Category: my ramblings

Adobe Acrobat Reader can open Adobe Illustrator files!

Finally, this week the weather is starting to break into the double-digits, and it’s finally looking like spring in Toronto. Birds are singing and flocking to our backyard feeders, the ground is starting to defrost and soon I’ll be planting the vegetable garden.

Spring also means spring cleaning. The car got a thorough cleaning over the weekend. I love cleaning the car.

Why do they make WordPress so hard to upgrade AGH. I hadn’t had enough coffee this morning and ended up screwing up my WordPress install. FUDGE. Now I have a handful of plugins to reinstall, have to re-customize my theme, bloody hell!

None of the links from the CBC RSS feeds are working today… but, if you delete the ‘?ref=rss’ from the end of the URL, it works.

Also, I tried to leave them a note about this, but all I get back is:

    An error occurred while processing your request.

    Reference #102.286fed8.1141677048.1c993

Seriously, folks, can you get this fixed? It’s been literally ALL DAY.

This post on the Newtontalk mailing list written by Richard S. Sternberg is an excellent summary of consumer protection recourse, including a good description of the BBB and what they do. Jon, you might be interested in this…

Of course, in Ontario we have some of the better consumer protection laws in North America.

Picked up a Linksys WRT54G v5 router last night. Best Buy had them for $79 with a $20 mail in rebate, and yesterday was the last day of the sale, so good timing. It was a helluva good deal.

Got it setup and now things are good. Read a lot of threads about people setting up QoS and decided to use MAC address priority to give the Vonage PAP2 box the highest priority. So far things are great! Doing some semi-heavy downloading and had a few phone calls that were 100% clear, no noticable latency, no fuzz, no echo, no dropped packets!

In this news story about some diplomatic retribution between the US and Venezuela, Donald Rumsfeld says some things that make my jaw drop.

Asked during a National Press Club appearance about indications of a generally deteriorating relationship between Washington and parts of Latin America, Rumsfeld said he believes such a characterization “misses the mark.”

“We saw dictatorships there. And then we saw most of those countries, with the exception of Cuba, for the most part move towards democracies,” he said. “We also saw corruption in that part of the world. And corruption is something that is corrosive of democracy.”

Umm… yeah, you might say they moved towards democracy because of the public actions (invasion of Grenada) and not-so-public actions (funding Central American rebel groups) of the US during the 1980s? Is Rumsfeld getting Alzheimers, or just more Republican selective memory?

The secretary acknowledged that “we’ve seen some populist leadership appealing to masses of people in those countries. And elections like Evo Morales in Bolivia take place that clearly are worrisome.”

“I mean, we’ve got Chavez in Venezuela with a lot of oil money,” Rumsfeld added. “He’s a person who was elected legally � just as Adolf Hitler was elected legally � and then consolidated power and now is, of course, working closely with Fidel Castro and Mr. Morales and others.”

NATIONS, TAKE NOTE: The US does not like it when you elect people who are popular. I mean, look at their president.

How – I say – How did I ever live without How’d They Vote? These awesome, amazing, wonderful people keep track of how MPs vote and what they say in the house! It’s as if CPAC had a searchable index. How else would I know that my current MP spoke and voted against the same-sex marriage act, and seems to be a shill lately for the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation?

So I ended up on the pre-release list for the Pepper 2.1 software. The new apps and features are there, and the pad is a whole lot more responsive in general.

But what I was really looking for were pre-build development libraries and include files, and I sure did get them. I compiled FCE Ultra, one of the premiere NES emulators, and also managed to build the Allegro library and then the FakeNES emulator without too much extra effort. They both run but a lot of frames are dropped. But still, I’m one step closer to my goal of using the Pepper as an awesome portable game system for emulation.

Click any of these thumbnails to see my screenshots of FakeNES running on Pepper: