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Quickies: A fun time to feel like a kid again ...
Tue, 31 May 2005

A long time ago in a suburb far far away, we were all younger and Star Wars (the original series, episodes 4 through 6) was taking over the medianet. There were the usual television and radio commercials, but also groovy lunchboxes, colouring books, the omninpresent action figures, buttons, piggy banks, comics, footwear, wallpaper, toilet shag covers... you name it. And it all made ol' George rich, so good for him :) Anyway, I find it really great to see all these new television commercials and products attacking every sense (sure, advertising is annoying, but this is at least old school) -- it takes me back and for a few instants each day makes me feel like I'm a little kid again. Read on for a bizarre little Darth Vader photo I've taken, and help me identify that this strange formation is...

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Gaming: Consoles killing gaming?
Fri, 27 May 2005

Random thoughts about the game industry: Historically, console generation lifespan has been a little longer than it seams to be for this current generation (though I'd have to check to substantiate this comment) and with consumer's getting grumpy and dev costs going up, can the industry support itself? Is the industry increasing costs to the point of hurting itself?

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Quote: Life is a Mop
Thu, 26 May 2005

I stole this quote from a posting on Slashdot a few hours ago; I will have to find the posting again so I can get the author's nick but for now I will leave it uncredited (sorry!).

Life is like a mop. Sometimes life gets full of dirt and crud and hairballs and things and you gotta clean it out. You gotta stick it in here and rinse it off and start all over again. And sometimes life sticks to the floor so much that a mop, a mop, it's not good enough. You gotta get down there with like a toothbrush, you know, and you gotta really scrub 'cause you gotta get it off. But if that doesn't work, you can't give up. You gotta stand right up. You gotta run to a window and say, "These floors are dirty as hell, and I'm not gonna take it any more!"

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Geekery: Need some disk space? Look no further...
Thu, 26 May 2005

Really, theres a point to this, and it might even be remotely useful to someone. No, really.

I've got this very old laptop (and computer years are somewhere about 5 times faster than dog years) that I absolutely adore and use for pretty much everything. Sure I'd really like to pick up a nice new Apple kit, but I'm the sort of fellow who drives a car until it absolutely falls into sub-atomic dust, and who uses a laptop until it burns a hole through its own display, ductapes a replacement display in and burns that one out too.

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Geekery: Podcasts and Mobile Media ..(or, What Is This Infernal Racket?)
Thu, 26 May 2005

I'm sure many of you are like me and have heard the term "podcast" but didn't really catch on to what they were until relatively recently. (Well, I knew what they were but didn't fiddle around until a few weeks ago. Like blogs, they just snuck up on me..) In a way, they're like an audio blog -- where a blog allows any old body to post articles or news to a site for others to read, a podcast allows anyone to post an audio clip. But like many things, it is more than just this simple fact (face it, people have been posting audio clips to the net and BBS's for decades) that adds intrigue -- podcasts have a simple yet relatively formalized distribution method, and have caught on, which makes them great. So, before going on, let me summarize bystealing a line from the all-new CBC Podcast page. (Note that since the CBC is on top of podcasts, either its a well established technology or CBC is really hip, and I think its more the latter.. podcasts have been around awhile, but not all that long.)

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Flora: The Phantom Grass
Tue, 24 May 2005

The sea is angry today my friends! The growth pattern of grass always seams to work towards self destruction so its amazing grass is anywhere in the world really (grow, grow, grow, cause too much shade, get burnt and dried out by sun, die, die, die.) Anyway, my little patch of office grass seams to have done well for the first part of the Victoria Day Weekend (a 3 day yearly weekend holiday we have in Canada, see link) and grown mightily .. but as the dry office air and long weekend without watering went on, the poor grass seams to have dried out and bent over, breaking the stems under their own weight, with the substrate as dry as a fine red wine.

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Recipe: Impossible Cheeseburger Pie
Fri, 20 May 2005

Sometimes I'm feeling a little peckish for something in particular, be it pasta or steak or pizza or just a fine sandwhich (the very best of which - like a Club House - will be called sammiches. I also suggest avoiding dishes that refer to themselves as 'gourmet' since that really just means pretend to like it when you really don't). But for me, once in awhile I get this urge to return to basics -- to fill up on a meal that harkens back to youth -- like mom used to make. And when you're a kid you don't go for fancy or complicated but simple things like peas and potatos which for me means Impossible Pie (or sometimes what I call Gray Stew, but thats for another article.) Recipe and terrible pictures below.

