negotiating Team
Member of the APBU Staff Negotiating Team
Member of the Faculty Evaluation Committee
Former member of the Bishop's University Executive Committee of Corporation
Former member of Senate
Former member of the Senate Planning Committee
Former Chair of the Computer Science Department
and many others.

And my response:

Hi Nelly,

It should go without saying that I don't consider my statements as a direct reflection of you.

My disagreement is with unions as a whole, and because of my affiliation with Bishop's, with the APBU specifically. I have seen, either through poor PR from the union or a lack of credible examples, very few points which would cause me to feel support for _this_ union when in general I lump them all into the category 'evil'. Perhaps evil is too strong a term and certainly its alignment with 'chaotic' is not correct, but I use it to express my absolute distrust in whatever motive they purport to have.

Forgetting everything else I feel about them, unions support the weakest of the group so as to bring the standard of work down, and for this alone I can never support them.

This said, I would be happy to meet with you at any point to discuss this further as I would always prefer to be well-informed, however I would find the possibility remote that you may change my mind on the larger subject. I am on campus every day now during the week, most likely in the mornings.

I'm going to take her up on the offer to speak about this further. Details of that conversation will follow on this blog in the next few days. As I wrote, I would always like to be better informed (you know, that whole "information is the only thing that really empowers" stuff).

Quote.

2007-06-29T10:08:00.000-04:00

"Features kill puppies."

-- Rusty Russell @ linuxsymposium 2007

Factoid

2007-06-22T08:45:00.000-04:00

In Ontario the ambulance is the only emergency vehicle that is not granted legal exception to go through a red light even with lights and sirens on during a critical run. That's not to say I've ever seen a medic get ticketed for doing so, nor do I think any sane cop ever would, but that's the law as it stands right now.

Okay...or how about a second...

Quebec is currently the only geo-political area in North America (and in most of the world really) where it is illegal to use an in-car GPS navigation device. This is because of the existence of an over-reaching law banning driver-visible televisions which was written as 'any electronic screen'. It's amazing they allow in-car radios in this province.

Cool 2.0

2007-06-21T19:59:00.000-04:00

Anyone looking for a USB storage drive? If you've got a little money and want the coolest (and safest!) way to store your data which requires virtually no maintenance at all from you, check out Drobo. Or better yet, check out the demo video!

This kind of hot-swappable ultra-redundant storage has been the stuff of servers for well over a decade now, but this little machine brings the technology to the forefront, at a price that isn't totally unreasonable and it requires virtually no user maintenance. It's already added to my wishlist.

The Coolest Thing

2007-06-20T21:25:00.000-04:00

Many times I've seen the International Space Station in orbit as it passes overhead, and for me the experience will never lose its grandeur. Debate all you want about whether 'we' should have built the station or whether we should have set up a moon base or whether we should have explored the oceans first, it's still awesome to look up at the football-field-sized man-made object floating 350 kilometers overhead.

Tonight was particularly good, as I got to see the space shuttle racing away from the station at only about 30 arc minutes away (which amounts to only a 2 second timespan ahead of the station ). The shuttle is planning to return to earth tomorrow, but until it's ready to do its deorbit burn it remains in the "upside-down" configuration which means that the top of the shuttle and payload bay are facing the earth so momentarily it was second only to the moon in terms of brightness as visible to us. Very cool.

Note to Record Labels

2007-06-19T20:29:00.000-04:00

If your song isn't available on iTunes, I'm going to steal it.

The sooner you figure that out the sooner you'll start to realize more sales. Someone would assume that you business gurus would have learned that in the first year of your degree -- somewhere between couch-burning and stripper-sex.

Go to iTunes to buy the White Ladder album by David Gray and there are only 2 songs from it available. Now I know this isn't the fault of iTunes...they would love to sell every song ever produced, I'm sure, so that leaves labels, as I'm ever-more sure that artists have little control over their own music these days.

So, off to Pirate Bay and problem solved, but I certainly would have preferred to pay someone for it.

5 Minutes

2007-04-30T16:17:00.000-04:00

That's how long it took to be convinced to quit my job today. Really I should have quit a long time before now; after all, I only had it as an 'in' to get me hired by the department as full-time staff and we all know how that turned out.

So I was meeting with Layachi (my Masters supervisor) today to plan out my research for the summer and he asked how much they were paying me based on my approximation of 20 hours/week for the entire year. I did some rough calculations, presented him with a number, and he hands me back a bigger one. "That's how much I'll pay you per year during your Masters" he says. (This is contingent on me quitting the ITS job and spending full-time on studies.) "Done", I say. I really didn't want to be with ITS anymore anyway...it was just something to pay the bills. They unfortunately have a very backwards view of what IT Services in an educational setting should be.

So that's the news.

Ad Augusta per Angusta

2007-04-26T22:18:00.000-04:00

(This is probably going to sound like a rant, and indeed it may be. I just don't quite know why the majority of my posts seem to be poorly-worded diatribes, when I'm generally regarded as such an optimistic person...for that matter I have no idea why I'm so optimistic. I am, after all, a fat, bald, single, 33 year old anglophone in Quebec with no full-time career. Woohoo...good thing I'm super intelligent eh?)

I don't care what job(s) people pick for themselves. Really. I don't. I never look down on people based on the job they've chosen to work at, however I will contemn a person fully and completely when they choose to be negligent in their duties or when 'substandard' becomes synonymous with 'satisfactory'.

Honestly, we spend 2000 hours a year working at these jobs...almost a full third of the amount of time we spend awake each year. It seems to me that there should be no excuse but for us to actually take the time to do a good and conscientious job. This is why I spend 45 minutes interviewing even the 16 year old that I might put on a cash register...I have to weed out people with the attributes that will lead to substandard work, and it'll cost me a lot less to spend the time interviewing them out up front than it will if I hire them and then we have to go through the necessary paper trail to get rid of them later (after we've potentially had to put up with weeks or months of wasted time).

Why am I upset about this today? Well, this is actually on the forefront of my thinking most of the time...as I travel through my day and witness stupidity after incompetence after complacency ad nauseum. People I work with...'developers' (wow am I playing fast and loose with that term) who write applications that I *sincerely* hope they're keeping as far from their resumes as possible. Stores I shop at...where staff and managers alike seem to be equally incompetent, but worse, seem to have no desire to change that sorry fact.

Folks, if it's in the purview of your job description, know it! Or at the very least be prepared to learn it when you need to.

Find out what your employer expects from you, and then aim to do more. (Note to my poor union-caged friends here...this could get you in trouble...I have never found a union that I liked.)

Accept criticism (well, constructive criticism) for what it is. Peer review can be one of the best methods to improve your own performance.

Learn more than your little pigeon hole in the business. Not only does it make you more valuable to the business, but customers/clients perceive you as a more conscientious person.

My ambulance instructor, a crazy Irish paramedic named Kelly Shepperd, once taught me his description of truly knowing a job inside out. We had been working with our airway equipment: oxygen tanks, valves, masks, airways, bag valve masks, suction kits ... and practicing with all different ways to assemble and configure all this stuff. To get truly good at proper assembly of it all can take hours and hours over many days (bag valve masks - the thing they squeeze on ER to get air into you - actually have 25 or so parts...little rubber gaskets, valves, connectors, etc.). So my group had spent all these days with this stuff and we thought we knew it inside out and backward. That was, until Kelly took it all apart, stuck us in a closed room, and turned off all the lights, and then timed us putting it back together. His notion: you don't really know something until you can do it with one of the senses that you normally require for that task removed.

With computers I try to be the same way...when Canadian Tire calls me about something if I can't talk them through the procedure cold, over the phone, with no screen in front of me, then I don't know that task well enough.

So that leads me to my final point: know your job right to the fringes, all the weird stuff that may never happen...because then the day to day stuff will not only seem simple, but you'll be perceived as an absolute expert.

Now, I'm in a big glass house here. Certainly I haven't aspired to all of these goals in every job I've ever done...but I'd like to believe that I gave 120% effort to every employer. Even if I haven't always done that I'm committed to learning about things. I make tons of little post-its about things I don't know an answer to and then I tackle them whenever I have some spare time. The gist of what I'm trying to get at is that I just don't understand the sloppy work concept. I don't understand why people do it. I don't understand why managers accept it. And all the while, the rest of the world suffers from it.

Fiction.

