February 2005

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I don’t care for the term

February 25, 2005 in Cars by matt | No comments

CBC News: Federal ‘feebate’ could pinch SUV buyers

If this is true I wholly support this measure. We need far fewer SUVs and big trucks and more fuel-efficient cars. See my post in the summer about the book High and Mighty if you need more clarification of my position on the issue.

This quotation completely misses the targeted vehicles:

“It’s penalizing the family; families here that drive minivans, go to hockey games, practices; people that hook on a little camper in the summertime and go for a family trip,” he said.

Minivans by and large are pretty fuel efficient. It’s the SUVs that are fuel-inefficient. This guy is trying to turn it into an attack on families as opposed to the vehicles they drive. There are plenty of good-sized options for families that don’t include SUVs. The safety risk alone of an SUV makes it an option I’d never consider.

That said the term “feebate” doesn’t really roll off the tongue. I’m not even sure what it means – fee rebate?

A Scanner Darkly

February 25, 2005 in Movies by matt | 1 comment

Yahoo! Movies – A Scanner Darkly

I don’t care what people say about the cast, this trailer looks very neat (full IMDB info on A Scanner Darkly). Also as an avid fan of Linklater’s work (Waking Life is one of my favourite films) I can’t wait to see the film in full when it comes out September 16th. I love a good Philip K. Dick novel turned movie!

Linklater’s remake of The Bad News Bears? Well I’m not sure how well that will fly. The original was a pretty saucy film.

Micropatronage

February 25, 2005 in Blog Discussions and Money by matt | No comments

I am a kottke.org micropatron

In reference to this previous post.

This is meant in the classical music, appreciation for art’s sake kind of way. The political connotation is far less pleasant and I like to think that this is a good cause.

del.icio.us/chang8ling

February 25, 2005 in Firefox and Links by matt | No comments

del.icio.us/chang8ling

I’ve been posting a lot of links recently to my del.icio.us account (it’s a very hard-to-type URL). I have the Foxylicious extension installed in Mozilla which makes it easy to have all of my bookmarks in the browser but I’ve been using the experimental “post to del.icio.us” bookmarklet. I like how it recommends tags for me to use based on my past tags and also the most popular tags. If you want to see what I’m linking to you (though I fail to see why you’d want to do so) you can either view my del.icio.us page or subscribe to my feed or even add me to your own del.icio.us inbox (if you have an account).

I’m in a post-y mood today.

I think I get the reference now

February 25, 2005 in Commuting, Health and Toronto by matt | No comments

I was thinking more about The Catch today on the bus (I had to stand for most of the way and it helped pass the time).

It seems so obvious to me now but The Catch in the advertisements means “the catch” when you sign up for a new service or get a good deal on something. “What’s the catch?” you might say and this is what they’re referring to – that cellphone providers seem to have these amazing deals for service yet there’s always a catch that makes you pay more than you had thought you would be.

It makes sense I suppose but I wonder if Virgin Mobile will be able to completely avoid The Catch themselves. It’s pretty contagious.

Prepare to purchase a home

February 25, 2005 in Money and The Apartment by matt | No comments

Prepare to purchase a home : Lifehacker

I’ve been reading Lifehacker more recently (it’s affiliated with the same folks that bring you Engadget and Gizmodo). Today’s article is very U.S.-centric (and NYC-centric in particular) but I think the advice applies to anyone looking to buy a home.

A Love-Driven Trek

February 25, 2005 in Humour, Links and Weather by matt | No comments

CBC News: Man gets frostbite in love-driven trek

This is funny in a sad way. Would you hike across the desert without water? Then why would you think you could walk for at least 100 km in the winter in the midwest? Man what some people will do for love. Hopefully he recovers ok though it seems like he’ll lose some of his fingers due to the damage.

Update: They’ve changed the headline to “Cold hands, warm heart”. They also have a picture of the guy and his fingers look pretty bad.

More on the recycling levy

February 25, 2005 in The Apartment and Toronto by matt | No comments

Recycling levy not fair, landlord says

This landlord says that it’s not fair to charge the buildings (specifically their owners) a levy to help offset the cost of transporting the huge amount of garbage that the buildings produce (see yesterday’s post for more information). The quotation in the article is rather silly:

“We do our part getting our tenants to bring down their recycling. We bring it out to the curb. We follow all their rules,” he said.

Rodrigues says the new levy could cost his company more than $40,000 a year.

Well for one thing the rules can change and if Michigan decides to increase the cost of dumping our trash there (as they’re proposing right now) then the city needs to make sure that we’re only sending what is absolutely necessary in those garbage trucks. I think having the Green Bins in apartment buildings would be a nice start but you still have the logistical problem of moving those bins around and storing the massive amounts of waste until the trucks come and pick them up.

