Category: my ramblings

Where has all the time gone? I don’t know, but let’s not answer that question right now. Let’s try to write and submit this whole entry before I accidentally close Mozilla and lose half of it. Good idea. So what do I have to talk about?

• First, a confession. When I first heard that Kylie Minogue was “back” (at least in Canada, she never really lost her popularity outside of North America), I laughed, immediately classified her as trash, and went to listen to something else. But the last few weeks, I started listening to it, and I like it. Most of the songs have a decidedly house feel, and I enjoy house music a lot. But I’m still a little ashamed.
• In other music news, this morning I finally gave Boards of Canada a good listen. They’re awesome. So awesome. Go and get it.
• NewtonTalk’s outage problems are gone. We hired some geeks to protect the wiring cabinet from Verizon techs. In return, they get to beat up Verizon techs. Win-win 🙂
• Tomorrow I’m leaving for a vacation! I’m going (with my Mom) for about three weeks to visit my grandparents and other relatives in Subotica (pronounced SOO-bo-TEE-tica, not SUB-ot-i-ka). My priorities will include relaxing, taking nice walks to the park, taking lots of photographs, eating some good food, and doing a minimum of computing and e-mail reading.
• When I get back, I’ll have a ton of things to do as usual. Some parts of this site need major work. I’m going to totally re-do the photos section. The hardware list needs updating. Maybe some design tweaks are in order too. I’ve got new software that isn’t on the Software part yet. UNNA badly needs an update. Sandy is going to miss me a lot while I’m away (and I’ll miss her a lot too), so we’ll have to do some fun outings – maybe do the tourist-y things in Toronto or something? I haven’t done that in a while.
• Yesterday I filmed presentations all day at an internal function here at work. When I get back, I’ll have to capture seven hours of footage (thank dog for FireWire and miniDV), do some (hopefully simple) editing, and master some VCDs.
• Also, when I get back Calum and I are going to hack my old AST Ascentia J30 into a digital picture frame, connected to a wireless network. Calum’s done this twice recently, and I hope to duplicate his results on old PowerBooks with my crappy P100. I can’t wait. More details will of course be here, and we might even roll a page together about doing this kind of thing.

I’ve also been thinking on writing a page on how to drive (at least on 400-series highways in Southern Ontario), cause there are many people who can’t. And I’d like to try and teach them before I beat them up.

NTLK is not down – that’s old news. More new news to come soon.

Insert threatening remarks to Verizon employees here.

This was written yesterday by me on the bus ride home.

Apparently I’m not the only person who thinks that most of the Toronto -> Guelph Greyhound drivers are morons. One guy waiting for the 3:30 with me today suggested applying electro-Shock therapy to some of them. Luckily today the driver of the 3:30 is the crazy fast driver I had at the beginning of the month (and never since). Chances are we’ll be there before 5.

One week until our big Symposium at work. I’m off the hook for grunt jobs during it, though: I get to help film the event. Speaking of filming, I also hare a brand-new camera to use: a Canon ZR40. It’s coming to Europe with my mom and I. It’s been so long since I shot anything, but I’d love to have the opportunity to work on a project. At my current and ongoing levels of commitment to everything else though…

The one thing that is certain in my life right now is Sandy. I’m finally at that turning point in life that I’ve been striving towards just a-out my entire life. It’s that time between schooling and, well, everything else. I’m really running my own life now. I’m fairly happy with the decisions I’ve made thus far. Sandy said something last week: The only reason you stay in a relationship with someone is because every morning you wake up and decide to stay with that person. Through good and not-so-good, I’ve been making that decision every day for over 18 months, and it’s been the best decision I could make.

Now pardon me while I administer some electro-shock therapy to the person In front of me. Boy am I glad I’ll be flying business class.

Final info from Bill about the Newtontalk outage:

Folks, 

Just to clarify some things I've seen on the list and on chuma.org, 

The outage was no fault of our ISP (PINS).  It was actually caused by  
faulty wiring in the basement of my building.  The wiring is Verizon's  
property and responsibility (they're no better than when they were  
called NYNEX or Bell Atlantic). 

Just to add some karma points back to PINS, I would like to say that  
their service and attention to detail are excellent and that anyone  
looking for a quality ISP (for businesses, they don't provide  
residential dialup or DSL) should consider them. 

Victor, Please make sure your website reflects this, in case someone  
does a Google search re: PINS and gets the wrong idea. 

Thanks, 
Bill

Go there and bask in the glory of the Newton!

Yes, Newtontalk is still down. I haven’t gotten a copy of the subscriber list yet. If you’re very Newtontalk-deprived, you can always check out the old NewtonTalk2 backup list on Yahoo! Groups, which has sprung to life again.

Here’s the 411:

• Sometime this weekend, PINS.net, the provider to Guns Media, who host the Newtontalk.net server, messed something up, causing Guns’ T1 connection to go down.
• This was soon noticed by me and other Guns people, who wondered what was going on.
• After some running around and trans-atlantic phone calls, we found out from Bill of Guns Media that PINS had messed something up, and that they were aware of it now and were working on it.
• However, there’s still no ETA as to when things will be back up.

So, Newtontalk is not going anywhere, things will be back up, and in the future I will keep an offsite backup of the subscriber list to let everyone know.

Also, I believe today is the one year anniversary of the list moving to its current digs, and we’ve only had one major unscheduled outage!

Both of the above sites are down for now. I am working on getting a copy of the Newtontalk subscriber list so I can send a general announcement.
More to come.

I’m getting a little tired of this layout. It doesn’t lend itself to rapid updates, which is maybe why I don’t do them.

Glenn Gould and discarded newspapers, outside the CBC Broadcast Centre, Toronto. Do any American tourists know what this is? Probably not, ’cause they’re too busy riding in rickshaws that have ads like “HOT ‘OIL’ BODY MASSAGE”. Yeah. ‘OIL’.