I read that the guy who did the code PC DOS' original three finger salute retired recently. In those old days you knew your PC had really crashed when Control-Alt-Delete didn’t cause it to reboot.
Sometimes I wish there was that kind of key combination on people. Like that fellow who was blasting the ticket clerk at the GO station about a 15 minute delay. As if the clerk has anything whatsoever to do with the problem. The railway line is leased from CP rail. Their freight train went through. The GO train had to wait for the “all clear” on the track. Where was I? Oh yeah. That man needed to reboot or rewind or something and stop being a blathering idiot.
Instead of going to work I took the subway to visit my Mom. She’ll be off next week to visit my brother and his family in Thailand and to “hang out” in Chiang Mai for a couple of months. She’s both excited about going and excited that my sister-in-law’s expecting their second in June — my mom’s 10th grandchild.
I did some “work” such as helping to clean the ceiling vents, hanging a few wall hangings and fixing the leaky toilet but mostly we visited, drank coffee and talked about “family stuff.” No big news here but, being the oldest, my memory (sometimes) can stretch back to some of the “great” relatives such as Great Grandma “Puss,” for example.
I also managed to get a picture of my maternal grandparents for the “relatives” collection on the china cabinet.
Are all JSP slow? A contract developer at work implemented a set of java and jsp stuff to parse “B2B” SAP IDoc purchase orders to XML files. “Junk” in the description parts of the records sometimes cause the java parsing or the XML file parsing to fail. He keeps getting contracts to fix up his messes. In a day or so I whipped up a parsing script in Perl which takes just a few seconds, not the several wall-clock minutes, 41Mbytes of RAM and 98% CPU usage that the java application consumed.
The Ontario Colleges Application Centre also runs jsp pages. It took over an hour to submit an application on behalf of my younger son. 90% of that time was spent waiting for the next page to load. Perhaps their server(s) is overloaded because the deadline is Feb. 1 for the 2004/2005 school year. Still, I blame the java server(servlet) pages.
I purchased a 1:10 000 scale map from the MNR store of the area surrounding chez moi. It was couriered to me the next day. Now I can figure out the distances of my running routes — none of this about 10km stuff.
My back is sore today from all that shovelling in the past couple of days. The local paper says we got a 40cm dump. That amounts to piles of a metre or more high at the sides of the driveway. I most notice the back pain when I’ve been sitting for awhile — I’ve got this kink which takes awhile to straighten. Bending was a hurtin' problem this morning. Suddenly I’m aware of bending to shave, to put my leg in my underwear and then my pants, to put on socks. Oww!
I went out for lunch, for beer and schnitzel at Wally’s, with some of the guys at work and a former colleague . We got caught up on the news of our and other former Ontario Hydroids.
I left work early for an appointment with the dental surgeon. The cost to my dental insurance was over a $100 for a description of the procedure, a look in my mouth and “any questions?” — probably less than 15 minutes altogether. Now I’ll be waiting for the “assessment” from said insurance company on what they’ll cover to remove that wisdom tooth with the big cavity. “Are you sure it doesn’t bother you?” the surgeon asked. Nope.
The Walmart near us (< 15 min. walk for me) now appears to be open for business.
Now there’s too much snow for my snow plow shovel. The wind has blown it into 30 to 40 cm drifts in places — mostly my driveway. It isn’t quite a Mel-Lastman-call-in-the-army snow storm yet but I’ll bet they will be a “snow day” tomorrow for most schools in the area.
The other runners in my family live in Thailand and Victoria, B.C.
It was -15°C, sunny, no wind and mostly hard-packed snow on the paths: great running weather for this time of year.
I feel sorry for those of you who have to run with only light T-shirts and shorts. You are missing the 3 or 4 layers of clothing, the fleece toque and hood over top, the running pants, the two layers of socks, the sunglasses that fog up when your body starts to get warm, the salt dust when you run by the roads, the continously drippy nose. You also miss the quiet peacefulness of running on the path by the river. Covered in ice, it makes no sound anymore.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But, in practice, there is.