Second of all it’s not like the property management company needs to eat up the levy themselves. As was discussed in yesterday’s post they could pass it onto the apartment tenants lumped in with the rent increase that they can use each year. There’s no way that this would cost this guy $40,000 a year (which means he has over 2600 apartments under his control) because I think he would be smart enough to pass some of the cost (if not all of the cost) onto his tenants. Landlording (as it’s wont to be called) can be an extremely profitable business and if it means this guy (or any other property management enterprise) won’t see as big a rise in profits this year at the cost of reducing the amount of trash sent to the dump then I still support it; maybe I support it even stronger if I knew that landlords would complain about it.

We’ll see if this story goes anywhere. I doubt the landlords have much sympathy with the public but if they frame it that they’re punishing regular tenants then it might get some more protest.

Council looks at garbage fee for apartments

February 24, 2005 in The Apartment and Toronto by matt | No comments

Council looks at garbage fee for apartments

Even if it means that I’d potentially pay more in rent I think this is a good idea. I never realized just how much garbage apartment buildings in Toronto put out until we moved here. In Kitchener it was always at the back of the building but here we have garbage trucks pull into the driveway every day almost and clean out the garbage. Let me tell you – there’s a lot of it between the two buildings. I like to think that we recycle plenty but I’ve seen some of the garbage that other tenants throw out and it contains quite a bit of recylcable material. The only reason I know this is because the people on our floor seem to have an innate inability to actually push their garbage down the garbage chute. Now granted the chute’s door is a little stiff and you have to push it with a little bit of force (say, 10 Newtons) but it’s not a ridiculous amount. Often times I open the garbage chute room’s door and find either a) garbage bugs just sitting on the floor waiting for some magical person to put it where it’s supposed to go (and believe me, I’m not a magical person) or b) I open the chute door and find piles of bags that people didn’t want to push down.

That was an aside to the point in question – that people need to be encouraged to recycle. It would be nice if we could just put our “blue box” in the hallway and someone would come around to collect it but that’s far from practical. I can’t think of a better solution than having the massive blue bins in the main garbage area on the main floor. It’s rather inconvenient if you live on the 28th floor because it woudl be a hassle to go down and up just for recycling. It’s much easier just to throw everything down the chute and be done with it.

The Mapping of a Cat’s Brain

February 23, 2005 in Cats, Humour and Pictures by matt | No comments

Cat’s Brain

This is so funny and so true. I especially like the “obsession with imaginary insects” and “inexorable fear of vacuum cleaners”.

Also somewhat related is this post – “Women prefer cats to men“.

Cure the Catch

February 23, 2005 in Commuting, Health and Toronto by matt | No comments

Cure the Catch

I’ve seen ads for this site on the bus recently but they’re very ambiguous. They say things like “Over 11.5 million Canadians have the Catch and everyday you come in contact with someone who has it.” No other information besides that except for the URL above. It hasn’t made that much of an impression on me though each time I see the ad I want to visit the URL just to see what it is but I forget about it by the time I get to a computer. This morning I checked it out.

They have some kind of “Self-Examination” to “diagnose” you. It asks four questions:

  1. Have you noticed any unsightly irritations that won’t go away? (rarely/sometimes/always)

  2. Do you experience unusual discomfort every 3-4 weeks? (rarely/sometimes/always)

  3. Have you noticed any growths that increase at irregular rates? (rarely/sometimes/always)

  4. Have you ever felt paralyzed by a relationship? (rarely/sometimes/always)

If you can find the connection between these questions then you’re a smarter person than me. After you answer they give you a “diagnosis”. For example:

MILD CASE OF THE CATCH

Thanks for taking the Catch Self-Examination. Based on your responses, you appear to have a mild case of the Catch. While your suffering might be bearable now, it’s bound to get worse. Much worse. Fortunately for you, a cure for the Catch will be arriving soon. Enter your email below for access to play in our lab and to get a prescription of the cure as soon as it’s available. GET YOUR PRESCRIPTION! You must be 13 or over to give us your email address.

So – yeah. That’s kind of interesting. Looking at the whois information for the domain I see that it’s registered to an advertising company.

Domain curethecatch.ca

Registrant Name Lowe Roche Advertising Inc. Registrar Can Reg (Infinet Communications Group) Renewal Date 2005/07/20 Date approved 2004/07/20 Last changed 2005/02/08 Description

According to this discussion forum thread it’s a viral ad campaign for Virgin Mobile which is coming to Canada sometime this year.

Most people probably think “the Catch” is a synonym for “the Clap“. That’s not something I’d want my ad campaign to be associated with. A certain subset of my friends might think that “the Catch” reminds them of “the Clem”. That’s far worse than Gonorrhea let me tell you!