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Flora: Return of the Grass
Thu, 19 May 2005

(Originally posted merged with the LifeDrive article, I've decided to not keep OfficeGrass posts merged with unrelated posts. It makes finding old articles hard I'm sure, and probably annoys people interested in only one of the subjects..)

The ryegrass is going crazy here .. before its even thickened out (was there enough seed planted to thicken out?) it'll need some serious trimming. But I can't trim it until its tall enough to overcome my NASA space-man figurine or shape up nicely as a crop circle (great idea sn00p!) I found it interesting that one blade of grass seamed to be trapped underneath a nodule of dirt and as we all know.. nature is powerful, so the chunk of earth has been lifted straight up. Nice. See pic below :) All of this and its only day 7 .. one full week since the seeds were put into mud.

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Flora: The Grass Strikes Back
Tue, 17 May 2005

The silly grass experiment continues! Yesterday was the beginning of the week and when I showed up at the office some tiny blades of grass were showing up on the left (Ryegrass) side and so far nothing on the (Bluegrass) right. Today the ryegrass is really pulling together though I expect bluegrass in another week or so...

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Pictures Around Town
Mon, 16 May 2005

Formerly 'Pictures from Parks', I decided to make this posting something that percolates to the top each time I add to it so that over time it'll become a collection of pictures I found interesting or amusing. I hope they amuse you as well...

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Digital Freedom is Easily Gained..
Sun, 15 May 2005

Usually we remember the Bad Things that occur to us, and often forget the good things. Its human nature, and maybe we're built this way as a defence mechanism - if its bad, you should bloody well learn from it, and if its good maybe you can get it to happen again :) (Tell this to a 17 year old boy :P)

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Energy Levels...
Sat, 14 May 2005

I am seriously wiped out today. Maybe it was walking 8km or 10km after work last night or doing yard-work this morning, but I really think its more likely to be a result of working a minimum of 60 hours a week (and usually 70 hours in actuality) for 5 or 6 years. Years ago I was an insomniac and got used to managing huge stretches of time without a blink, and I've always been an energetic and cheery and inquisitive person - but these traits only lead to workaholism in me. That's cool - I've got lots to do :) Still, working hour after hour and doing my share of house-work to claw ahead of things does tire one out, and certainly puts a lot of pressure on my poor wife.

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Flora: Grass Force (Part I: A New Hope)
Thu, 12 May 2005

The Internet is a wonderous thing -- it lets us find out vitaly important things like How many bubbles are inside of Coke? (one of my favourite websites by the way), but it never really reveals which side of the force is more powerful. Darth is a bad-ass of course, able to strangle enemies and stir drinks from across the room, but ol' Luke can shoot wamp-rats from his speeder back home. Did I mention - when I say Force I mean Grass? Darth is Ryegrass on the left, and Luke is Bluegrass on the right? No? Well, its true and I have experimental proof so we can finally find out who is more powerful and on which side the grass is greener.

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Tech: Hacking your local pop machine..
Wed, 11 May 2005

As everyone knows, I'm pretty into coin operated machines... be they arcade cabinets, classic old jukeboxes, or old Coca-cola machines -- someday I will (wife permitting *g*) pick up one of the old Coke machines that had the vertical column of Coke bottles stacked on their sides behind a little thin glass door. They're expensive, but not too too hard to find. Harder to find is cola in a glass bottle however.. (actually no worries, my wife is very cool with my obscure big-toy hobbies, as long as I keep all my junk out of site *g*)

Anyway, 'hacking' is the honourable (or sometimes mischeavious) act of finding out more about something, while a good 'hack' is a something nifty that has been discovered or built. For instance, a good hack is to make a pinhole camera out of next to nothing, or make a simple transistor radio out of a single transistor. A magazine like Popular Mechanics will feature dozens of hacks in its pages. But here we have some people hacking pop machines of all things! Did you know thse things have a debug mode in them?!

