Archive for September, 2006
The Sun Rises
Sep 27th
On the trip to Toronto and eventually Boston, this was a little later than the early sunrise picture I posted awhile ago entitled “Good Morning Canada”. I took several pictures like this but ran into trouble in all but this one when the glare from the sun showed the flaws in the glass on the older Air Canada plane window. In this shot, I used the wing to cover the sun – resulting in a surprisingly pleasing photo with the sun rays casting over the clouds and dispelling the darkness in the sky.
In a lot of ways, I wish I had grabbed a shot like this earlier when the sun wouldn’t cause the glass to ruin the shot. I’m not entirely pleased with the airplane wing in the shot, but there wasn’t really any other options!
Server move complete!
Sep 27th
Well it’s done and everything seems to have moved fairly smoothly. If you notice any issues, please let me know because they aren’t immediately obvious to me.
This move signals the first time I pay for web hosting for my blog/website. This is made possible via a really cool webhosting company called nearlyfreespeech that lets you run your website for what seems like really really cheap. Their hole philosophy is very agreeable and if you are looking for a place to host a site, I recommend checking them out!
As a result of starting to pay for webhosting, you may see the return of google ads in more prominent spaces. I’m not certain that I’ll do that just yet, but be forwarned. If they do return, I’d appreciate a few clicks since a regular google ad income should *easily* pay for the hosting fees.
And that’s all from me for now. Back to my thesis!
Heraldk
DNS Updates
Sep 26th
I’m moving my webpage and blog (again)! This time there isn’t anything you have to do. The urls should just work like before, but my blog is going to experience some downtime as I get ready for the transfer. Just so you know, you’ll probably have a couple of days where you can’t read my ever so exciting blog!
But never fear, I will be back!
See you in a little while.
Heraldk
Late Day Sky
Sep 24th
On our first night in Boston, we enjoyed a very tasty meal at a restaurant that was perhaps not the fanciest place, but I really enjoyed my food! I have never had shrimp or scallops that tasted so good or were so large before in my life, and I look forward to having a chance to do so again!
After dinner, I tried a couple shots from the patio we ate dinner on, and this one turned out rather well I thought. It was getting towards sunset, and it made for a cool contrast in colours in the sky.
On Unsportsmanship
Sep 22nd
Sometimes, I shudder at the state of humankind.
Last night I played a late rec-soccer game on the Lister Hall fields. Our team plays in the semi-competitive division of the intramurals and were obviously outclassed against the team we played against. Fine, that’s all fine and dandy. It was tied 1-1 after the first half but then the other team scored 5 unanswered goals to win the game. Good for them.
But it was the actions of a couple of their team members that really had me shaking my head. One of the players in particular, wearing a Beckham soccer shirt nattered throughout the second half … including comments involving the word “pussy” and stuff like “I don’t want to make you guys cry”. Well, I’m crying all right … crying out that something isn’t right. It is a friggin’ rec soccer league! These actions don’t belong in a rec soccer league … one that has in its name “recreation” (I would argue these comments don’t belong in any league).
One of the guys on our team commented that I must not play much soccer. He said that this sort of thing is normal. Why the hell is something like this considered normal? It makes me seethe with rage that for all I can tell is impotent. What exactly am I going to say that will change things? Nothing. In fact, anything I say will just be mocked with more of the same. Ugh. I enjoy playing soccer for fun and some good natured competition, but when players make it a place to act with unsportsmanlike qualities, I stop having fun and start wondering what’s going on.
Heraldk
Sorry …
Sep 21st
for the lack of updates. Between all the hectic things going on, I haven’t had much of a chance to actually post anything of interest in the last little while. Let me summarize what I’ve been up to, and I’ll promise to try and get some more posts up. I want to finish my bankroll building series before too long because the longer I leave it the harder it will be to sift through my neteller transaction history to determine what I won and lost where!
Anyways, so my most recent news posted was my iPod purchase which I have already received. The entire process lasted a week from clicking the “purchase” button to arrival of my new electronic gizmo. I submitted my order last wednesday, it shipped on Friday with the free engraved personalization already completed. It left Shanhai, CN (I assume that means China??!) and arrived at my place Tuesday afternoon! Incredible. I love it already by the way. It is nice having more than enough room for all my music plus some space to cart files around if I wanted!