P-I-G of a weekend

February 22, 2005 in Humour, Links and Sports by matt | No comments

P-I-G of a weekend

I never have weekends this crazy and that’s a good thing.

The Warrior Knight

February 22, 2005 in Commuting and Toronto by matt | No comments

For many reasons I like to commute using public transit. Sure there’s the lack of mobility as a negative factor and you have to be willing to shrink your personal space circle (a problem I have at times) but the bus and/or subway is a fascinating place to people watch. That’s just not something you can do driving your car; you just don’t have the extended period of time looking at a bunch of people that you have on a bus (assume “and/or subway” tacked onto every reference to bus from here on in).

Anyway last Friday had another interesting character on the 34 – Eglinton bus heading home. Halfway to the subway station (where I transfer) this man got on the bus. He had short-cut hair that was gelled in a wavy pattern. He wore RayBan sunglasses that haven’t been popular since the mid-90’s. He had a short mustache that was curled in a nice curlicue on each side (waxed of course). He wore a heavy black jacket that looked like PVC. On the jacket he had a variety of buttons but the most prominent one was a huge Bombardier “button” that looked more like it was stolen from a Seadoo or a Lear Jet. He wore black jeans and black running shoes.

If that wasn’t strange-looking enough he had these “winter” gloves that were very long and had chainmail on them. I guess he was expecting to get lanced or something while travelling on the bus.

All-in-all one of the more amusing fellows I’ve seen on the bus.

Speaking of the office

February 22, 2005 in The Office and Toronto by matt | No comments

Either the city or the people who own the building I work in have gotten wise to the parking scam available on this street. There’s a parking-pass enabled (but not really) lot and then there was ample parking on the street. People parked there if they didn’t want to walk too far in the parking lot (which gets full quickly) or if they didn’t have a pass (like the people who are gym members). I’ve parked there many a time when I had the Accord because I didn’t have a parking pass for it.

Yesterday I was walking to the bus stop and noticed that there weren’t any cars parking on the other side of the street (where parking was previously allowed). Also there were parking meters all along the near side of the street. I guess the city wanted to cash in on this street for whatever reason though parking is free after 6 PM. I didn’t have a chance to look at what the hourly cost is. I’ll try and do that tonight on the way home.

Today’s spam of choice

February 22, 2005 in Career and Humour by matt | No comments

My Hotmail account gets a lot of spam and I’m pretty sure it’s because it’s just my name (last name first) @ hotmail.com. It wouldn’t be too difficult to come across that in the standard spambot script.

Today’s spam is interesting.

From : You Can Be A Cop

Sent : February 22, 2005 6:17:34 AM Subject : Homeland Security Is Everyone’s Job! Help Protect Our Country! Homeland security is creating more jobs… get educated and take advantage. Insert cheesy-looking picture here. 29% increase The U.S. Department of Labor predicted that by 2010 there will be more than a 29% increase in the demand for criminal justice professionals. Fake unsubscribe link. Surprisingly actual address. This advertisement was brought to you by Bonus Bonez. Visit the Bonus Bonez mailing list manager to unsubscribe.

I’m considering leaving this job because the potential of being a criminal justice professional with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security is just too great. And Bonus Bonez? How poor a name is that? That’s almost as bad as chortling on Joker’s boners. I think chortle is a word that should come back in fashion but that’s just an aside.

So goodbye Toronto, hello criminal justice professionalism!

A change of career - not mine

February 22, 2005 in Blog Discussions, Career, Life and Links by matt | No comments

Doing kottke.org as a full-time job (kottke.org)

Jason has decided to focus on kottke.org on a full-time basis. He’s looking for micropatrons to contribute whatever they can to enable him to do this. If I find some spare change I might consider contributing because Jason’s writing and posts are always entertaining (and his links are great too). It’ll be very interesting to see how this experiment unfolds. If it means more frequent posts then I’m all for it.

Blue Melting Substance

February 22, 2005 in The Office by matt | No comments

In the building where I work they use this strange blue substance to melt the snow and ice. That’s fine but I worry that the blue substance will stain my pants or anything else it touches because it looks rather permanent and has a “i dye you” quality to it. I suppose if it’s more environmentally-friendly than salt then it’s good for Mother Earth, bad for my pants.

Paris made me change my number

February 22, 2005 in Humour and Links by matt | No comments

Paris made me change my number

This is pretty funny. As someone said: “from meme to t-shirt in 24 hours”.

Province toughens fines for crosswalk offences

February 21, 2005 in Cars and Toronto by matt | No comments

CBC Toronto – Province toughens fines for crosswalk offences

I approve of this. Too often you have cars that crowd you when you’re trying to cross the street and I can’t imagine how frustrating it must be to work downtown and try to walk around during business hours (or during club hours for that matter). Fining may not be enough but it’s a start. Three demerit points can add up to a lot of headaches.