2007-01-22T22:11:00.000-05:00

When I was young (young -- 9 actually, grade 4 -- young) I was into Dungeons and Dragons...series 1 stuff, not the series 3 and 3.5 that the kids are playing these days. Anyway, I remember when my parents got me my stuff D&D stuff, they were nervous because there had been a rash of news coverage about how dangerous it was...that kids would lose themselves in the fantasy. Indeed the concern was that we would lose our ability to determine the difference between the story and the real world. (This belief was largely given steam because of a few events that did happen where some kids in California dropped a little acid, got dressed-up as thieves and paladins and wandered around the sewers attacking each other with sword-like implements.)

Flash-forward to 1997. Harry Potter and the Philospher's Stone is released to much praise becoming a seemingly overnight hit. Subsequent books in the series earn further accolades. But in the last many years we've heard rumours of problems, groups of conservative parents banding together to state that it's dangerous to let kids use their imaginations in this way (??? - go figure on that one). Or the church, the church denounces all things Harry Potter because evil takes too-prominent a position, and because the books proffer fantasy over reality. In fact, Rev. Gabriele Amorth of the Vatican said, "By reading Harry Potter a young child will be drawn into magic and from there it is a simple step to Satanism and the Devil,"

In both of these cases the subjects are put forward as fiction. FICTION. The kids know that it's fiction -- ask them, they know. So why is it that when something so purely *fictional* is put forth as *fact* (or at least half-fact), the world is not up-in-arms?

Stop forcing children to read the bible. Or at the very least tell them it's no more real than Harry Potter.

I'm just terribly dismayed that I'm more surrounded by deeply religious people than I thought I was a few months ago. And more so when I see parents forcing their children into the same religious shackles; your children are too young to decide for themselves, ergo they are not religious, they are simply repeating the actions and thoughts that you're brainwashing them with.

Quickie News

2006-12-10T12:06:00.000-05:00

Okay, first, no job for me. To those of you who knew that I was applying to work at ITS at Bishop's, that should satisfy your curiosity as to my immediate future. From an outside point of view, their decision to go with someone else looks sound. The candidate they selected graduated from Bishops 9 years ago and has been working in Windows development ever since, clearly on paper he has more Windows code experience than I do. My ego says that I can both learn and develop faster than most people can just develop, and past experience tells me that may actually be quite true. Aside from my ego, there is no way at all that the other person will ever put the kind of effort in that I would have, and if I do end up working for Bishops at some point they'll realize that, but I will not wait forever -- even if it is a job I would love to have.

So, currently I'm on a train heading for Toronto. And, by the way, internet access on Via trains is great, and oh so convenient. I was able to connect to my work VPN and do all my Canadian Tire stuff this morning. Anyway, I'll be in Southern Ontario for a few days, then back to North Hatley for Christmas. I'll wait until after the holidays to make any big decisions about my future.

Status Update.

2006-11-25T21:22:00.000-05:00

Hey, I'm actually not going to rant about anything today!

The roads in North Hatley, which have been under construction for what seems like ever, are finally done (well, not completely, but the ones that I travel on are basically complete). It's nice to see North Hatley get a bit of a face lift -- the hill will have stone walls almost the complete length, with a sidewalk that finally goes all the way to the top. The town wants to showcase itself as a premium vacation spot, but they tend to be their own worst enemy, by letting things fall way too far into disrepair; indeed the last time the hill was repaved was about 20 years ago, and only then because a major storm washed away several large pavement chunks. At the very least I'm relieved that I won't have to worry about destroying my vehicle's front-end just to get basic groceries.

---

I've taken to baking a lot lately, partly because I think it makes ideal Christmas presents but also because I have a feeling I'm going to need a bunch around the house this season. It's just disappointing that I can't enjoy any of my own cooking. Tonight was chocolate night, last week I made solid chocolates with painted chocolate decorations but tonight I made filled chocolates with cherry and orange fondant centers. Tomorrow I'll be experimenting with nuts, and liqueur fillings. I'm just sort of testing all this stuff right now...once I get it all perfected I'll combine all of it and start to make boxes. For now I think the people I work with at ITS are enjoying my experimentation.

---

I was going to rant (and break my own statement) about some things, but now I think better about it....something about "If you can't say something nice...".

Anyway, poker Sunday at my place. Email me to confirm a spot.

Wow.

2006-11-20T22:57:00.000-05:00

...Fox canceled a controversial show before they even got close to airing it. I amazed, though it was certainly the right choice.

The show? (and book incidentally - also canceled) "If I Did It", a story told by O.J. Simpson detailing how he would have killed Ron Goldman and Nicole Brown-Simpson if he had done it. Can you believe that? He was going to go on TV and tell the world how he killed them; for people of my generation this case has long spelled-out the weaknesses in the US legal system.

For once however, Fox decided to listen to public outcry. Maybe there's hope for them yet, now if we could just get them to take Fox News off the air...oh wait, still way too many red states to ensure a constant stream of viewers for that. Have you all ever watched that channel before? Seriously, it's Jerry Springer disguised in a thin veil of news headlines...I was once stuck with it being my only news station in a hotel I was in...they did like 3 hours straight on some girl who went missing in the Caribbean, I think they'd even interviewed the guy she'd lost her virginity to years earlier (just so he could say "she was such a nice person"), what an investigative accomplishment indeed.

UPDATE: I should be clear on why I don't think this show should air, for you're not likely to find me telling people and companies not to speak their mind. But this kind of television is the lowest kind of entertainment and I firmly believe it (and other similar programming) contributes to the denigration of our moral codes. Second, I really, vehemently disagree with the fact that OJ should be paid to confess to a double homicide.

Reproach.

2006-11-20T22:06:00.000-05:00

The esteemed Nick posted over on his blog (http://evillenick.livejournal.com/) a rebuttal of my claim that the PS3 will win the latest round of the console wars because the machine can run linux out of the box.

While I agree with his contention that -- at this point -- the PS3 having an onboard BlueRay drive (the cheapest on the market) will drive some sales to it, it is not a lasting thing. Soon enough, dual format readers will hit the market and will become the $35 doorstops that regular dvd players are now.

I also agree that the general public will not run to the machine because they've heard of this phenom called "The Linux" but when I said linux, I meant people to read Linux. You see, the beauty of the open source community and Linux is that you can do virtually anything you want. How about these suggestions:

USB video input and Linux in kiosk mode with MythTV - all of a sudden your PS3 is a PVR which can record shows and pause live television

USB cameras and a customized distro and your PS3 is a home security system while you're not there...it would even email you pictures of movement around your house

USB modem and the right distro turns your PS3 into a voice messaging hub while your not home...better yet, even a full VOIP solution running Asterisk

All of these solutions could be packaged in a custom download...you don't need to download Fedora and customize it then install Myth and customize it, instead you download the "PS3 PVR package"...the fact that it's running linux is something only us geeks need worry about.

My total point to this being that I think Sony did so much more than release a game system when they released the PS3...they released a very real and powerful, fully-functioning computer; further I believe that people haven't even begun to realize all the things that we'll be able to do with them in the coming months and years.

...but Nick's video selection was much better than mine... ;)

Why PS3 Will Win in the End.

2006-11-20T15:49:00.000-05:00

Once people get used to the idea that with the PS3, they're not only getting a game system, but a full, working, fast PC...there really is no choice. Sony has promised that it will run any linux distribution that supports the PPC architecture right out of the box. Heck, it was just released on Friday and these videos are popping up all over YouTube and similar sites:

I've been reading articles for the last few days on how the New York Times reviewers don't like it because it just plays good games, and therefore why should consumers pay more for it than an XBox 360? Developers are complaining because they don't like to have to optimize their code around the new (ha! right...) paradigm of parallel systems. What they're neglecting to notice is that all systems are going that way...they'd better just buck-up their skills and get used to it. Dual core, quad core, and the like are coming fast and furious onto the market and until compilers can auto-optimize to handle those architectures in the best way, coders are simply going to have to get better at developing code for parallel execution. And heck, to be honest, coders should always be concerned about the efficiency of their algorithms...to be otherwise is to be the Walmart of coders.

The Pilsen Does Good (Sort Of).

2006-11-20T09:41:00.000-05:00

Does anybody remember what I've been saying about the Pilsen for the last 5 years? I tell almost everyone...including the staff there. During the winter when the restaurant crowd slows down, I have long persisted that they should have a big screen in the downstairs bar to show sporting events on...certainly the major ones and possibly even getting into weekly hockey, etc.