Jan L.A. van de Snepscheut
Bob Keeshan died today. When I was a kid (let’s say 40 years ago) the school was less than a 10 minute walk so I could watch most of the Captain Kangaroo morning show along with his pals, Bunny Rabbit and Mr. Green Jeans. I remember how excited I was when Mom took us to see him at Massey Hall. Life seemed to be simpler then — I probably didn’t know that computers existed nor was there an Internet. After school we played with the kids on the street: no video games, CDs or DVDs, just books and toys. Even colour TVs were a rarity back in the early '60s when I watched the show. I still remember the theme to the show.
Contest — My younger son left a message that he had “amazing” news. We thought: magazine article published? perfect term test? got into the program he wanted? No. He won US $500 in a phone-in contest on the Howard Stern radio show. Oh well, at least it can pay off some of his student line of credit.
Imminent Divorce — This isn’t in my family but is happening to a colleague at work. I asked him how his wife was and he told me he had enough and he was going to divorce her. I’m “happy” for him: this guy has been treated like a doormat for many years. Can you spell B.I.T.C.H? In his career at work he must have wasted several months of vacation time helping her with her schemes. Her recent café endeavour failed though my colleague was called up from work many times to fix things while it lasted. It seems he found out that there was more than just business going on between her and the business partner.
There was a line up to exit through the small GO station at Kipling. Instead of patrolling the train to check for stamped tickets, the GO Transit police were checking passengers as they funnelled into the station. It looked to me like they already had a haul of half a dozen miscreants who had some “splainin” to do. Personally I think a 3 or 4 dollar fare is much cheaper than a $90 fine.
Racked up the Valpolicella I bottled on the weekend. I also added to my collection of “stashed away” bottles — 6 or so from each batch I’ve made for a total of about 30 so far. I found that I have four Shiraz left from May, 2002.
My wife graduated with her diploma in early childhood music education today at the Toronto Centre for the Arts. Now she has the initials: A.R.C.T., D.E.C.M.A after her name. There were zillions of piano students receiving their ARCT in performance or teaching. Someone asked why there were so many oriental students? Well, how many oriental students do we see at the hockey rinks across the land? It’s just a different set of priorities depending on the culture.
The graduation had the usual speeches from a bank CEO and the-famous-orchestra-conductor and lines of grads getting hooded and pieces of rolled up paper. Bob Rae, as chairman of the Royal Conservatory, shook everybody’s hand. The woman who received the gold medal in organ performance ARCT told Mr. Rae that he was responsible: when Mr. Rae was the 21st Premier of Ontario she lost her public health job because of his government cutbacks. Apparently Bob was speechless. The woman felt great after that.
Today’s musical instrument is the erhu. Even though it was a virtuoso performance by George Gao at the graduation ceremony, it still sounds to me like a whiny violin and resembles a long stick and a tin can.
One of the first things she did was attach a few pictures of 1600×1200 resolution, 500k+ jpeg images and send them to a small list I maintain for our choir members. Of course, since this email was over 7Mbytes in size it bounced or clogged the inboxes of almost every choir member. Methinks sympatico should have some confirmation in their email client:
“Are you sure you want to send this gargantuan email message? Over half of your recipients won’t be able to receive it because of their inbox limits and another quarter on dialup will need to have their phone line busy for a week while they download your message!”
I usually recommend that people download Irfanview, a freeware image viewer and “editor.” There may even be software provided with the digital camera. These newbie high-speed-digital persons should reduce the resolution (via Image | Resize/Resample in Irfanview) down to 640 × 480 or smaller. The recipients can always email back for a greater resolution image. Better yet, the large image can be posted in their webspace and they would just send a link and perhaps a small thumbnail limited to, I suggest, a maximum width or height of 200 pixels. Then, even dialup people can have a look.
Now I’m waiting for the next phase where the newbie will start sending long jokes and mpeg videos that I’ve been sent many times before.
After poking along several routes in rush hour for two days for four 23 km trips I wonder why people drive to work. I had to do this because of two dental appointments. Tonight it took me over an hour to get home from work. By walking, GO train and running I effectively travel the same distance in about 55 minutes. The train trip itself is about 15 minutes where I read or snooze. The rest of that time is waiting for the train and at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise. I got none of that driving in the car. I can hardly wait until my next dental appointment so I can drive in traffic again!