Plan B

February 21, 2005 in Commuting, Toronto and Weather by matt | No comments

In January there was a bad storm and after that I formulated a plan in case Marcy couldn’t drive me to the subway station. Technically I can take the TTC all the way from my house to work.

Today I put that plan into action. I call it Plan B. There was a significant amount of snow dropped on us last night and the roads were not too pleasant-looking when we got up this morning. We decided that Marcy would drive all the way to work and I would take the bus. Fortunately the bus stops right outside of our building and comes fairly often (every 10 or so minutes in the morning). I got on the bus heading south where I could hook up with the Bloor-Danforth subway line. The ride on the bus was a bit treacherous at times as the curb lane wasn’t plowed very well and the bus was sliding quite noticeably. But we got to the subway station in about 30 minutes which isn’t too bad considering the weather conditions.

The subway ride was fairly uneventful. It wasn’t even as busy as I was expecting. I got off at Pape Station and that’s where it became interesting. I went up the stairs and found approximately 200 people waiting for the Don Mills bus north (25D). There were some pseudo-lines set up to wait for the bus but when you have that many people at the same bus stop chaos tends to rule. I waited for about 5-10 minutes and then all of a sudden 6 Don Mills buses appeared. It was like watching clowns come out of a clown car at the turning lane. One more… and another… and another… and another! I got on one of these buses and vaguely knowing the route I guessed at how long it would take to get to the Science Center where my bus stop would be. I sat at the back row (the “cool kids” row). It was very packed – people standing from front to back. I was lucky to have a seat but knew that it would be a challenge to get out again once my stop came.

It seemed like the whole Don Mills route was backed up because at each stop we came to (and those that we blew by because we were too full) there were a lot of people, even at the small bus stops people were crowded waiting. The scarier part was when we were on Overlea. It was hardly plowed at all and we were sliding all over the place. Sometimes it felt like we wouldn’t be able to move out of the rut and considering how much the bus weighs that’s a scary feeling. We got onto Don Mills road and I made my way closer to the door. Fortunately there’s a school there so a lot of the kids who were on the bus got off. I saw one kid wearing a thin short-sleeved shirt and no jacket. That seemed the smartest thing to do today. Don Mills was very slow and I ended up getting out a stop early because a) I could get to where the shuttle meets me quicker than the bus was travelling and b) the two girls beside me were having an extremely inane conversation and it was driving me nuts.

So I got off and walked one block to the shuttle. The sidewalk wasn’t plowed at all and if you had a bad ankle this wasn’t some place you wanted to be walking. There was a lot of snow on the roads too and people were having a very hard time getting around. I’m glad I took the shuttle because the sidewalks in this subdivision are even worse than on Don Mills though the road itself wasn’t something I would want to drive on either.

Total travel time for Plan B? One hour and forty-five minutes. Not bad considering the distance I needed to travel to get here but probably not worth it as an everyday alternative. Although it may be more feasible with clear conditions. Perhaps I’ll try it someday when the weather is supposed to be nice. I would estimate that the return trip would take about an hour and a half but that’s just a guess.

Hunter S. Thompson dies

February 21, 2005 in Books, Humour and Movies by matt | No comments

Author Hunter S. Thompson dies

This wasn’t the good news I was hoping for when I came into work. I really enjoyed reading Thompson’s work and Fear and Loathing… is one of the more enjoyable movies I’ve seen. Thompson also wrote some really great articles for ESPN’s Page 2. His most recent one is about shotgun golf with Bill Murray. Appropriate perhaps. His wit and humour will be sorely missed.

Boing Boing: Cracking car keys and Exxon Mobil’s SpeedPass

February 18, 2005 in Cars, Links and Technology by matt | No comments

Boing Boing: Cracking car keys and Exxon Mobil’s SpeedPass

This isn’t good news. That’s one of the things that kept our car from being stolen back in December (I assume).

Right on time!