So I am down at the Pilsen for lunch yesterday and what do I see? Of course, they're setting up a projection system! Initially it will only be for the Grey Cup, the Superbowl and any other major events...but they're polling the patrons to see if they would enjoy a more regular broadcast schedule. I told the owner that I'd certainly be down there regularly for hockey should the decision be made to air those events (I suppose that it would be the french broadcast...and mostly Montreal games, but I'll live.)

So I was all thinking that maybe the Pilsen is finally doing some things right...that is until someone walked out with a microwave and put it on the end of the bar.

Being in management taught me well about the perceptions that people (public, clients) derive from even the smallest actions. I was always (*am* always...as anyone who goes to a Canadian Tire store with me knows) very cognizant of what customers may perceive about a scene, even down to the simple stuff: a garbage can being too full, two cashiers talking to each other, etc.

A microwave has no place being visible to a customer in a restaurant! I don't care if they're only using it to heat nachos for a football game...no customer should ever see (or hear!) it. What does it say about a restaurant that is trying to convince its clientele about the quality of their food, when they put a microwave on the bar (5 feet from the entrance!)?

Well, it says nothing good anyway. Also, I noticed and took the time to point out a spelling mistake on one of the pieces of paper on their door. Come on, this one's obvious, a spelling mistake says "we lack attention to detail"...who wants to eat at a place that prepares food that doesn't pay attention to detail? Yikes...businesses need to do better.

It's All Muddy From Here

2006-11-18T18:49:00.000-05:00

So most of us, at least those in my circle of friends, have seen and loved An Inconvenient Truth - if not for the staccato presentation of the facts we've been hearing piecemeal for years, then simply because there was a hole in the way these facts were being communicated to the masses and we were watching this movie fill it, with a talented guide and easy language.

But as always in life, there are certainly two sides to every story. In the past couple of years no doubt that you've heard the sentiment that "global warming is a myth" or "it's just part of the earth's natural cycle". These statements don't often make in into the mainstream press because they speak about the non-existence of a problem...and who pays money for news that tells them what doesn't exist?

Yesterday I went to a lecture by Curt Rose, Professor Emeritus of Bishops, on Problems Found in the Recent Literature on Global Warming. In this talk he concentrated on two main points (although he briefly hi-lighted some others during the discussion afterwards): first, all of the current forecasts put the mean earth temperature at +1.78 degrees at 2100AD (some suggest 3.5 degrees but they've been widely discredited), but the problem is that we have reliable paleontological data that shows historical temperature variance of greater than this over a 100 year period long before humans were contributing additional CO2 to the atmosphere. In fact this has happened many times. Worse yet, the models...all of the models that show that we will be up ~2 degrees by 2100AD are based on 2X the amount of CO2 we have in the atmosphere now (something like 750 ppm) and with a growth rate of 1%. We're nowhere near these values.

Second, the contribution to the idea of global warming that comes from the heat-holding capacity of CO2 is actually relatively minor on the global scale. It is responsible for some 16% of our total heat energy holding. Water vapour on the other hand...simple water vapour is responsible for 75%. To simplify what this means, if we had just 4% more clouds over the earth each year, we'd have no problem getting to +6 degrees at 2100AD, when we could continue to increase our CO2 output at similar rates to what we have now, and never come close.

Let me just say that I believe in global warming...I sit on that side of the fence. But it's a muddy issue. A lot of people think we might not be seeing the true problem because of the issue of global dimming. Right now, given a clear day in Africa and identical relative humidities, it takes longer for a pan full of water to evaporate than it did 40 years ago. Less solar energy is getting through to the earth...is this masking the true global warming issue? No one knows for sure.

Also, while I'm glad that Al Gore put together that wonderful movie, because sometimes we need to exaggerate to make our point, it should be noted that a lot of international organizations, including the IPCC are distancing themselves from the claims made in the movie...they are largely a stretching of the truth. It's not sensational to say that the earth's temperature will rise by 1.73 degrees and that there will be *some* noticeable change on the planet -- instead we say "+4.5 degrees by 2050 and most of the current earth coastlines will be under water!".

Oh, and what about Kyoto...we scorn the countries that have decided not to hop on board the Kyoto wagon...but the majority of the real science being done today (check the IPCC and Nasa climatology) indicates that Kyoto isn't going to do anything. Adopt it, don't adopt it, we end up at the same place 50 years from now. So yes, Kyoto is good, simply because it encourages the mindset that we're looking for in the future...not for any actual effect that people hope will come from it.
See what I mean? Muddy.

I'll Give Him Funny...

2006-11-09T19:52:00.000-05:00

I'm not going to miss much about Ralph, not that I ever had to live under him, but I'll concede to the fact that he certainly has his moments...

It's Not What You Know...

2006-11-09T09:12:00.000-05:00

It turns out that getting a family doctor in this province is like convincing a church elder to explore his homosexual tendencies with the youngest, most impressionable boys in his flock. Err, wait, I should come up with something that doesn't happen all the time. (Seriously, someone must have done some research on this...but statistically speaking there's definitely a high percentage of fondlers dressed in clergy garb these days....but I digress.)

Most of the doctors seem to have waiting lists that go on for years and years (I've been told by one doctor that it would be at least 5 years) which leaves people to try to obtain consistent care from walk-in clinics...hoping only to map out the same doctor's schedule so that he or she will hopefully remember you from time to time. Anyway, I was talking to someone in ITS about this the other day and he suggested that I check with JD, "he's got a great doctor who you'd really like", or something along those lines. Sure enough he does, but he's not taking new patients (surprise, surprise...). However, one call from JD and I've got myself a doctor! Not only that, he's a linux guy! Loves to talk about linux and he's a total tech-geek. It just goes to show it's all about who you know!

Ummm Turkey.

2006-11-07T14:55:00.000-05:00

Is this creative, or just plain wrong...I confess I can't decide.

Me...Boring?

2006-11-06T18:15:00.000-05:00

Just in case you find what I write here to be boring, or if you think you might be interested in the same things that I am, check here. That link is my google reader shared items page...entries that I find interesting from the 50 or so rss feeds that I read daily will end up there.

Down With iMovie!

2006-11-06T17:51:00.000-05:00

Okay, I will never again use iMovie again.

Now, I'm in love with my Mac, and I'm all happy with the fact that it comes with the iLife package, which does have some genuinely useful stuff in it, by why the hell do people keep releasing editing software that actually makes the process of video editing harder?

You see, iMovie is not (NOT!) an A-B roll editor, in short you can only use one video source track and then just splice things into it. This works mostly well I suppose if you only have video from one camera. As soon as you have been using two cameras to record the same event, this becomes nothing but annoying. Ideally, what you'd like to be able to do is just sync the two videos and then cut back and forth, but this is not possible with only the one source track. It becomes an arduous process of making the entire show out of my B roll (which has the cleanest audio and a broad view of the lecture) and then splicing in the talking-head and slides from the A roll. The problem is, now I have to manually sync every single insert (this workload will probably be lowered with some math and one good initial sync).

...on to the hunt for a new piece of editing software...

Back in Action.

2006-11-06T09:06:00.000-05:00

So, if you've come here by typing www.scottstoddard.net, you've likely already noticed that I've switched back to my Blogger blog. I've tried running blog software myself a few times over the past few years, but inevitably I always stop because I get frustrated over the additional maintenance that's needed when you run your own software...web infrastructure, blog software, security updates, etc. So for now, back here. Maybe I'll just clean the place up a bit over the next few days.

Retirement

2006-06-14T01:47:00.000-04:00

Well, after a year using this temporary blog, I have decided to return to my old URL with all new blogging software and new features!

Please visit my new blog soon!

2006-04-13T16:15:00.000-04:00

The Good and the Good

So, some exciting things have been happening of late. What, you ask. Well here are a couple:

Around last October I posted that I was finally doing work for my favourite Linux distribution, Gentoo, as an Arch Tester and that I hoped to someday consider the possibility of becoming a Developer. Well, in January of this year I began the mentoring process and by mid-March I was done my review period and am now a full Developer. Currently I work only with the amd64 team to help port apps and ebuilds to this platform but in the future I hope to join the PR team to put some of my business background to good use.

Next (I know! How could there be anything else? That first news was just tremendous!), I have decided to wait another year before starting my Master's and instead add a major in math to my honours in computer science. I have always felt a little weak in the math department and I think taking the extra 10 courses next year to get a major should fix that (...or possibly make me entirely crazy, who knows...).

Wow...with all this goodness happening things are looking just great. One wonders if the universe is now going to do its best to smite me in order to balance things out...