I had to shovel more snow in the zillion degrees below zero wind chill and then drive slowly to the dentist this morning. The snowplower had only just started the visitors' lot so I drove down the street and turned around. By that time I could pull into the lot and go for my appointment.
Today’s appointment included a teeth “physical.” One wisdom tooth has a big cavity (why hadn’t they seen it before?) which means that tooth will have to come out at the end of the month. Here I’m almost fifty and still have all my wisdom teeth! Another wisdom tooth has a small cavity which will be fixed next week: a lot of dental visits.
So, I drove back to work, slowly, as everyone was moving gingerly in the snowy conditions. I much prefer walking and transiting than doing this rush-hour driving thing.
Finally there was about 15 cm of fluffy snow on the ground tonight so I could try out the snow plow shovel I got for Christmas from my son. Works great — especially after I figured out you need to turn it over each time you reverse direction so that the plowed edge keeps moving in the same direction.
400 years ago King James I (That name has a great sound to it, doesn’t it?) ordered a bunch of clergy and courtiers together to create the definitive English version of The Bible. I still remember my verses from Sunday School, the ones I learned so I could get my very own bible — which I still have around somewhere.
My nephew asked a bunch of the family over (Dad was paying) to Memories of Japan for a Teppanyaki-cooked meal to celebrate his 21st birthday. Great food. Good sushi. While we waited for the rest of the party to arrive, two of Metro’s finest picked up some takeout then a couple of ETF guys picked up some takeout. Proof positive that not all who “serve and protect” are coffee and donut eaters.
Instead of drying the towels in the dryer I hang them in a room in the basement and turned on the floor fan for awhile. In a couple of hours most of them were dry. I turned them in the the dryer for a few minutes to “fluff” them out and dry up the final bits. As a bonus the drying humidifies the house.
I did some walking to the library and the drug, variety, and grocery stores. After all that fresh cold air, I completed my aerobic exercise on the treadmill. Today’s treadmill stats were #3 / 311 ↓ / 97.3 ↓ / 1.5% ↓ / 4.44 ↑ / 10.5 ↑ / 80 ↑ / 48.
The temperature got down to -24°C last night and the forecast is for a -27 minimum tonight. It’s darn cold around here. I was at a conference seeking technical recommendations regarding the August 14th blackout. One guy from California apparently came dressed in just a suit. Me, I wore two pairs of pants, boots and a hooded fleece pullover plus coat. In fact, it feels cold in the house as the moisture is sucked out of the air and freezes to the windows. I think I’ll go and crawl under lots of covers.
I have been reading a bit about hot-linking where one web site links to another’s images instead of making their own copies. I always copy the image and usually crop and resize it smaller as a side illustration. Then I got to thinking that maybe my site stats (1.75 Gb in December) might be inflated with hot-links. The birthday cake image or this one in particular seem to be quite popular. Anyway I got rid of the hot-links by adding the following code to the Apache web server httpd.conf file:
<Directory /usr/home/<user>/public_html/www/images/>
# Prevent links from external sites to images
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?my-site\.com/.*$ [NC]
RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif|bmp|png)$ - [F]
</Directory>
I’ll wait for a few days and see whether this makes any difference in the bytes transferred. Meanwhile, I guess there will be a few sites with broken links now. 
)
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After a month of waiting where a professor apparently couldn’t even be bothered to write a commentary my younger son was turned down for the first-year Creative Writing course at Windsor U. A comment by another professor in that department, “Damn good thing she didn’t accept you, she’s a terrible teacher.” Or words to that effect. He was supposed to have found out Dec. 15. Meanwhile, his English composition teacher can’t praise him highly enough. Now he’s finding that all the good courses are full and he can’t register on the Internet until he lines up for hours at the Registrar and changes his major from business to English. What’s a young lad to do these days? Will Dad have to phone some Dean and complain?
The son of a colleague of mine can’t find a tech. job in IT for his first work term. Only 50% of the class has been placed. It would be a disappointment to be forced to take a “McJob” for the next four months. What’s this young lad going to do?