February 18, 2005 in Technology by matt | No comments

In my inbox this morning:

Hi there,

Thanks for signing up to be updated on the latest Gmail happenings. We hope it’s been worth the wait, because we’re excited to finally offer you an invitation to open a free Gmail account! Just click on this link to create your new account: — insert link here — Since last April, we’ve been working hard to create the best email service possible. It already comes with 1,000 megabytes of free storage, powerful Google search technology to find any message you want instantly, and a new way of organizing email that saves you time and helps you make sense of all the information in your inbox. And here are just some of the things that we’ve added in the last few months: – Free POP access: Take your messages with you. Download them, read them offline, access them using Outlook, your Blackberry or any other device that supports POP – Gmail Notifier: Get new mail notifications and see the messages and their senders without having to open a browser – Better contacts management: Import your contacts from Yahoo! Mail, Hotmail, Outlook, and others to Gmail in just a few clicks. Add phone numbers, notes and more. Even use search to keep better track of it all. We also wanted to thank you. For showing us your support and for being so patient. And to those who have already signed up for Gmail, thank you for giving it a try and for helping us make it better. Our users are what have made this product great. So whether you’re just signing up for your account or you’ve been with us since the beginning, keep letting us know how we can build you the best email service around. That’s it for now. We hope you like Gmail and will share it with your friends. We’ve got lots of cool new stuff planned and we can’t wait for you to see our work in your Gmail accounts! Stay tuned… Thanks, The Gmail Team

It’s too bad I already have a Gmail account. I got it last April. I guess the service is moving out of invitation-only beta to public beta.

New look

February 17, 2005 in Blog Discussions by matt | No comments

You may have noticed a fresh new look on this blog starting today. I decided to try out a new theme (not that Kubrick was getting old but I wanted to see what else was out there). This theme is called Benevolence and it’s by the talented designer Theron Parlin. I like it – the grass reminds me that spring is around the corner.

Soon I’m going to have to upgrade to the final release of Wordpress 1.5. I’ve been running the beta versions for quite a while but it would be nice to have the final release and that would wrap up any recent bug fixes.

Those griefers!

February 17, 2005 in Humour, Links and Technology by matt | No comments

A parent’s primer to computer slang [via]

A very funny attempt to de-mystify the magical language of “leetspeak” or “!337$p34k” as they spell it on the page.

One sentence struck me:

The first series is of particular concern, as their use could be an indicator that your teenager is involved in the theft of intellectual property, particularly licensed software.

The words are “warez”, “h4x” and “sploitz”. Of course seeing your teenager use these words would probably be an invasion of their privacy unless they speak like this in conversation with you. I doubt there are many tests or essays written at school that include “warez” as discussion material.

PubliCity

February 17, 2005 in Links, Pictures and Toronto by matt | No comments

PubliCity [via]

I want to go to this. It starts on March 16th and runs until April 23rd. I really enjoy Rannie’s photography so it’ll be interesting to see what he has on display and the other photographers I’m sure will capture the uniqueness of this fine city.

Too funny

February 17, 2005 in Cars, Humour, Links and Pictures by matt | No comments

I love the idea of this site [via]. There are a lot of people who I’d like to put these stickers on. Maybe I’m someone who would get such a sticker from someone else. You have to wonder if some of the pictures on the sticker site are real, particularly this one:

Parking

That seems pretty staged to me. The others seem like your average everyday horrible parking jobs.

Temporary Outage

February 17, 2005 in Blog Discussions by matt | No comments

Yesterday you may have noticed that the server was inaccessible (unless you were using theinflux.dyndns.org – this should always be up-to-date). I’m switching my Internet access at home from Bell Sympatico to Primus. Primus is a lot cheaper and although it was a hassle getting the modem deilvered I think it will be better in the long run. We’ll see once I actually start using their DSL service. I need to cancel my Bell service and then call and activate my Primus service. Hopefully I can get all of this done before my next bill comes in for Sympatico on the 20th.

So if you see this site down over the next few days you’ll know why that is.

IE7

February 15, 2005 in Firefox and Technology by matt | 1 comment

IE7

So we’re going to get an Internet Explorer version 7 this year (in beta). That should theoretically be good news but we’ll see what features it will support. I doubt they’re going to do any kind of tabbed browsing (which is what makes Firefox great) and their standards adherence is currently iffy at best so they have a long way to go to improve. That said it’s still the most popular browser on the planet – currently I get 70% of my hits from people using some version of IE.

If anything this proves that big companies can listen to its customers when there’s a need for software updates. Now Microsoft still has to prove that they really can listen and implement the features people are clamouring for.

Hooray for Kyoto

February 15, 2005 in CBC, Cultural Criticism, Economy and Links by matt | No comments

Achieving our Kyoto targets – a first step towards a greener Canada

I like the Kyoto Protocol. I think it’s a step in the right direction. I tell myself that me taking public transit every day is helping us meet the one-tonne challenge that Rick Mercer is pushing on tv. I watched an interesting discussion on CBC’s Sunday news show on Sunday (go figure) that featured the Minister of the Environment, Stephane Dion (naturally for the treaty) and a professor at a university in Virginia who was opposed to the reduction of carbon emissions. The professor said that the treaty was useless because it wouldn’t do anything to stop global warming. That’s an interesting argument considering how most of the scientific advisors in the US administration don’t even believe global warming due to man is occurring at all. I think for the U.S. it’s more of an economic issue than an environmental one. That’s a shame because something as big as Kyoto needs a lot of countries participating and meeting their goals for it to be successful. I guess we’ll just have to show them how it’s done.