My thesis is coming slowly. Jonathan has read a draft of my thesis that was missing a couple of sections. He is now expecting a draft for the 4th of October that has all the sections complete. This is a deadline that I’m hoping to meet, but there’s been some other distractions working against me.
The one in particular (no, it isn’t WoW … I only play that in the evenings) is the condo builders have finally started working on the deficiencies and warranty work in my condo! This is super exciting for me because finally I won’t have to deal with the problems that have been particularly annoying for me. The carpet has been patched so it is no longer an eyesore, the t-caps between carpet and lino have been installed finally so those transition areas look finished and no longer hurt people’s feet. Now the wall patches are being done and a significant change to my kitchen view is also being done! So things are happening very nicely on that front. However, this means I have to “work” from home while the people from Clark builders come and fix up my place. Of course this means I either have the distractions of my computer and the internet in front of me, or I’m watching the repairs being done to make sure I like how they are done (plus I like to think it’s a good idea to watch and learn how they do some things).
So that’s what I’ve been up to. I need to run to a CS games meeting. There were a couple other things that happened that I want to write about, but they will have to wait until later I guess.
Heraldk
Candles
Sep 17th
In St Michael’s Abbey in Italy, there’s some very neat stuff to look at. There’s paintings on the wall, a real life choir singing in a corner, and these lit candles next to the window. Personally, I really like this photo though perhaps I am biased because it is one of the few photos I took inside the abbey that actually turned out.
iPod!
Sep 14th
I have purchased a new iPod.
Thanks to that $1K winnings from the mansion risk-free bet, I decided that I needed a new iPod. My previous (and first) one has now reached the point where its battery doesn’t last a full day’s worth of writing-my-thesis time. Between that and Tuesday’s announcement of the new 80 GB iPod, I just had to purchase one.
So yesterday I placed my order for a brand new 80 GB black iPod with custom engraving provided for no extra cost. It should ship early next week and be in my hot little hands in about 2 weeks total. Hooray!
Yesterday, I was playing with my music library in iTunes 7. The new iTunes has some pretty nice features two of which I like a whole lot. The first is automatic downloading of album art. This is such a cool feature that now I needed to double check *all* my album tags to make sure that they all have the correct album and also add the album art for all the songs that iTunes couldn’t find the art for. I think I made it up to ‘D’ in my library before I had to head out for the night. It’s gonna take me awhile to get through my library! The other feature I really really like is one called “gapless playback”. This automatically does a scan of your library and makes sure it knows if two tracks should be played with no gaps. I don’t know how the software works, but it is damn cool. No more gap between the Rhapsody songs “Epicus Furor” and “Emerald Sword”!
What I don’t like? iTunes 7 seems to have broken the scroll wheel functionality … at least on my windows computer. No longer can I scroll down my list of songs with my mouse scroll wheel. Since I’ve gotten so used to doing it, this is really really annoying for me and I really hope they fix it soon. Also, they’ve managed to make iTunes take even more memory which is annoying because yesterday I found it running with over 70 MB of memory. Why does it take up that much? It’s just a music player! Worse yet, for the first time ever, iTunes’ playback was crackling when I was doing something else on the computer. It wasn’t even something all that intensive… just opening up new tabs in firefox!
Ugh. So I hope they fix these issues soon – the release is quite nice and I’m pretty happy with some of the new features. I just hope they have these issues fixed before I get too annoyed with it.
Heraldk
JR’s Kitty
Sep 10th
This is JR’s kitty. isn’t she cute? I can’t remember her name, so JR will have to remind me of it, but she’s full of energy and cute as a button. Erm … perhaps cuter than a button.
Boston Seaport
Sep 8th
While I was waiting for the conference to start, I was treated to a pretty nice view from the Boston World Trade Center building we were in. This boat started going by and I grabbed a photo that I was a little surprised turned out so well through the glass window. It’s kind of a peaceful looking picture in my opinion. You also get a pretty decent look at the Boston skyline which I think looks pretty neat.
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