Little Bald Men

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.

:(

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!

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

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?

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!

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

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.

(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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Thank You!

Better.

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.

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.

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.