Little Bald Men

2006-03-06T08:20:00.000-05:00

The Oscars last night were a standard accountance of the usual fare. I thought the best acceptance speech was given by Reese Witherspoon (who, despite having lived in LA for however many years now, still strikes me as one of the more down-to-earth people among them). Sure, appearances -- certainly those made by an actress -- can be deceiving, but I prefer to believe not.

I was very glad that a movie as important as Crash won for best picture...and frankly, amongst the other contenders in the Academy's popularity contest, I didn't really see it coming. Crash probably goes down as my favourite movie from 2005.

I am miffed however at the "In Memorium" montage this year. I don't know if any other geeks have latched onto this yet, but I suspect they will. Conspicuously missing from the presentation this year was James Doohan, the actor who played Scotty in Star Trek for well over 30 years. In fact, his IMDB filmography listing has some 80 entries, most of which are not for Star Trek. I don't understand why such a seemingly glaring omission has been made, but I hope to hear why in the coming days.

:(

2006-02-22T16:56:00.000-05:00

Time to let the armchair analysis begin I suppose. Was the it totally unnecessary offensive-end penalty Bertuzzi took? Or what about the Official calling lost-sight on a puck in only half a second and then we had it in the net just hundredths of a second after his whistle?

Really, my feeling is that we simply didn't play well. Canada did not look like a cohesive unit on the ice.

:(

Go Canada!

2006-02-22T14:11:00.000-05:00

18 minutes till puck drop in the Canada/Russia quarter-final game.

Beer...check.
Chips...check.

Off I go to cheer for the best team over there in Italy. For we all know that there is no more patriotic Canadian than a drunken hocken fan. ;)

Lay Me Down in Your Soft Pillows

2006-02-21T08:12:00.000-05:00

Have you ever shopped for a pillow? I mean, being a guy, and as unrelated to Martha Stewart as you can possibly be, I've never really considered what it meant to shop for a pillow. Until yesterday I'd only ever bought one pillow before, and that's because when I moved up to Timmins I discovered that I had forgotten to bring one from home. The process was simple: go to local softgoods store, walk in just far enough to see a box labelled "Pillows! Sale!", pay my $3.99 and get out of there.

Yesterday I decided I needed new pillows...indeed there comes a time when even a guy says to himself, "Ewww...my head is not going anywhere close to there." (Usually this realization occurs when you didn't drink enough before coming home...but I digress.) Suffice it to say, new pillows were needed. Off to Sears I go.

Upon arrival in the bedding department, I'm greeted with nothing short of a wall of pillows and the price of the first one I see...$189.99!! (note to all of the Sears executives that frequent my blog...apparently most of you skipped the day about merchandising at management ass-kissing school....never, ever, put your most expensive products in the first 8 feet of a >16 foot display) Seriously, who pays $189.99 for a pillow? That pillow costs a quarter the price of my second car...my second car which was a V6...and had air conditioning!

Apparently there are many choices to be made in the selection of a pillow: fill (I've usually thought 'soft and fluffy' was sufficient), firmness, sleeping pattern (it intrigues me that they sell pillows specifically for people who sleep on their stomach, or their back, or their side). Do people actually sleep on their stomach? I've never met anyone who does (regularly anyway). Anyway, most of the pillows seemed to be in the $30-$70 range, which I still consider ridiculous, but I did eventually find one there to buy: the grandpa pillow from the Martha Stewart line. $7.99 each. Where the grandpa name came in, I'm not sure...either the Martha line wants to embarass you into not buying it, or they're implying that "grandpa" will sleep on anything...even something that only sells for $7.99. Whatever, good enough for me.

Who's the Poker Star?

2006-01-11T20:30:00.000-05:00

Poker Star
Originally uploaded by deltacow.

I am! Tonight anyway.

A good poker day today. I won $390 USD in only two games (the pic is the win-screen from the first game).

So...what is the reality of trying to earn a living playing poker? I'm going to spend a little time thinking about this over the next while. You see, I have been playing $5 and $10 sit'n'go tournaments up until this point where you make between $25-$42 if you win...and lately I've been winning about 70% of my plays. Problem is, it can take 2 hours to win that $25 which doesn't make it worth much more than entertainment. Anytime I would try a $20 game (going for the $84 prize) I would usually lose because I was playing far too timid, $20 was too much to risk losing.

Well today I decided that I would probably stand a decent chance of winning at a bigger money table if I could convince myself to play with my normal style, so I played a $50 game (easily covered by previous winnings anyway)...and I won $210.

We'll just have to see what the next few days bring...

Ha!

2006-01-05T08:56:00.000-05:00

All you young'uns that I spend most of my days with remember having this argument at some time in the recent past: how to pronounce gif.

See, most of us who were hardcore users before the internet came to be used by the general public, we all knew that gif was pronounced as jif -- because that's what the original developers of the standard had specified.

All of the younger people seem to believe that it should be pronounced as g-if. Bottom line, you loose! Here's evidence to that end.

Next on my list: all the people who try to convince me that warez sites should be pronounced as war-ez. Honestly, how does that make any sense, it's a site that you go to to get softwares[z], not softwar-ez.

Mouse House

2005-11-23T11:42:00.000-05:00

Mouse House
Originally uploaded by deltacow.

On my deck, out the back of my house, I have this plastic storage shed in which there are two metal garbage bins. In one there is cracked-corn which ducks and crows love to eat, and the other one has striped sunflower seeds which virtually every other bird eats. This morning when I opened up the sunflower can, this is what I found.

None of this was here two days ago when I last fed the birds. Since then 3 mice have built a home and brought in a whole supply of peanuts (you can see them in the other picture...in Flickr). (Apparently the limitless supply of sunflower seeds was not enough they had to steal all of the remaining peanuts I had and store them inside the plastic container I use as a scoop.)

This all leads to a problem in that I really don't like to kill animals, but now they know about this place, and there will be no stopping them from rebuilding -- likely every single day. Time to think of some ingenious plan I guess...but they are cute.

Mmmm Cops.

2005-11-17T13:10:00.000-05:00

(I give up on apologizing for not blogging regularly, my life is busy, an entry will come whenever I have time and enough motivation to conjure-up a degree of creativity.) (Like now!)

When I was in Stoney Creek a few weeks ago, on one of the last mornings, I was in line at the local Tim Hortons' drive through (which really is kind of silly being that Tim Hortons is in the parking lot and I could just park in my regular spot and walk there, but it's 5:30 and really cold) and I see a cop car in the alternate entrance to the drive through. It's kind of hard to explain the layout of the place, but when our old store closed we left an empty area so that now there are sort of two entrances to the drive through. For the most part this works peacefully as people just pay attention to what position everyone was in when they arrived and they go when it's their turn -- no big deal.

Anyway, when I was one spot away from the bottleneck point the cop pulls up and there are still 3 cars behind me. The guy in front of me goes into the bottleneck, but then I broke all the rules and let the cop in. Besides the fact that she was cute and I find most chicks with guns to be especially hot, she was a cop and I have a belief that people should do whatever it is that they can to make cops' lives easier (actually, this feeling extends to people in the emergency services field in general). (One coffee shop in Whitby used to give free coffee to all uniformed police officers which I thought was great.) Anyway, I get up to the window, and I've got a big order because I'm buying for several other people in the store so I'm expecting to pay about $8-9. The girl at the window tells me the cop was very thankful and paid for my order along with hers. "WHAT?!? She can't do that.", I say, followed promptly by "have you ever seen anyone chase down a cop?"

I raced out into the parking lot to try to catch her and at one point I got to about 50 feet behind her, but she raced off and I was only willing to go so far to catch her, I was already skirting a few laws about how one should drive. So several of us ended up with free coffee that morning because of the good-heartedness of one really hot Hamilton police officer. Guess there are still good people out there...

A Gentooist Am I.

2005-10-25T13:48:00.000-04:00

After years of benefitting from the toils of the Gentoo Development Team, I am now officially on the road to becoming one of them. Today I was accepted as a Gentoo Arch Tester with the amd64 herd. Basically the arch testers work with the developers to track down bugs and stabilize as many packages as possible. Should one wish to become a full-fledged developer after being an arch tester for at least a month or two, it is a relatively short mentoring process to get there.

This is exciting for me as I've been loving the Linux/open source community since I became involved about 3+ years ago and I've been looking for a good opportunity to give something back.

I didn't really need anything else to do outside of my school hours right now as my other jobs seem to keep me plenty busy, but this is something that I consider important and will prioritize time for. I do plan on becoming a full developer at some point, hopefully early in 2006.

Google. World. Domination.