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Cinema: Shaolin Soccer
Wed, 11 May 2005

Alllllllrighty-then! Soccer. Kung-fu. What can be better? The first Stephen Chow film I caught was Kung Fu Hustle a couple weeks back. The second was Shaolin Soccer just now when I should've been working away answering support email. Both of these are seriously rear-kicking martial-arts action-comedy films (though still with a certain satisfying spiritual undertone that even I can appreciate.) Compare to Ong Bak - a more traditional martial arts flick story-wise (and crazy fun action flick) for very difference experiences. All are must see entertainment for the sports fan action movie lover in all of us!

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Dining: Soaked at the Harbour 60 Restaurant
Wed, 11 May 2005

The Harbour 60 restaurant is one of Toronto's premier steakhouses and I recently had the good fortune to pop by for an evening of dining and conversation with friends. While a wonderfully historic building, I left fealing a little lacking... so I rate her a majestic 3 stars out of 4.

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Rant: Escape from New York 2005
Wed, 11 May 2005

I know - I know - who am I as a Canadian to comment on American politics? This is just the usual reading-too-many-news-sites-and-getting-sucked-in silliness, but what the heck..

Well, they're sure fun to watch sometimes (did you notice I put the politics category under Entertainment here?), and the US is our greatest ally and largest trading partner, so we really should be supportive or at least paying attention. Further still, the Americans are really a lot like us .. essentially the same background with shared borders (and vacation spots.. how many of us have driven to the US for shopping or to hit up Vegas?) ... just with a government that has a backbone (and is a trifle over-eagre to get into a fight.) The US is Canada's Big Brother in every sense of the word.

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Politics: Government Scandle 2005 (will it be out done by Scandle 2006?)
Wed, 11 May 2005

I'm sure the news media is making more of this whole Liberal scandle than the population at large is, but its certainly too alarming a series of events to just 'let go' despite our apathy. Our Canadian approach to things is generally to be nice to something, maybe poke it with a stick a few times and then leave it be - but when our government is very likely illegally throwing our very hard come by tax bullion to the dogs, we should forcibly remove them if they don't have the honour to step down.

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Music: Negativland, Toronto 2005
Wed, 11 May 2005

Negativland's members are often described as pirates of the airwaves (though I would dub them more as folksingers of the era) due to their extensive use of 'found art' including tape loops from radio, television, theatre and .. peoples cell phone conversations - nothing is sacred in their travels to challenge audiences.

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Gaming: Comparing Shooters - Old School to New School
Wed, 11 May 2005

Back in the day I liked shooters. Vertical shooters. None of this 3d stuff where you got killed from behind by cowards... we're talking games for Real Men where you get killed by a full-screen alien with lasers for eyes and missiles coming from every orif^H^H^H^Hcrevace.

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Pictures From Parks
Wed, 11 May 2005

I enjoy a good brisk walk on a cool day. Getting around on a bicycle is very satisfying because you can get somewhere useful fast, and getting around on a motorcycle (been years!) is fun because you get wind in your hair and get to park in bizarre places. But walking means you generally can't get anywhere fast but you do get the wind in your hair, so its nice to just trundle about and see what you see. Heck, burning a few calories and working the heart are good for us coder folks. (Try going up and down 11 flights of stairs every day, that'll get you going.) Anyway, sometimes I walk through this dog-park [pic]

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A Palm OS Simulator for Pocket PC?
Wed, 11 May 2005

Well how about that! We've all known about various ports of CoPilot ("POSE") to WinCE and Pocket PC but they've always been too slow or too goofy to use, but here we have StyleTap putting something a little more polished together. Sure, it runs apps as if they were on a low res old school Palm III or the like and then scales them up - but they run not half bad.

Shadow Plan, my main application, seams to run pretty well there, and once you find the data files in Pocket PC memory in /Program Files/StyleTap/db it makes you wonder if Shadow Desktop can edit them... nice!.

Edit: Actually, on a VGA device in unscaled mode, it uses a high res device display..

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Tales of a software developer
Wed, 11 May 2005

This is just a test of your local neighbourhood blog.

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