Category: Misc

I like The Onion, but they recently underwent a slight site redesign and now things are a bit…spread out. For example, the main stories are split into two pages now, which I didn’t realize at first until I scrolled down a bit after thinking that one of them seemed a bit short. The motive here is fairly obvious: get more separate page views in order to get more advertisements in, or entice people into premium subscriptions. Fair enough, we’re reading it for free after all so we don’t really have much room to complain.

When they go so far as to put each individual single-paragraph News In Brief blurb on a separate slow-loading page though… Well, I still don’t have much room to complain. But it’s still annoying.

Once again it is time to celebrate our country’s, uh, liberation from polar bears. Or something. Which I did by playing video games all day. Whoo.

(Seems like holidays are the only chance I even get anymore to do what used to be a daily ritual…)

You’d think getting something shipped to you would be easy, but noooo, I just have to be super-picky…

I don’t really like using the commercial shipping companies like FedEx, UPS, etc., especially for packages coming from the States. Their airmail rates are fairly high, and I don’t usually care too much about it arriving quickly. The ground rates are better, but then there’s extra paperwork involved; customs charges wind up being handled through a separate broker for some reason. In any case, the customs charges themselves are annoying, and there’s often an additional customs brokerage charge on top of the actual duty itself. UPS is particularly bad — the last time I received something from them, there was a flat $25 brokerage fee in addition to the duty percentage *and* the initial shipping charge paid to the company that sent it.

Delivering it to the right place can also be tricky. If I get it sent to my home, they’ll almost certainly never actually catch me at home, so they wind up holding it and making vehicle-less me go down to their way-out-of-the-way holding centres to pick it up. Maybe if I’m lucky that day they’ll let it be redirected to the office, or I could have it delivered there in the first place, but then there’s office paperwork added in. And sometimes they won’t allow it, insisting that it can only be sent to the credit card’s billing address.

I would actually prefer that they just send it through regular post office mail, since then I can pick it up at the nearby neighbourhood branch, the customs brokerage fee is only $5 (and often waived completely), and the speed isn’t *that* bad. Unfortunately a lot of places don’t give you that option. The major one that does is Amazon, but now there are whole categories of things that they won’t even ship to Canada (e.g., electronics).

Ah well, time to just deal with the paperwork, I guess…

Gotta love it when you’re trapped in line behind someone making horribly complex lottery purchases. You can see the next line over moving rapidly, but you stay where you are because hey, this guy’s got to be finished any moment now, right?

And then I get stuck in the elevator for a few minutes on the way up to the office after it refuses to move after reaching the 8th floor.

Oh yeah, this is going to be a really nice day…

It’s well known that companies play tricks with their numbers to make it seem like you’re getting a better deal than you really are, but the Net can reveal just how blatant it is…

Amazon.com’s price for the iGP-100: $211.95
Amazon’s original list price: $249.99
Your alleged BIG SAVINGS: $38.04
iRiver’s own MSRP for the device: $199.99
What you’re actually paying: $11.96 more

Sadly enough, I’d probably still wind up going with Amazon for the better reliability and free shipping…

Now this would definitely turn some heads:
Commuter Cars

It’s an interesting enough idea and design, but not really a full replacement yet. It suffers from the same thing as the rest of the pure electric cars: a lack of range, and that’s especially a killer up here in Canada, where the major population centers are farther apart. It wouldn’t be good enough for city-to-city travel, and really who wants to buy two separate cars or always have to rely on buses, trains, or planes?

It’s pretty much the exact opposite of what I need, but I’m sure there are some markets it could do well in. I certainly hear enough complaints about commuting from people I know in places like California…

The spring cleaning frenzy continues. I think my bedroom is now the least cluttered it’s been in at least five or six years. No more boxes on the floor, clothes on the boxes, piles of papers and junk on the desk, etc.

An essential part of this process has been throwing stuff out. A large part of the reason it gets so cluttered in the first place is that I run out of room to put things, so they get dumped on the floor or desk ‘temporarily’, to be sorted later on. And things get dumped on top of them. And then they get hidden by a blanket tossed off to the side. And so on… After throwing a lot of old junk out, I finally have some more room in which to put everything.

There’s one thing that I’ve been reluctant to throw out so far though, and that’s the books. My collection might not be that large compared to some people’s, but it’s still a fair amount of space. There’s a fairly wide variety, too: textbooks, technical manuals, paperbacks, comics, game manuals, reference guides, tutorials… I don’t really want to let *any* of them go. Throwing out a book almost seems sacrilegious somehow, as though I’m devaluing the very information contained therein.

Do I really need all of those books? Well, maybe… The textbooks for courses long since passed? I’ve already thrown out my own notes for those classes, but the books are somehow different. On occasion I actually have gone running back to them to check on some bit of information I vaguely remembered, so they are still occasionally useful. How about the paperbacks and comics? I do sometimes like to reread my favourites. Game manuals? Not really, but they take up the least space. Some of the computer books are fairly recent and still relevant, and I refer to them often. Others though, aren’t quite so up-to-date. Do I really need “The MC68000 Reference Guide” anymore? Almost certainly not.