2005-10-25T13:34:00.000-04:00

Well, following along with the belief that somehow Google will eventually control most of the information resources we will take for granted, there is speculation that Google is about to announce the next step in Their Plan: the Google database.

What a terrific idea! Store what you want in it with web access from anywhere. Surely they will be putting together an API to allow people to concoct all manner of wonderous sites to take advantage of it.

Surely this one will hit right at the heart of Microsoft who continues to try to shove the overly expensive and needlessly complex Access down the throats of every Mom and Pop store and Holly Hobbyist that wants to store some information.

Go Google!

Bad, Bad Blogger.

2005-10-25T12:58:00.000-04:00

I am such a negligent blogger. People have given up reminding me to blog because they know I'm not going to do it with regularity anyway. Oh well, that's me.

Honestly there hasn't been a lot of interesting stuff going on lately, but I'll sum up some of the recent happenings in Scottland:

Dropped computer vision to instead take it next year as a graduate course. This was necessary because of the next point.

Have to go back to Stoney Creek at least 2 more times before Christmas, possibly 3. To that end I leave Friday for my next trip.

That leaves me with only matrix algebra which I could ace without really thinking all that much about it. The midterm was this morning and I'm pretty sure I got perfect on it.

Went to Boston about 9 days ago to go to the swapfest at MIT. Spent the morning trolling through thousands of pieces of used computer equipment, which makes it incredibly difficult to actually decide what you want to get and then makes it that much more depressing when you go back to the vendor who had what you wanted and now its gone.

Several people in our group picked up Mac G3 boxes and other assorted Mac hardware -- actually, that seemed to be the theme of this trip. I was the only person to decide on a plain ol' PIII (which I'll be using to run Asterisk at my house).

That afternoon was spent at the Boston Museum of Science which I wouldn't recommend to anyone older than 9, unless they're from the east coast or are a student attending Ryerson in Toronto. It was all very...simplistic. The planetarium was built in the 50s and doesn't look as if it has been updated since. Oh well, now I know where not to go in Boston.

And btw, who designed the streets in Boston? A bunch of Ryerson students it must have been. I've never seen a town so backwards. We got lost a couple of times which was complicated by the number of trees seen to be falling on cars in our path (it was really windy).

Oh, and BTW.

2005-10-13T10:59:00.000-04:00

Kerry, a good friend of mine from Timmins (who refuses to start a blog!!!), who now lives in Kap (Kapuskasing for those of you who haven't been initiated into the HOLE that is Northern Ontario), just began working for Canadian Tire. She finally saw the light and came over from the retail darkside of Walmart.

I swear, I convert everyone.

There are like 7 or 8 Canadian Tire stores in Calgary which are always looking for middle-management type staff. Pay is better than most entry-level and the benefits package for management rocks. I'm just pointing that out.

Back to Life.

2005-10-13T10:41:00.000-04:00

Actually I've been back in Quebec for several days now, but they seem to have disappeared rather quickly.

The Stoney Creek trip went generally well, by which I mean we opened on Tuesday morning at 8am as the Corporation wanted us to. The nine days that I was down there simply were not enough to complete the task before me. Worse, my time demands made some unfair demands on the 'normal' process of transitioning an old store to a new one; for instance, I diverted several of the people who should normally be moving stock over to the new building to spend 2 days moving technology and office furniture which could normally have been left to last. Having to get back to school dictated that I had to get stuff going asap.

So, the store is up and running and all of the various office PCs and the lan that connects them (along with associated web server, mail server, remote access, etc) are running and should remain in good shape until I can finish the job in December when I plan to spend two weeks in Southern Ontario.

Part of the problem is that we wanted all of the new technology for this store; the old store contained a glut of long-expired and unsupported technology that the previous owner should have replaced years ago, but didn't want to invest the money. His office looked like something out of an Austin Powers movie -- that should tell you something. If the technology move was just to take all the old stuff and put it in the new store it would have been simple, alas, that was not the case. But in the end, all of the new technology puts us ahead of the curve defined by the average of Canadian Tire stores; everything is crisp, clean, new and fast.

Some very basic (and uncorrected) pictures are available in my Flickr account.

So now I don't have to work through any more 15 hour days, but that said, I've signed up to be an 'on-call' web developer for the university bringing my official job count to 3+research+classes. Should be fun right?

Double Eek.

2005-09-29T17:30:00.000-04:00

They've moved the desired opening date of the new store up to Tuesday at 8am (from same time Thursday).

My next 108 hours are going to be, hmmmm, hectic.

Eek.

2005-09-29T14:11:00.000-04:00

Ummm, does this worry anyone else?

From the link, "If the shrinking trend continues at its present rate of 8 per cent a year, there could be no ice at all at the pole as early as the summer of 2060."

Not an isolated report either...the new evidence the report is based on is also being reported by the New York Times and CTV.

Apparently my plan to move to Alaska to bask in the wonderful coldness of it all may be short-lived. Well, I'll be almost 90 by then so probably not an issue for me. What I'm most worried about though is what the effect of all that 'new' water will be over the rest of the planet. That ice water floats sometimes hundreds of feet over the ocean surface for an area of some 2 million square kilometers. That's a lot of water.

It brings to mind that debate over the movie "The Day After Tomorrow" which involved the rapid onset of an ice age because of the sudden increase in melting of the ice over the north pole. Everyone agrees that the events depicted occurred far too quickly (like decades fast), but many scientists are starting to believe that those events could actually happen, just over the course of 30-100 years.

What was most interesting about the release of that movie was that the head of Nasa at the time forbid all of the agency's climatologists from talking to reporters about the potential truth behind the movie's pseudo-science.

I just say: "Eek."

Teetering on the Edge.

2005-09-29T12:00:00.000-04:00

radar-sept29
Originally uploaded by deltacow.

Uh, yeah. I woke up this morning because 90km/h wind gusts are quite loud. Our forecast says these should be around almost all day. I guess that's one way to get rid of the old deadwood around my house.

I just captured that radar picture, it's just a few minutes old and shows that we're just on the edge of a large rain front that will also pelt us today. Yay.

Thank You.

2005-09-28T17:46:00.000-04:00

To the anonymous someone who shopped with SAQ and sent a bottle of my most favourite wine straight to my home...

Thank You!

Better.

2005-09-28T17:43:00.000-04:00

What's better than earning money while sitting in a lab doing my homework?

Earning money to sit in a lab doing my homework and playing poker for real cash at Ultimate Bet.

That remote desktop protocol for that little bit of wonderment.

Monday.

2005-09-26T11:27:00.000-04:00

Wow. Not much bloggin goin on here in a while!

Truthfully, that's because there's just not too much happening. Poker happened last night -- it was good, as usual, even though I ended the evening $5 down after three tournament games. Thankfully there was an abundance of red wine still left over from the CSC party last weekend. I consoled myself in it's cheap, stark redness.

(Aside: I'm a work. Someone just asked me what a USB port looks like. I sometimes forget that minutia like that is not necessarily common knowledge.)

Most of this week will be spent in preparation for my trip to Stoney Creek on Friday; I leave at 3am to hopefully arrive just before noon. It will be a phenomenally busy week as we make final preparations to open the new store. Over the weekend I'll begin packing all of my LAN hardware and PCs but I'll stop short of bringing anything over to the new building as the office furniture won't be in place until Monday morning. Sunday evening we have the 'gala' store preview for staff families, neighbouring store owners and invited guests from head office.

Monday morning, my crew of 20 will spend the day moving 22 PCs, 8 servers, 40 dumb terminals, 14 cash registers and all of the associated hubs, swtiches and battery units over to the new site. I'll have 1 day to get everything hooked-up and working before the 'go/no-go' call for Thursday morning opening. I'm not expecting any non-trivial problems.

I'll be back home in Quebec sometime on Thanksgiving weekend -- I'm thinking Sunday -- it all depends on how everything works on Thursday through Saturday technology-wise.

Rant.

2005-09-20T11:34:00.000-04:00

While I normally like to envision (or at least project) Bishops as some sort of utopic hall of academia, mostly due to our small class sizes and level of student/prof interaction, it is certainly not without its flaws. Those on my mind today follow:

Why is it that I work for ITS (Information. Technology. Services. !!!) and almost all of our correspondence is on paper? When I got hired, I had to fill out 6 pieces of paper. Why? WHY? Most of them even had duplicated information. When I work in one of the labs, I have to go over to H150 (the main lab) and write (WRITE!) my hours onto a timesheet. Why don't we have a web application for this? Worst of all...my supervisor is the web designer for the university. In all fairness to her, I get the distinct feeling that she is overworked and that she would probably be proactive about things if her schedule permitted it. I just can't shake the feeling that reliance on old methods is something that is clogging these peoples schedules.

Even my work schedule was only available on paper, well, until yesterday anyway. Now, with an email (wow...not actual paper) announcement last night I have been informed that it is now available as an outlook schedule and hence only accessible through the official outlook application or the official webmail. WHY? Our schedule doesn't change...it's the same until December. Why can't it be just a simple web page? There is no supposed confidentiality here, it just lists who is working where and when. But hey, we do take the confidential phone numbers (which we are reminded are c.o.n.f.i.d.e.n.t.i.a.l.) and post them in the labs so that anyone can see them.

My thought: Why don't we just have a web application for the consultants and other ITS staff - password protected - that has a page to enter hours, a page to get schedules, and a page to find staff phone numbers? ITS, let me introduce you to the open source world and a package called Mambo. It irritates a nerve with me that if I showed this to someone in ITS they'd probably immediately start a search for a product they have to pay for instead.

And, please, someone...800x600 is no longer a used screen size by those of us under the age of 105! Yet it is the default on almost all lab machines across campus. Speaking of bad desktop setups, the consultants workstations (at the front of each lab) are supposed to give us access to all kinds of 'extra' software -- like the printer administration, print credit stuff and password reset features. But not all the labs are set up this way. For instance, the lab I'm in now has absolutely none of it. The only reason that I'm actually here I suppose is to prevent people from walking out with computers because I can't really do anything else. We use Windows folks, which actually makes networking not terribly difficult. Why can't we just use roaming profiles with a consultants group policy so that it doesn't matter what work station I log on at, I have access to all of the tools I might need? I had never worked with any of that stuff, but I both learned and implemented it in two weeks in Stoney Creek over the summer.

And communication people! Right now Bishops is in the middle of a switch from Novell to Microsoft's Active Directory. It makes less than no sense why they'd wait until ALL OF THE STUDENTS ARE BACK to make this change, but whatever. Problem is, we've been in a state of half-way-done for weeks now. At Bishops profs use the R drive to put course materials for students -- this normally works very well. Now however, half of the profs' offices are on the old Novell system and half are on the new system. The ones that are on Novell continue to put things on their R drives entirely oblivious to the fact that that is the Novell R drive which is NOT the same one that all of the students access when they use the lab computers (which are almost all running active directory). No one is telling them anything!

Cheers to Doocing. Better yet, cheers to Doocing while I'm at work. Actually, I suppose it's not really Doocing per se, the people I work with are nice, but we're certainly lacking something. Last year, Kent (the former ITS head) was fired and we have an interim director in place. He seems both capable and personable, but impressions don't forgive inaction. We'll see how all this progresses.

Music To Code By.

2005-09-19T12:09:00.000-04:00

I'm different from most coders that I know in that when I code I need loud metal music playing (well, that or show tunes, but that's a story for another day), generally the louder and heavier the better. One band that I've been listening to more lately than in the past: Disturbed (the link is a stupid flash site). They've always had some great singles in songs like Stupify and Prayer. On their new album this year, called Ten Thousand Fists, the latest (only?) single, Stricken, is a fabulous coding song.

On a related note, the address for The Edge (CFNY 102.1 Toronto) has changed for those of us linux users that use mplayer to play the stream. (They used to be shoutcast, but now they seem to have moved to Stream the World.) Anyway, this address should be the currently correct one: http://64.34.147.163/CFNYFM

Random Monday Morning.

2005-09-19T11:26:00.000-04:00

Computer science party 2.0 was a fair success on Friday night, despite the frequent mini-showers. The outdoor component only really ended because the rain really picked up at 10:30 or so. We came inside and (those of us who were not falling-over drunk) played a $5 poker tournament, which I won.

The only sad point? (Coincident with the disadvantage of buying an expensive camera) I took not a single picture of the event. The constant light sprinkling of rain made me nervous to take the camera out of the car all evening (beyond showing it to Stefan, who is debating a digital SLR purchase in the near future). I'll just have to wait to see Dimitri's pictures, he was not so paranoid about water on his Canon EOS 10D.

Also: I reinstalled Gentoo on my main AMD64 box this weekend (partly because my old Gentoo profile had expired and it was no longer a trivial symlink switch to upgrade, and partly because after over a year I had built up quite a bit of dependency crap that I hadn't bothered to clean out). As such, anyone who had an account on it no longer does. If you would like one, just send me an email and I'll get you set up.

I also unmasked and installed Gnome 2.12 which seems to work terrifically. Evince is a vast improvement over all previous attempts at a document reader. If you're a Gentoo-er (ist?) and want the package.unmask entries for it, let me know and I'll send them.

A Windows (ghast!) partition is being set up tonight, only because I love photoshop and simply cannot stand using Gimp. It may have most of the functionality, but it has none of the usability.

CompSci Party in the Woods 2.0

2005-09-15T22:35:00.000-04:00

Late notice here but everyone should know anyway...

This year's Computer Science student/faculty/significant others/admirers/fanboys party is happening tomorrow evening (beginning around 5pm or so and continuing until we can't go any longer).

Location: My house! North Hatley, in the orchard.

What should you bring? Alcohol, food (there will be both a BBQ upon which to cook and an open fire for roasting things -- remember your marshmallows!), a cooler to keep things cold.

What else should you bring? Consider a chair if it's feasible for you to do so, I only have 9.

Anybody have any questions? Leave a comment and I'll reply there.

Updates from Academia.

2005-09-14T08:42:00.000-04:00

My new job with ITS is not nearly as bad as expected; indeed, I have a tremendous amount of free time when working in the labs. This will prove especially beneficial later in the semester when I want to get homework done. Right now, I mainly occupy my time by working on Canadian Tire stuff (I am a Canadian Tire whore don't you know...), watching DVDs (which reminds me...Colin, if you're reading this, we're gonna have to get some sort of system going where I can borrow DVDs from you...I have watched all of mine many times and I only have 30 to begin with), and writing email or blog posts. Really, in a 4 hour shift, I would say that I only spend about 30 minutes doing any actual job-related work.

This morning I have a meeting with my research supervisors Layachi and Madjid to see what direction I should be heading during the Fall semester. Lately I have compiled a large collection of volume data to be used as real testing data for my programs. My collection thus far includes CT scans of a human head and an entire body and an MRI of a human head. The data comes as image slices at varying degrees of resolution. My program then takes that data and attempts first to extract important features from it, then take those extracted features and attempt to rebuild them into independent 3D objects. Trust me, it's exciting stuff. I don't see myself continuing past this Fall on it though -- what I really want to be working on, and the direction I plan on taking in my Masters, is what Layachi is researching -- multi-camera integration and it's applications in remote-sensing.

The two classes that I have this semester...well, they'll be exceedingly easy. It turns out that I already know most of the information from both of them. Oh well, I'll be able to spend more time on the jobs and research for this semester anyway.

Tonight.

2005-09-12T23:57:00.000-04:00

I can't remember the last time that I had an evening where I was this sad. Not pathetically or weepily sad...just in a profound state of reflection. I normally have pretty much only one emotion: normal. Not so tonight.

On August 4th of this year, sometime around 10:30pm my stepfather was going to work on his motorcycle. He loved his motorcycle; 2001 Kawasaki Ninja, green. He spent years doing everything he, my mother, his two daughters and my brother and I needed. House, cars, everything else before he bought that bike -- it was his only 'toy'.

He was killed instantly by a driver leaving a parking lot only two blocks away from work, only 51 years old. The other driver is said not to have stopped at the lot exit, this being a statement that I can't actually make until the police conclude their investigation, but after looking at the scene myself it is decidedly obvious that that was the case. He was wearing full protective equipment -- all body leathers, with bike boots and of course a helmet. He always did, even if he was just going around the block. They didn't help, but at the same time I give a new look of scorn to those bikers who don't wear proper safety equipment, as I pass by.

I got the call at 5am the next morning; calls from family before the sun rises are rarely good. Within a few hours I was on the road to Whitby. The whole way there I watched cars and bikes flow past and around...everyone's life just...continuing. I wanted to scream, "Stop the world! I want someone, everyone, to take notice that Greg is gone." Does everyone feel this when someone dies unexpectedly?

The next few days are a blur in my memory. The funeral was five days later, but so much had to be done before then. How can the government, the world in fact, expect a grieving spouse to begin filling-out insurance paperwork and visiting banks to deal with account transfers during the week of her husband's death? It's all deadlined...it has to be done...the spouse's financial solvency depends on it. We as a society have a long way to go in our treatment and handling of the survivors of unexpected loss. My uncle and I did as much as we could, but so much has been left to my mother. It aggravates the grieving process in such a terrible way.

The truly terrible and infinitely regrettable point for me is that I never truly got to know how great a person Greg was before he was gone. I know, we all say that right? But really, I always knew he was a terrific person because of how he made my mother feel -- she lived the last 16 years like none I'd ever seen before. Their relationship is one of the few bright lights that I've used to convince myself away from a permanent state of relationship pessimism. Anybody who could show that state of wonderful to my mother had to be a truly good person. But aside from that, I never saw a lot of direct evidence of it -- I mean, I never lived with them so I never had an opportunity to be around through the normals of daily life.

That week, the one before the funeral, really made me see. The number of neighbours, ostensibly in this day and age, strangers, that came and told stories about how Greg did this, or Greg did that. Took care of their lawns. Carried their groceries. Fixed their cars. Help with problems. Teach them things. E.v.e.r.y.t.h.i.n.g. One night at about 11pm I answered the phone after my mother was asleep and an elderly man asked for Greg. I began to explain what I'd managed to explain a hundred or so times by this point and he went to tears on the other end of the phone. When he was able to explain he mentioned that he only knew Greg from Don Cherry's (a local bar...a chain in Southern Ontario) but that Greg was the guy that would always take him to his doctor's appointments and to the hospital for x-rays. It became clear to me that he had similar 'relationships' with many people from Don Cherry's. Greg was just that type of guy.

The funeral was bigger than any I've ever attended. The sheer number of people that came was staggering. More than would fit in the chapel, the overflow wouldn't even fit in the standing room behind the chapel. Greg was a much-loved man. There wasn't a dry eye in the building, including the hundred or so coworkers from GM. People said wonderful things. I didn't get up and speak, I couldn't find the words to describe what I wanted to say. The funeral ended with myself, my brother, and four other family members carrying Greg's coffin and putting it into the hearse. What a surreal experience. I only remember it as barely being there...barely cognisant of that fact that we were carrying Greg, my stepfather, my friend.

Everytime I see those Lance Armstrong bracelets, you know, "Live Strong" yellow bracelets, I get this feeling that I want to make my own and I want them to say "Live Like Greg". His philosphy was just like Pay It Forward, but in smaller steps, all the time. We would all do well to live a life like that.

Fall 2005 Schedule.

2005-09-09T11:23:00.000-04:00

Fall 2005 Schedule
Originally uploaded by deltacow.

I got the job I applied for with ITS - a lab consultant position. Yay me. How long has it been since I earned minimum wage? Oh well, it actually works out really well for me because I'll do Canadian Tire work while I'm sitting in the labs and get paid twice.

Anyway...click through on the picture if you're interested in seeing my schedule for this semester. Only two classes, but I have no doubt that I'll be busy anyway between research and two jobs.

Ransom Demands.

2005-09-08T17:46:00.000-04:00

ransom
Originally uploaded by deltacow.

Should the owner of this iPod Shuffle wish to see it forwarded, intact, to their new address the following demands must be met:

1. The owner of said iPod must fashion a costume at least vaguely resembling an aquatic creature. The iPodnapper would be most pleased if an octopus was chosen.

2. This costume will then be worn out to no less than two on-campus bars at which time pictures must be taken and posted to the blog of the iPod owner (public post only please).

Once the photos have been witnessed to be online, the iPod will be securely packaged and express-posted to its rightful owner.

Failure to comply with any of the two conditions above will result in the packaging being sent to the owner -- in separate envelopes.

News.

2005-09-08T10:33:00.000-04:00

I don't have to go to Hamilton this weekend as previously thought. The new store is at a point right now where I simply don't have enough to do to fill up five days worth of work (or not work that I can't do from home anyway). Instead, I will stay here, there will be a regular poker game on Sunday night and I'll go to the John Deere equipment demonstration extravaganza on Saturday morning.
Bishop's has a photography club. My new camera and I will be attending the first meeting, whenever and wherever that may be. Why they would put an article in the school paper, but not provide any seemingly important info like that, who knows.
All of Petter's boxes should now be out of Quebec and en route to his new home in BC. Little does he know that I'm holding his new iPod Shuffle hostage. Proof of life photos and ransom demands to follow shortly.

Addicted to Workahol.

2005-09-08T07:43:00.000-04:00

Stacey comments the other day that she is jealous about the fact that we are back to school. This is a feeling that I understand, the workforce is one hard taskmaster and if you happen to be fortunate enough to end up with some closet dominatrix as your immediate supervisor, well, you'll find yourself frequently wishing for a return to the security that academia provides. Nothing really matters here. Program submission deadlines and calculus midterms are the sole puntuators of a stress level that is constantly somewhere below Tense.

All that considered, every time I go to Toronto, I have to fight the urge to stay there. The work-world, although considerably more stressful and decidedly frenetic, offers an unparalleled sense of freedom. Sure, the stakes are higher; deciding to skip an assignment most likely will get you fired, you can't tell people what you really think about them and expect no consequence, and you will be in dire straits if you don't get a steady paycheque (well, unless your name is Phil Verlinden).

But real work has substance. Whether you're picking up dope needles in a park so the next three-year old to fall on his ass won't get stuck and die well before his time. Or perhaps you're ordering inventory for a store and you have pride in the fact that you've done your job well, so that when the five year old girl comes in with her father on a Saturday, to buy her very first bike; a bike which she's been talking about for days and dreaming about for months - she won't be disappointed. Or, you work in a law firm and help in the incorporation of companies - companies which employ hundreds or thousands of people - companies which provide families with opportunities they may not otherwise have.

For years now this is what I've told people. It is quite possibly true that you may never see quantifiable evidence that what you do has meaning; you may never meet those whose lives you have affected - this is where blind faith comes in. It is inexplicably difficult to convince the sixteen year old cashier that, by being happy, friendly and genuinely interested in each and every customer that passes through her line, she has the power to turn an argument with a spouse four hours later into a pleasant family evening.

Pithy? Perhaps. But true none the less. I prefer to live in the real world where what I do really does have meaning and it won't be soon enough that I'm back there.

And it Begins Again.

2005-09-06T09:46:00.000-04:00

So school starts for another year.

This post was made automatically by Flickr when I sent a picture from my cell to my Flickr account. Yay for Moblogging!

pic14.jpg
Originally uploaded by deltacow.

BTW...

2005-09-04T18:29:00.000-04:00

Who else that reads this blog regularly has a Flickr account? Let me know so I can add you to my contacts.

The Triumphant? Return.

2005-09-04T18:10:00.000-04:00

I'm back!

I wasn't really gone, but I was really busy. Now with the start of the new school season things will be a little more stable. For today however, two things, entirely related:

I caved, well, not so much caved as decided that I wanted to buy a new camera. I have been looking for the last year but could never bring myself to purchase. Well, it occurred to me that if I don't do it now, and I wait until I actually have the money to do it, I may never. So I did. And it's yummy. It's a Nikon D70S digital SLR. Besides my own exhaustive research on the landscape of similar camera fare, I credit Dooce and Jennifer and the wonderful photos both have published to help in my decision.

Second: I upgraded my Flickr account to a pro account which gives me unlimited storage and 2Gigs of upload per month. Expect Photos!

Ugh.

2005-07-21T00:47:00.000-04:00

It's almost 1 am. Here, at work, I sit waiting for the printer to complete its printout of a 3600 page report. Have you ever printed 3600 pages before? Even on this very expensive and quick-like-a-bunny printer of mine it has been going for over an hour and a half. Actually, I shouldn't call it my - or our - printer, you see, today is (was) changeover day. Ed has now sold the Mavis and Dundas Canadian Tire store and the 3600 page report is the inventory discrepancy that must be checked tomorrow.

In short, what that means is that our computer logs on-hand quantities for every one of the 48000 products that we carry. Today Western Inventory Service came in and counted all of the products in the store and the report lists the products that have a disagreement between what the computer thought we should have and what Western found.

3600 pages. I'm looking at the first 2300 of it now and it's well over a foot tall. :(

Oh well, I'm not one of the people that has to spend the next several days running around the store re-checking the majority of those discrepancies. You would have trouble paying me enough to do it -- it's the scut-work of inventory auditing.

Tomorrow, I'm splitting my day between Mississauga and Stoney Creek. Sometime on Friday or Saturday I will be back in Quebec.

