ShinyPlasticBag

I woke up this morning to find that, despite my Internet connection working perfectly, I was unable to visit this site. That's odd, because this site is hosted on the same gateway that lovingly distributes Internet connectivity throughout the house. If that was working, why woulddn't the site be? After a moments thought, I remembered that my DNS nameserver hosting expired this morning. Since 2002, I've been paying $30 a year to have Lanechange do my DNS hosting, but this year I decided to try a free one (hey, thirty bucks is thirty bucks). I'm now using ZoneEdit, which (hopefully) will serve my purposes. You know, it was fun to host everything here once upon a time, but it's really lost it's charm lately. Next year, I think I'm going to do the hosting for life thing from TextDrive. I'd do it now, but I don't have the $470 for it at the moment. One can dream.

I didn't get that job I applied for (although I wasn't expecting to). However, my backshifts have been extended to the end of October. As happy as I am to not face unemployment, I was really, really looking forward to the prospect of getting off of night shifts. I'm going to try to find something between now and the end of October, at which point I'll have to apply to keep my backshift job. Wish me luck.

Anyway, I should stop procrastinating here. I've got to get some more work done on the web site layout for the Discovery Centre, and I'm also trying to learn Python. So, I'll end this here — cheers.

• Written on 26 September 2005 & posted at 04:00 PM.
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So, congratulate me: I finally made my first Google Maps mash-up! After watching other geeks have all the fun, I couldn't resist any longer. I saw an opportunity and decided that it would actually be pretty neat. Introducing Google Stalk. Enter a phone number (Canada only) and it'll pinpoint the owner's house on a map. Pretty neat, eh? There are a few caveats: the accuracy is limited by the information on Canada 411, so not all numbers can be looked up. Unlisted numbers, non-personal numbers, and cell phones are not available, and some telephone companies (such as Eastlink) don't provide accurate information. Also, the addresses are looked up with GeoCoder, so their accuracy is a factor as well. That being said, for most numbers, it can at least show you the city. Give it a spin and let me know what you think of it. Just don't be a weirdo.

Anyway, Hurricane Rita is entering its final march towards the shores of Texas & Lousiana. Over the past two days, it has weakened significantly. It doesn't look like Rita will nearly as bad as Hurricane Katrina, despite CNN's best efforts to induce terror in the populace. The best example of this is the wonderful quote they were running along the bottom of the screen: “If you haven't evacuated, it's probably too late now.” Lovely. As bad as this hurricane season has been, I'm getting tired of the major news networks making it seem like the world is ending. Urging preparedness and providing information are important endeavours. Having Wolf Blitzer stand in front of a half-dozen video screens? Not so much.

• Written on 23 September 2005 & posted at 04:59 PM.
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Oh, man, am I ever tired. I got home from school today, hopped in the shower, and promptly fell asleep. I woke up about three hours later, still tired but wicked hungry. I got up and ate, and now I'm sort of awake. Seinfeld is on...such a cunning temptress. Sigh. This is because of my crappy morning schedule — I had to get up at 6:30 this morning. I realize that's not really that early, but I keep switching between late nights and early mornings and it really sucks.

Somehow, I managed to drift for five days without updating my little blog...I can't believe it, actually. Time flies when you're, um, doing nothing (translation: playing Kitten Cannon can be incredibly distracting). I absolutely love Flash games, and I'm trying to build a sort of ultimate Flash game library. I think it's probably for the same reason that I love old NES games: simplicity is the key to amusement. If you know any good ones, let me know.

Anyway, no news in my world, really. My plans for the rest of the week are pretty mild: I've got a job interview at the hospital happening on Thursday, and I have a wild desire to get to FutureShop at some point soon (maybe tomorrow). Both me and Mom want to be able to listen to our MP3 players in the car, but our car's stereo doesn't have an auxilliary inputs. None of the local electronics places have very good web sites when it comes to listing detailed information like “does it have any auxilliary inputs?”, so I have to go in to look in person. The prospect of being able to avoid listening to the radio until the end of time is very appealing to me, let me tell you. Good god, I hate the radio so much. Especially in Halifax.

• Written on 20 September 2005 & posted at 11:20 PM.
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So, joy of joys, the group I'm in for my community outreach class is working with the Discovery Centre. Why is this exciting? Well, we'll be doing various mundane hardware tasks but also creating a new web site for them. Not only is this good experience, but it will look great on a resume someday. Plus, we get to hang out in the Discovery Centre itself, which is just awesome. (For those who are not from the area, the Discovery Centre is a little science museum sort of thing. Very nifty, if somewhat kid oriented.)

In general, classes have been good so far. The three hour break in between my first class and my second class isn't too long — it provides enough time to grab some food and get a few things done (ie, reading or typing tests or what have you).

In geeky news, despite my disdain for Microsoft over the past year or so, I watched a demo video from Channel 9 that I found pretty interesting. It details their fancy new vector-based Avalon graphics subsystem that will power Windows Vista (if it ever comes out). It's definitely pretty neat — after more than a decade with the sorts of interfaces we have now, it's nice to see changes are finally on the way. That being said, it's going to obsolete the vast majority of computers out in the wild, this one included. Maybe my future PowerBook will be able to dual-boot it.

