chuma.org

Not smoking, thank goodness, but caffeine. My three coffee per day average is not a good thing. I blame the rich, smooth flavour of the free Starbucks at work though, not my own weak will to resist it. Anyways. Instead of having a coffee-coffee-coffee day I’m going to start having a coffee-coffee-green tea day. Green tea has about half the caffeine of a cup of coffee, so if I can ease myself onto green tea instead, I’ll be dependent on less caffeine and I won’t be making my teeth turn brown. I did do this once, for about five months, and then I came back to work at Maptuit again and the free coffee was there… so good… mmm… slurp

Confessions of a Car Salesman – this does NOT make me want to buy a car.

I get tons of ideas. Mostly for software, web services, and the like. It’s kind of like I’m always thinking about how things can be improved, or what I want my computers to do and how to make it happen. The vast majority of these things never get done, because I forget them or I just don’t have the time to see them through. But I’m working on one such nugget that will be really cool by the time I’m done (which will be soon). Here’s how it works.

For a long time now, I’d wish that I had an inventory of my DVDs. I had actually started to enter all this data onto my Newton, but somewhere in the G’s I got really tired of it. Plus the program I was using, CardMEDIA, wasn’t really what I wanted. I know that all of the information about these movies is already out there: IMDB has it all, and you can even download most of their data for your own personal (not online!) use. Every DVD has a barcode, of course, but IMDB doesn’t list them (also you can’t download their DVD technical data, which sucks). Enterprising guy that I am, I managed to obtain from a poorly-designed website the list of 30,000 North American DVD releases: with barcodes, titles, studio, length, and rating. By cross-referencing the title with the IMDB data, I added director and plot summaries to my list, and I could add anything else that I wanted from IMDB. At this moment, I’m pretty damn happy with this.

The next step is to get this data on my Newton, so I can carry it around with me and build the list of things that I have. Once I load the data into a Newton database program (I’m using FilePad), I can use my InPath barcode scanner to scan my DVD barcodes and check off that I have the titles. Later, when I’m at the store looking at a $13.99 DVD deal, I can just filter out the titles that I have to make sure I won’t be buying something I already have. Etc, etc.

WSJ.com – For His Sick Kids, a Father Struggled to Develop a Cure: Heartbreaking story of a father who quit his job and started his own biotech company in order to find a cure for his children’s fatal disease.

This is Felix, our latest addition. I totally can’t remember if I’ve posted a photo of him before, so here it is. Felix is a bit of a special cat. He is a polydactyl cat, meaning that he has extra toes on his feed. In his case, he has two extra toes on his left front paw and one extra on all other feet. This inevitably leads to nicknames like “bigfoot” and “alottatoes”. He also has a tendency to hit first and ask questions later: when he encounters something new, he’ll sooner hit it than sniff it. This even goes for things which he may want to eat, which means he’s on the table every day at dinnertime trying to whack some beets off your plate.