You Can't Brush What's Not There.

2005-07-14T09:14:00.000-04:00

Back when I was in high school I began to lose my hair - no obvious (none of my relatives has a history of early hair loss) reason for it. Nick, my barber, told me one day that if I cut it really short, like under an inch, it would appear as if I had more total hair on my head. This revelation, as most optical illusions do, had some merit. Let me tell you a little bit more about Nick. He was this 50 year old Italian import with greasy hair and weighed-down with an abundance of gold jewellery, and short - 5'2" would have been a dream for him. He owned this little barber shop/hair styling place in a crappy mall and drove a corvette which he exchanged every two years for a new one.

Coincident with the short, greasy, Italian-guy stereotype, he always had a lot of women around -- seemed to be dating a new one every week. He only allowed women to work for him and think most of them were, ahem, 'professionals' before they were hair stylists. If Nick wasn't getting hummers in the backroom on a daily basis then I'm shocked. All that said, Nick was a great guy, he had great insight into the human condition and I learned a lot about people from him. Come to think of it, one of my sisters worked for Nick for a while. She got fired - perhaps she wasn't providing the requisite employer benefit...

Actually, I got fired from a job in that mall too. I used to work at the shoe repair shop for a guy name Dan. It was one of the best jobs I ever had because job satisfaction was easily obtained. Each day had it's own reward -- plus, you got to work with lots of really strong glue...for hours on end. I went home happy every day. Why did I get terminated? I had this tendency to stay out really late with friends and then, umm, forget to wake up in the morning to open the store. On day I woke up an hour after I was supposed to have opened the store, flew (FLEW) through my house and down to the mall only to discover that the shoe store across the aisle from us had called Dan and he was already in and working. He was mad, so mad I thought for sure he was going to hit me, and he was a really bit guy. Did I mention that shoe repair gives you gargantuan upper-body strength? No, well it does, and he'd been doing it for 30 years. The actual termination was somewhat anticlimactic based on that original fear.

Three months later I started with Canadian Tire, as a cashier, as the only male cashier my store employed (and, come to think of it, I have never seen or hired a male cashier in any of my 4 stores since). It occurred to me last week that I have been with Canadian Tire for 14 years now. 14 years.

I still stop in to see Dan at the shoe repair shop everytime I'm in Whitby. You see, I'm quite thankful to him for firing me. If he hadn't I may never have made a connection with Canadian Tire. I make no bones about the fact that he terminated me illegally - at least by Ontario's standards. I was too young at the time to really know otherwise, but he didn't have grounds. I have however, over the years, make sure he knows all of the successes that I've had with Canadian Tire over the years. You know, managing large 20 million dollar stores and such. There's a certain satisfaction in that.

Anyway, 15 years ago Nick told me that if I cut my hair to shorter than an inch all around, I wouldn't look as if I'd lost so much. I don't actually know about the truth of that, but I'll tell you, it leads to 'maintenance free hair'. Yesterday it all got lopped off. You can't brush what's not there!

Racoon Update

2005-07-11T09:59:00.000-04:00

laying
Originally uploaded by deltacow.

Up until last Monday I've had just two regular racoons that visit my house almost nightly. The first one I call Stumpy because he's, well, stumpy. He has almost no tail. The other one I simply call Mother for reasons which should be obvious.

Last Monday was the first day that she decided to bring her babies (all 4 of them) to the house with her. Before she had her babies she was very comfortable with me, she would take food from my hand with no problem -- after having them, she would come close but would never actually take from my hand, that is, until Sunday night. I think that was a comfort point she needed to reach in order to bring the babies with her the next night. (See a picture of one of the babies in my Flickr stream.)

She's an odd one really, I'm almost positive that she has had a lot of interaction with a dog. If not, I can't explain her behaviour at all. You see, when she's waiting for me to get her something, she lays down on the deck (which racoons do not normally do to begin with) and pants. Yes, pants. Just like a dog.

Just another strange animal spending time at my house.

Good Movie.

2005-07-08T10:52:00.000-04:00

I watch Hotel Rwanda yesterday, in part because my aunt recommended it, then Oprah recommended it, but mostly because I was planning on renting it anyway.

It's worth seeing. Really.

In 1994 (the time during which the events in the movie were unfolding) I was 20 years old - yet somehow I have no memory of hearing about the killing.

I can honestly say that I've never been so moved to try to do something to assist the people of the countries that are still involved in this genocidal state. But what can we, here, do? I refuse to provide money to organizations that purport to help in the afflicted areas, my reasons being two-fold. First, I don't really have money to spare at this point, and second, I have very little faith that the majority of the donated monies actually makes it to the people who need it.

In the last few years, 4 million people have been killed in the Congo and Sudan as a result of the same genocide that killed the one million Rwandans in 1994. Why haven't I heard about it? Why aren't there daily news stories? Why doesn't the UN go in and stop it?

Better than that (and right up my alley in the vein of "U.S. -- World Police") why don't the Americans send a fighting force in there to stop it? Oh, wait, because the Congo doesn't export any oil. That's really sad.

Did You Ever Wonder?

2005-07-07T09:07:00.000-04:00

Back when I was in high school (eek, some 15 years ago - this may have happened earlier as well, but I certainly have killed too many brain cells to remember) I remember looking around at 'the group' and wondering which of us would become a public face. I mean, I went to a large high school (almost 3000 students) so odds were that someone would end up doing something in which people would recognize them.

Also, when I was in grade 7, I made a video with a group of students for a school project. I remember it because I remember all of my videos - having a father who worked in post production meant that when we wanted to do a video in school we got it professionally edited on the same equipment that was editing some of the top television shows and movies of the time. Anyway, the video we did was a newscast about our school. It was anchored by a friend of mine named Nelly Gonzalez.

So I was watching TV the other night - a Winnipeg Global station - and who should come on? None other than Nelly doing a news update. It turns out that she is the nighttime anchor. It's nice to see the progress that people from my graduating class have made.

Other Bishops (CSC) News.

2005-07-06T19:59:00.000-04:00

(Informing my far off brethren of the state of our school!)

Dimitri has moved offices! I must say, I find more than a little satisfaction that he has now occupied Kent Maharaj's old office. There is talk that Nelly will also move, to Sandra's old office, just across the hall. In that case, the plan would be that the southern wing of 1st floor Johnson would become the computer science wing and attempts would be made to hold most of our classes there and to move the linux lab to that side of the building.

(In Bishops IT related news) Rumour mill has it that not one of the people working in ITS (not one!) has a valid certification in anything. Doesn't that sound like a wonderful plan to set up an IT department? Very little official training and no official qualifications. It's not that I blame the staff here, most of them seem quite nice, rather I blame the former management and a university administration that would set it up this way.

Oh well, I hear that the new manager (who is only an interim appointment currently) is planning on making changes -- I'm at least slightly optimistic.

All Linux Users...

2005-07-06T18:41:00.000-04:00

luminocity1
Originally uploaded by deltacow.

Everyone has to try this. No, really, I mean right now. Within an hour I was able to get a working luminocity window that would (stably!) run most apps, taking full advantage of my Radeon's rendering performance.

Go here to try it out for yourself.

Notes...A Little Catch-up

2005-07-05T20:26:00.000-04:00

Okay, so it has been way too long since my last post. I want to return to a more predictable, er, regular blogging pattern, but my last blog software was just pissing me off too much -- too many spam comments to deal with (almost 50 a day), can't seem to set it the way I want it (without coding it myself). Blogspot is just easier to deal with.
A few updates about my life from the last month:

I went to see Cirque du Soleil's performance of Corteo in Old Montreal a few weeks ago -- it was my first time to see one of their performances, and it was terrific. I highly recommend it for a good afternoon/evening out if it happens to come to your town.

When we last left the story of J9, it was a little bit up in the air as to whether we were going to have access to that lab by the beginning of the next school year. It turns out we will. There is currently no risk we will lose that lab during the next school year.

Bishops Computer Science is confirmed to be offering a grad program to offer Master's degrees in both image processing/computer graphics and theory of computation. My research this summer and my involvement with the image processing lab during the final year of my B.Sc. next year will both begin to count towards a Masters degree.

More later... (not in a month!)

New. Blog. - First. Post.

2005-07-05T18:22:00.000-04:00

This is a test of the emergency blogging system. Had this been a real blog emergency your screen would immediately have been filled with mostly naked animals acting out the entire story of 1984 by George Orwell. When played backwards and upside-down, these animals would remind you mostly of mormons reading the bible while wearing latex fetish wear.