In the end though, I’m really just too lazy to sort through them for the few I might actually get rid of and dispose of them properly, so for now I’ll just keep building my own little library here. I just need to get more bookshelves so I’m not forced to keep stuffing them in closets, in drawers, on top of desks, etc…

I don’t think I’m going to be able to wear my iron ring much longer. Three or four times now in the last week it’s just slid right off while I was in the middle of doing something, and it’s only a matter of time before it falls into the garbage/toilet/drain/etc.

It’s questionable whether I even really have the right to continue wearing it, as I haven’t gone for the proper P.Eng. title yet. Software work doesn’t require it, and I’d be hard-pressed to justify my recent work as ‘engineering’ anyway. Still, I did take the Oath, and it still serves as a reminder of that regardless of what little pieces of paper I have…

Yesterday’s (belated) lesson:
Continue reading “Most Alumni Have The Opposite Problem…”

It never fails. Every year I swear I’m going to do my taxes early, to get it out of the way, and every year I’m sitting at my desk a day or two before the deadline, frantically calculating away…

At least I’m getting a fairly big chunk back this year. Of course that’s only because they freaked out and charged me huge instalment payments due to ‘other income’ whose tax had not been withheld in the first place… Fortunately that was the last year I’ll have to declare that ‘other income’ (yearly instalments of a payout from the sale of our company), so next year’s taxes should be simpler again.

Now I just have to remember to get my RRSP payments in on time…

News of the day:

A recent discussion on Slashdot has revealed some information that I’d been meaning to research for a while now: CD-R/RW media reliability. It’s apparently mostly dependent on three factors: dye lifetime, the reflective metal, and proper adhesion.

The best dye is phthalocyanine, with cyanine in second place and metal azo as the worst. For the metal layer, gold is best due to a higher reflectivity (closer to pressed CDs, for better compatibility in players) and resistance to corrosion, with silver in second place. And adhesion is simply how well it’s glued together, with no leaks or weak spots, and just varies from brand to brand.

So, for the absolute best reliability, you want phthalocyanine/gold discs. They can be a bit more expensive though ($1 USD per disc is what I’ve seen quoted). What I might wind up doing is dividing my files into three categories: essential, important files, which will be archived on the phthalocyanine/gold discs; the common, non-essential files, for which phthalocyanine/silver or cyanine/silver are good enough; and the ‘whatever’ files, things like videos and music burned merely for convenience, where any el-cheapo brand will do.

(Though I do still plan to move to DVDs, I’ll probably still archive some stuff on CDs just for extra reliability and redundancy.)

Nothing really interesting to say at the moment, so play with this instead:

The most recent pictures posted to LiveJournal entries. (occasionally NSFW)

I don’t know whether it’s the NyQuil or the cold, but the last couple days my dreams have been a bit more vivid and weird than normal. As usual I can’t remember most of them, but I do recall a period in which I thought that if I moved the wrong direction I would destroy my iBook. Later on, I kept thinking that I had been outbid on a couple auctions and could see them on the screen, but couldn’t get to them to rebid and they were about to close…

I’m such a geek…

Ah, the lovely prairie spring weather. Yesterday it was 24C, today it’s snowing…

Upon arriving back at my mother’s house, I have in the past been welcomed by a dog. I have been overrun by two dogs. And now I have been completely mobbed by three dogs at once: Coco, my brother’s; Shyla, his girlfriend’s; and Buka, her family’s.

They’re nice enough dogs, but damn they are a handful to take care of. It’s nearly impossible to sit down and do *anything* without constant interruptions from one of them looking to play or trying to mooch food or just wanting to be nosy…

In stark contrast to my electronic-less Christmas, this upcoming trip will be the most gadget-packed I’ll have ever had. I’ll be taking along:

– CD player
– Gameboy Advance
– digital camera
– PocketPC PDA
– iBook
– RSA key device
– zillions of cables, AC adapters, and batteries

And oh yeah, some clothes and stuff too…

Do I really need to drag so much stuff around with me? The answer is…well of course I do, what kind of stupid question is that? :-P We’ve all got to have our toys. In fact, I need *more* toys! I still don’t have a real MP3 player or even a cell phone…

Now I just hope I don’t break my arms dragging them all around.

I wonder if cashiers hate it when I pay for something that’s only 2-3 bucks with a twenty. After all it depletes their stock of tens and fives and leaves them with something that they’re unlikely to get rid of since people rarely use fifties. But sometimes that’s all I’ve got since that’s all the ATMs give you now. But maybe I should be using more of my piles of change to pay. Do they like it or hate it when I pay with change? But then, uh…*thinks*…

I like cheese.

Gotta love it when the water lines to your apartment get turned off for maintenance without warning. Maintenance in general is rather poorly handled in this building, despite regulations they have to follow, but I can’t complain too loudly — they could probably nail me with a dozen infractions in return. :-P

Saw Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World in the theatre last night, and was fairly impressed. I can’t speak as to its actual historical authenticity, but it certainly *felt* realistic.

Although it works in principle, pants make for a poor mousepad replacement.