Hints of spring

February 15, 2005 in Weather by matt | No comments

There have been days where I’ve felt hints of spring. Saturday was such a day – it was so bright and sunny. Today is such a day – the snow is melting and rain is in the forecast. I walked to the bank machine today without a coat. That wasn’t done on purpose – the bank machine in the building was inoperational as it is wont to do on occasion. It was bearable walking without a coat and fortunately it didn’t rain because that would have put me in a foul mood. I think those of us who prefer the warmer temperatures of spring and summer (throw in early fall for good measure) actively look for such signs of warming. Sure it’s a slow pace going from winter to spring especially here in Canada but nature assures me that it is on its way. I can’t wait for the warmer temperatures.

Of course to prove that winter is still around we’re supposed to get a bunch of snow tonight and tomorrow. That should make driving extra pleasant.

Carrying Flowers

February 15, 2005 in Commuting, Marriage, Movies and Toronto by matt | No comments

I carried flowers into work this morning.

As I mentioned previously we stayed in a hotel last night. The hot water in our building was being “improved” and so we decided to stay closer to our work. We stayed at the Radisson Toronto East Hotel. It was pretty nice though the sounds of the 401 were very noticeable from our room. We had a bit more time to get ready this morning and we actually had a more normal breakfast. That was nice.

I took the Victoria Park bus south and Marcy had a much shorter drive (I hope). Now the Victoria Park bus (#24) is one route away from the one I usually take (Don Mills #25). But let me tell you – there’s a world of difference between the people who take the two buses. The people on the bus this morning seemed very angry and surly and wouldn’t really accomodate you if you wanted to actually get off the bus. I had to practically force my way through this one guy who was standing right in front of the door. Fun times had by all I’m sure. I got to work at approximately the same time I usually do but it took far less time over all.

Anyway, so for Valentine’s Day I got a whole bunch of lovely things from Marcy (aka My Love). She got me a lovely card, some heavenly chocolates from Laura Secord, two tickets to Rain: The Beatles Experience in 10 days and some beautiful flowers. Since they wouldn’t last too long in the car all day until we got home tonight I took them with me to work.

I bet that most people who saw me carrying those flowers would think that I was giving them to someone else and not that I was the recipient of said flowers. I like my flowers – they brighten up my desk and remind me of Marcy during the day.

We had a lovely evening last night at the hotel. We went out to a pub for dinner and some really amazing wings. We were a little hesitant at first because on the first drive-by the pub was advertising Budweiser and Labatt’s Blue in the window. There aren’t many English/Irish pubs that will make those their featured window beers. We were pleasantly surprised though so we’ll be going back again for wings soon. We also watched Bridget Jones: Edge of Reason in the room which was pretty funny. The price point wasn’t too terrible – $12.64 including tax which is right in-between renting and going out to see a movie in the theatre. Seeing as it’s a fairly recent movie it’s a decent price.

So yes I carried flowers to work today and have them sitting proudly on my desk. I’ve even received some nice comments about them!

Returning to operational status

February 15, 2005 in Blog Discussions by matt | No comments

Well the good folks at the Debian project have fixed the problem I was discussing last week. It turns out it was a problem in the Apache 2 packages and now that they’ve been updated the problems I was seeing earlier have disappeared. Hooray for that. I have my aggregator back again!

The Giant

February 14, 2005 in Commuting by matt | No comments

I cringed when I got off of the subway and arrived at the bus platform at the Don Mills station. There stood The Giant. I have nothing personal against this man but I’ve shared a bus ride with him before. First of all you may have guessed by his name that he’s tall. He’s like 7 feet tall. He rides with his wife who gets off somewhere near York Mills. As a large man he tends to take up quite a bit of room and one day last month he was standing near where I was sitting and he had his shoulder bag on his shoulder (how chic). The problem was that it’s an extremely heavy bag (judging from how it looks). It’s filled with books or some such thing and every time the bus would stop this bag would come dangerously close to hitting my head. Eventually he seemed to realize what was happening and put his bag on the floor. He’s also one of those guys that inexplicably refuse to sit down in a seat and instead stand in front of an open seat. That behaviour baffles me. Why not make it easier for other people to sit down if you’re not going to use the seat? I’m sure it’s annoying when the bus is really crowded (as it is often likely to be). Fortunately I always get a seat in the morning and often in the afternoon.

I’ve been experimenting with a new route to the Wilson subway station. Initial runs last week seemed pretty promising but I’m going to try it tonight as a potential substitute for the 1-bus/3-subway ride that I was using before. 2-bus/1-subway seems intrinsically better. I guess we’ll see tonight.