Our younger son continues to be like the moody daughter we never had. Today we drove him and his girlfriend, plus a trunk full of luggage, back to residence, a 750 km round trip. No hugs and kisses for his mom nor a “thanks Dad.” Just an attitude: “Haven’t you left yet?” I assume what’s bothering him is that he has to try and change his faculty, choose a new set of courses and adjust to a new roommate since the first term’s roommate is leaving today. We don’t know because he didn’t share those or any other of his problems with us. He kept very much to himself and his friends over the holiday period. Perhaps his brother, cousin or girlfriend can find out what’s bugging him and let us know.
The good news of the day was that the “WINTER STORM WARNING” issued for southern Ontario only happened to us for about an hour on the 401 between Windsor and Chatham. It was dry the rest of the way. Now at about 10:00 p.m. it seems the snow has started. We also found a nice restaurant near St. Thomas while looking for the Swiss Chalet “signed” on the highway.
The temperature was 10°C and I thought it felt spring-like during my afternoon run. I heard this bird call. Unfortunately it was getting too dark to see the bird except in silouhette. January 3 is the earliest I have ever seen or heard a robin in these parts. Usually I don’t expect them until March. I wonder if it will head south again — it’s supposed to go below freezing and snow next week.
These paragraphs made me laugh. Source: 2003: A Dave odyssey
Can young people wear their pants any lower? Their waistbands are now at approximately knee level. Where will this trend end? The shins? The feet? Will young people eventually detach themselves from their pants altogether and just drag them along behind, connected to their ankles by a belt?
Late in the month, a massive “Storm of the Century” blizzard batters the Northeast with icy blasts and holds the region in its wintry grip, blanketing New England with white stuff as emergency crews struggle to keep the news media supplied with weather clichés.
In an inspiring story of courage, hiker Aron Ralston, trapped in a remote Utah canyon, frees himself by amputating his own right arm. Somehow he manages to fashion a tourniquet and hike back to civilization, where he is slapped with a $17 million negligence lawsuit by lawyers representing the arm.
In yet another sign of declining national educational standards, a 12-year-old Vermont girl wins the National Spelling Bee in Washington by spelling “horse.” She actually spells it “h-o-r-s,” but the judges rule that this is “close enough.”
On the literary front, the blockbuster bestseller of the year is the long-awaited fifth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter Reaches Puberty and Starts Taking Really Long Showers.
In a medical breakthrough, a Houston-based team of surgeons, working for 17 hours in a risky, first-of-its-kind operation, are able to separate a 21-year-old woman from her cellular telephone. She expires within hours, but doctors report that the phone is stable, and they expect its condition to improve dramatically “once it finds a new host.”
In immigration news, federal agents in 21 states descend on Wal-Mart stores that are allegedly employing illegal immigrants. The agents emerge hours later, glassy-eyed, holding bags filled with hundreds of dollars worth of bargains but unable to remember what they went in there for in the first place.
 | Ever notice how Dave Barry resembles Mike Myers? |  |
Hmmm, a new year. An Olympics' year, too.
Though they have snow in Vancouver there’s been none here for a couple of weeks. Just because I can, I went in-line skating for my exercise. Not quite as an aerobic workout as a run but I cover more territory. For example, I found out there’s a new beer store opening within 3 km of chez nous. Can an LCBO be far behind — perhaps in the new set of stores being built just behind the beer store?
The unfiled music stack is now down to a 6 inch pile from about six or seven banker’s boxes. I have recycled about a 9 inch stack of unsortable photocopies. Now there’s room on the shelves for current in/out music piles.
A few days ago I saw a large dumpster on the other side of the street across from my driveway. I went to check out what’s going on. A neighbour a few doors north-west was having their entire lawn dug up with a backhoe and three “drain rooter” vehicles parked on the street. Uh-oh! I wonder if those two trees on his and his neighbour’s front lawns have anything to do with the problem? Or should I be worried that our domestic sewer systems are aging prematurely? Not a nice holiday for them. I bet you they wish for snow to hide the mess left after the emergency repairs.
An unexciting New Year’s Day for me: just as it should be. I’m sure the year will get busy soon enough.
Today’s humour is brought to you by a spam email. Apparently you can lose weight by listening to ocean sounds. My wife asked if people at the sea shore lose weight using this method and I replied, “Only if they leave the windows open.” Being an engineer I always thought there were two inequalities:
Since, as a first approximation listening consumes no calories, ergo no weight loss.