Anyway, I'm off to watch How It's Made and learn how puzzles are made. Nifty stuff, I tell ya.

• Written on 15 September 2005 & posted at 07:46 PM.
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Ever since I was a kid, I've been fascinated by the stock market. Even the massive dot-com bubble burst didn't dissuade my interest, and I continued to want to invest at some point. I think I might finally get a start on ticking that particular item off of my todo list. I don't have a huge amount of money, but I finally have some, so I'm going to go up to the bank and look into it. Royal Bank has some nifty online tools for such things. I also want to look into getting a new Visa card (since the one I have has bare-minimum insurance and no benefits). It's Financial Awareness Day.

In other news, I bought something on Amazon that excites me to no end: Pirates of Silicon Valley. This was pretty much my favourite movie in high school. Keddy and Steve and I watched it religiously whenever we were bored...um, basically every day. Between this and Hackers, there was always something geeky on. Janet bought Hackers for me last year, but Pirates has only just come out on DVD. I'm quite excited. Other hopeful Amazonian purchases include Battlestar Galatica (the original series). It's almost $100, though, so it'll have to wait for a while. Still, the price isn't too bad — it includes all of the original episodes and the box is shaped like a Cylon helmet. This exact same box set was $170 this time last year.

Anyway, I should get going. Must go to the bank and all that fun stuff.

• Written on 12 September 2005 & posted at 01:39 PM.
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You know, I really love how Apple never does things alone. Changes always move in herds for them, and today was no exception. After weeks of speculation, they released a new replacement for the iPod mini, a new version of iTunes, and the expected iTunes phone. Out of these three things, the new “iPod nano” is by far the most interesting.

It's smaller than a remote control and the thickness of a pencil, with a clickwheel barely bigger than the tip of your thumb. It has a colour screen and all of the capabilities of the full-sized iPod and 14 hours of playtime between charges. Basically, it's the iPod mini owner's dream replacement. The problem that I see, however, is in the name. I personally believe that the name was chosen just to piss off their nemesis, Creative, makers of the Zen nano. That's right, they had a “nano” line first. Not only that, but they recently announced that they have a patent for the iPod interface. Basically, I think this was a spite name. A few months from now, people will hear “nano” and think “iPod” — a sort of fame that Creative could never have even dreamt of for their Zen. They'll hear “Zen Nano” and wonder if it's just an iPod rip-off.

Basically, I just think that this is a fairly petty shot in the ongoing battle of consumer electronics. The nano is incredibly tiny and very cool looking, especially in black, but I really hate the name. What about everyone else?

• Written on 07 September 2005 & posted at 04:48 PM.
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Well, this is it...tomorrow is the last day of my last summer before I'm done university. Wow. It's epic in a slacker sort of way, if you really think about it. I'm excited, although the whole day isn't slackable — I have to go get my mom over in Halifax at some point in the afternoon. Other than that, though, I'm golden.

The last few days have been fairly dull. Basically, I was just sitting around and waiting for my iPod, which ended up getting delayed for the entire Labour Dabour weekend by stupid Fedex. Stereotypically, I missed the delivery this morning and had to drive out to their depot in Burnside to get it myself, but I have it now, and it's better than I could have possibly imagined. Just imagine the words “I christen thee Lela the iPod.” in a booming voice, if you will. I spent most of my afternoon getting it all set up the way I wanted and then went to Janet's house in the evening to watch a few episodes of Penn & Teller's Bullshit.

In other geeky news, I exchanged a few emails with Bruce Tognazzini, who not only has one of the funnest-to-say last names ever, but is also a geek I admire. He's a former Apple employee who really pushes the importance of usability in software and hardware design, which is a subject matter that I find particularly interesting (don't ask why, I'm not sure). It was definitely awesome. That brings my total number of famous Apple-related people I have conversed with to three: him, Woz, and Steven Levy. If I could get Andy Hertzfield and Steve Jobs, I'd be happy. It's like geeky trading cards.

Anyway, all this typing is too close to doing something. I've got to quit now, before it actually counts as not being lazy. Viva las laziness!

• Written on 06 September 2005 & posted at 11:39 PM.
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Arg, I'm so sick of this crappy summer. Never warm, always hot, but with almost no sun — what a blast. Sleeping in the daytime is hard enough without being so hot that you can't even be in contact with blankets of any sort. Anyway, I managed to perservere and I'm all sleeped-up for my fifth-from-last weekend of nights.

My iPod was scheduled to be delivered today, but got held up at some point along the way and, uh, didn't. It's currently sitting somewhere near the airport in Montreal. I'm not sure if FedEx does weekend deliveries, but I sure hope so. Regardless, my iPod Socks arrived — I just have to go pick them up from Purolator in Burnside (yes, the socks came via Purolator and the iPod via FedEx...weird). I guess it's better for the protective socks to arrive before the iPod does. But I disgress. Patience, geekboy, patience...

Anyway, tonight, I've got to go pick my mom up in Dartmouth and then that's about it. I think the most exciting thing I've got going on for the rest of the weekend is the possibility of bowling with Apollo. Gotta love the last weekend before classes start, eh?

• Written on 02 September 2005 & posted at 05:56 PM.
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