Finding new housing

February 11, 2005 in Commuting, Moving, The Apartment and Toronto by matt | No comments

Marcy and I have started looking for a new place to live even though we likely won’t be able to move until early fall unless we’re able to break our lease. I spent some time looking at various sites this afternoon and decided that there are some very affordable places available in the areas we want to live. We might even be able to get a house to rent. Oh man that would be nice. I can dream about that day. Right now I think that the Toronto Craigslist has the best listings. Toronto Rentals and ViewIt aren’t bad either. I’ll have to keep my eyes open for any opportunities that strike our fancy as the year progresses. Anything will be better than our current place. The latest development – they’re shutting off the hot water in floors 1-14 from Monday at 9 AM until Tuesday at 5 PM. How great! I booked a hotel for us on Monday night (Valentine’s Day too – how good is their timing) that is closer to our work so we’ll see how much better it will be driving in on Tuesday.

PHP troubles

February 11, 2005 in Blog Discussions by matt | No comments

I’m having some PHP troubles on this machine today. I have the Debian packages for PHP and Apache2 installed and I think there’s a version conflict. PHP was held back and Apache 2 was upgraded and as a result a bunch of my PHP sites on this server aren’t working properly (for example my photo gallery). Hopefully the problem is resolved tomorrow when I upgrade again.

Ten whole cents

February 10, 2005 in Commuting by matt | 2 comments

The TTC is raising their fares effective March 1st. Twenty-five cents for cash fares (up to $2.50) and ten cents for tickets and tokens (to $2 per). So this means that my monthly transportation expenses go from approximately $76 to $80. This isn’t a huge jump and if it results in better service then I’m all for it.

MSN Hotmail trickery

February 9, 2005 in Technology by matt | No comments

I’ve had a Hotmail account for what seems like forever and I only discovered recently that it will add “@hotmail.com” for you if you don’t complete the entire email address. I’m not sure why I never noticed this but it is quite handy because typing in a whole email address like that can become cumbersome. I wonder how many other things I have yet to discover about websites I use frequently.

Accept my $20!

February 9, 2005 in Commuting and Money by matt | No comments

This morning I had some difficulties. I had one subway token left but I needed to purchase some more for the ride home. I got a $20 bill but three different token machines in the Leslie station wouldn’t accept my money no matter how I tried to flatten it out. I’m sure I was annoying to the other people waiting for rides or what not in the station (the machine makes a beep each time you put money in or it spits money out). I guess I’ll have to break the $20 and have enough for a $2.25 bus ride and then use the $10 to buy more tokens tomorrow. It’s a complicated procedure but it should work.

I can dream can’t I?

February 8, 2005 in Commuting by matt | 1 comment

I saw this in my list of feeds and dreamed of a day where I could take the subway virtually from home to work. An Eglinton line? That would be great for me. A Don Mills line? Ditto. We would really have a far more accessible city if this were ever to happen. It’s too bad that the TTC is scrapping any grand dreams of subway expansion and is instead focusing on dedicated streetcare lanes across the city. I wonder what the origin is of this map. You can click the picture for a larger version. If only subways weren’t so difficult and expensive to build we could have this subway system.

Future TTC

MSN Messenger has poor connectivity

February 8, 2005 in Technology by matt | No comments

I wish Jabber had more market penetration because this week MSN Messenger has had some serious connection issues. By that I mean there have been lengthy outages where I have no connection to their servers. It’s crazy that a big service like that can just go down. I hope there’s a good reason.

Happy Mardi Gras!

February 8, 2005 in Food by matt | No comments

So today is Fat Tuesday. Hooray! We’re having pancakes and sausages tonight for dinner. Mmm, sausages. I’m hungry already. We’ll make our apartment seem like Bourbon Street (watch those cameras today – it’ll be interesting).

Gilles Peterson - well really the BBC online player

February 7, 2005 in Music by matt | No comments

I haven’t listened to Gilles Peterson’s Worldwide radio show in a while. In fact my music listening at work has stumbled to an all-time low recently. I noticed though that the online player for BBC Radio 1 has vastly improved. It takes up a whole browser window instead of being an annoying popup. This looked pretty ridiculous in Firefox. The Javascript is way more functional and by that I mean it actually works. It’s fantastic!

Disabled!

February 7, 2005 in Firefox and Links by matt | No comments

I saw this on Boing Boing this morning and disabled the configuration setting in question (’network.enableIDN’) and it seems to have fixed the exploit. No more DNS hijacking for me!

The doctor’s place for me

February 7, 2005 in Health by matt | No comments

Today I need to see a doctor. My cough hasn’t gotten much better over the last week and I’m afraid that I might have some kind of infection. The worst coughing is at night and when I get up in the morning. It’s none too pleasant. Fortunately there’s a walk-in clinic at the grocery store just up the street from the office so I’ll be able to go there on lunch or shortly thereafter. I feel like I’m not gaining any ground on this cough and scared that I’m losing ground. This needs to be remedied soon – like today!

I lied

February 4, 2005 in Movies by matt | No comments

I have enough time to link to Mr. Cranky’s fantastic review of Alone in the Dark (already #10 in the bottom 100!). This is a movie that I hope to never ever see.

Busy day - no time for posts!

February 4, 2005 in Career and Technology by matt | No comments

It’s been a very busy day today. I successfully executed a large-scale test of my code which makes me happy. That makes for a lot less to worry about over the weekend. Hooray!

Oh how hard it will be

February 3, 2005 in Cats by matt | No comments

Via Accordion Guy I read about the fate of one English Setter dog of Ashley Bristowe and Chris Turner. They had to put their dog down after she attacked Chris. It’s a truly heartwrenching story.

Marcy and I have discussed how horrible it will be when our pets pass on. It will be so hard I know it and if for some reason we had to make the decision to put them down I know I’d be a mess. It’s really crazy how much a part of your life your pets can become. It’d feel so strange not having them there when we come home from a long day at work. Their running around and purring and cuddling is endearing and I know I’ll miss it.

Mr. Laplace

February 3, 2005 in Career, Commuting, Life and UW by matt | No comments

I was looking at some of the advertisements in the subway today. They have this ad campaign going for the TTC that praises people who use the service for being incredibly intelligent. For this advertisement they have a picture of some college professor standing in front of a very complex mathematical sequence involving integrals and strange-looking equations. The thing is that I know and understand what these equations are – there’s a Laplace transform in there and some other calculus operations. I was very good at doing these kinds of things in my courses at University.

I wonder how well I’d do if I had to take a qualification test on the things I learned for my degree. If I had to take it right now with no time for preparation I doubt I’d do that well. It kind of makes you wonder at the value of doing all of those exercises. I suppose if I ever had to apply those skills they would be lying there right under the surface. I do know that my day-to-day job doesn’t involve a whole lot of the engineering skills that I acquired during five years of schooling but the skills that I do use I use consistently and have more than proven their worth.

Who’s to say that I won’t use the majority of my university-acquired skills during the life of my career?

Zero 7 in unknown territory

February 2, 2005 in Music and Toronto by matt | No comments

Last night we were driving home from dinner (finally a good Winterlicious meal!) and the radio was tuned to CHFI, a “soft-rock” station here in Toronto. I was surprised to hear Zero 7’s “Home” come on. It was the last place I would have expected to hear them but yet it was played. I haven’t heard the song in a while so I was confused when I thought that I recognized it (the radio was down low). I had no idea that a station that I had dismissed so decisively was so “with it” and “hip”. I wonder if they’ll play the Thievery Corporation next. Or maybe the Gotan Project. One can hope!

Rings on the other hand

February 2, 2005 in Commuting and Marriage by matt | No comments

Today on the bus I saw a married couple. Hardly unusual I know but when I looked at their wedding bands, they were both on the right hand as opposed to the usual left hand. Is this really unusual or is this a practice that I just haven’t seen before?

Coffee management

February 2, 2005 in Food and Links by matt | No comments

This is an odd story [via]. I love his quotation though – “I don’t buy Taster’s Choice. I do beans.” I do beans too but I think I’d notice after all of the commercials and advertisements for Taster’s Choice that it was me on the label. I mean it’s not like it’s an unknown brand. I wonder if this guy was used as a model for other brands and he hasn’t clued into that fact yet. He could be owed millions more! Still, $15.6 million for one day’s work isn’t too bad.

Neat!

February 1, 2005 in Work by matt | No comments

The company I work for is in the Globe and Mail today – Globetechnology subsite! We’re in the “big” leagues now.

Testing trackbacks for Augie

February 1, 2005 in Blog Discussions by matt | No comments

Consider it done!

Real posts later hopefully.

Oh Jon how I miss thee

February 1, 2005 in Cultural Criticism, Humour and Television by matt | No comments

I haven’t been able to watch The Daily Show that much but fortunately I can often find the funnier clips online. Usually Boing Boing will point to On Lisa Rein’s Radar and this has taken place today. Last night Jon attacked Wal-Mart for their new policy of compassion and caring about the American (and likely Canadian) workers. It’s a pretty funny segment. I’m no big fan of Wal-Mart’s corporate practices so it’s nice to see them taken to task for their shameful policies in the workplace.

I only wish I could stay up late enough to watch the show on tv.