Steve's Personal Blog

My 2011 Big Day Downtown

2011-09-18T14:36:00.001-04:00

I was lucky enough to get asked again this year to take part in the Halifax Downtown Business Commission's Big Day Downtown promotion. The theme this year was to do something that you've never done before. I originally thought this would be a bit of a challenge for me, because I've worked in the downtown core for nearly 15 years and in that time, I've done a whole lot of things. It definitely took some thought before I decided what I would do.

Eventually, I settled on an idea that wasn't tied to a particular place or business. Ultimately, of course, I would have to spend my money somewhere, but what I chose was part of an activity I love to do downtown: ride my bike. I've been a bike commuter from Clayton Park to my office in the BMO building for the past two years. It's made me want to attempt things like bike touring or racing. I decided to use my Visa gift card to get some clipless pedals.

For those that aren't sure what makes pedals 'clipless', it means that there is a mechanism that binds your feet to the pedals via special cleats on the bottom of your shoes that doesn't use the over-the-toe baskets or toe-clips. Most cycling shoes are very narrow, and I have fairly wide feet, so I ended up getting a pair of Keen Springwater cycling shoes. the shoes and pedals together would have been over budget for my Big Day Downtown, so I'll just talk about the pedals :)

At Mountain Equipment Co-Op, Crankbrothers had a special edition version of their Candy 2 pedals (made especially for MEC) for about $15 less than the non-special edition version. The special edition is half black and half green (MEC's primary colour), but that is really the only difference. The silver version would have matched my bike better, but it seemed like a no-brainer for me to get the cheaper, greener, equivalent pedal. Since I bought them at MEC, their in-house bike shop was good enough to install them for me free of charge. It was a simple enough process, taking only about 10 minutes. I could have done it myself, but I don't own the specialized tool (a pedal wrench) required to remove my old pedals. The new ones are installed and removed with an 8mm allen wrench.

Part of what makes clipless pedals so appealing to me and cyclists everywhere is the simple fact that your feet are fixed to the pedals. This means that you are no longer limited to just pushing on the pedals, but you can pull on them as well, and once you get used to that, it can mean twice the power on every stroke and a smoother revolution; spinning, rather than a series of alternating pushes.

When I told people that I was trying out clipless pedals for the first time, everyone suggested that I practice clipping and unclipping several times before heading out on the road. I heard horror stories from cyclists who, forgetting to unclip when coming to a stop at an intersection, tipped over like they'd just taken off their training wheels. Then, hoping they didn't tip into traffic, they must swallow their pride and right themselves to keep going. I've never been one of those sensible people that do things like 'read instruction manuals', or 'practice unclipping', so as soon as the pedals were installed, I hopped on and took them for a test ride :) My inaugural ride with clipless pedals went from MEC on Granville St. to Sackville to Hollis to Marginal Road so I could visit the Seaport Farmers Market. I also picked up some of the fine wares from the Garrison Brewing Company since I was down that way.

To date, I have not yet forgotten to unclip from my pedals and I have not yet fallen unceremoniously on my side, however unclipping is not as simple a process as you might think. You can't just take your feet off the pedals, you have to turn your heels outward so that the angle that the cleat on your shoe makes with the pedals is such that they release. It can be awkward because due to the size and shape of my shoes, I can't do it when my foot is at the bottom of the pedal stroke; the crank gets in the way. I have had some close calls, but I have always managed to get my foot out in time. Here's hoping I never have to find out what happens if I can't.

A few days after having my new pedals installed, I found out there are going to be some changes going on to the streets in the downtown core; some streets are changing to one way, some are getting more parking, and some are getting bike lanes! I purposefully chose a cycling-related topic in order to draw some attention to cycling in Halifax and in retrospect, I can claim it was because of these new cycling-friendly changes coming to downtown.

After buying my pedals, I only had about $8. Who knew pedals could be so expensive? I treated my wife, Julie, and I to some coffee and confections at one of my favourite coffee places downtown, Just Us Coffee Roasters on Barrington Street. We enjoyed our coffees, muffin, and cookie as she walked me back to my office.

Thanks, Halifax Downtown Business Commission for allowing me to take part in this awesome promotion again. I had an awesome time trying out a new thing downtown!

My experience with Vibram FiveFingers

2011-04-25T13:50:00.000-04:00

A little over two years ago, I started a journey that led me to lose 120lbs in 15 months. It's not like I tried to keep that a secret, but I've never really blogged about it either. I did this through a fairly drastic change to my lifestyle. I joined a gym, got a trainer, and more meticulously watched what I ate, as it was apparent that the "pub food" diet wasn't working for me. My physical activity was primarily swinging, snatching, and otherwise lifting kettlebells.

I had done a few stints on the treadmill in the gym in between kettlebell workouts, but never for longer than 10 minutes at a time. And those 10 minutes were a chore. Despite how difficult it had always been, I have always had an underlying desire to be able to run, maybe because it was so difficult. Perhaps it stemmed from the gym classes in elementary or junior high school where we had to run around the perimeter of the soccer field, and I would inevitably be somewhere near the back of the pack. I was envious of the people who seemed to be able to run with such ease. You always want what you can't have, right?

But wasn't running supposed to be easier now that I was lighter? I kept at it, telling myself that it was just because I wasn't used to it, I had to work up to it, etc. This was partly true; I gradually increased my distance and time until I got to the point where I was going to sign up for the Blue Nose Marathon's 10k event. I managed to get up to the 10k distance, but my entire lower body paid the price for it. My knees and hips were sore for a few days afterwards. It was dawning on me that being lighter had very little to do with this. After reading running websites and blogs, I learned that many people were experiencing the same issues as I was, and these people ~~were runners~~ ran regularly! Unlike me, they presumably knew what they were doing and they were still getting injured. Hrm...Perhaps some more investigation is necessary.

Time passes...

A friend and co-worker was a regular runner, and a while back he had started running in these strange toe-shoes that I came to understand were called "Vibram FiveFingers" or VFFs for short. He also introduced me to the book Born to Run. I think that part of the reason I had always wanted to be able to run was that you didn't need any implements, accessories, or equipment. To risk sounding like a Nike ad, you should just be able to do it. The barefoot running experience that Born to Run evangelized seemed exciting to me; exciting enough that I decided to get a pair and try it for myself.

I figured that fit was a very important aspect to wearing shoes with toes in them, so I went to a local retailer to get fitted. They brought out a custom measuring device provided by Vibram and I tried on the size that it recommended. They felt tight. Unfortunately, they didn't have the next size up in the model that I wanted (KSO), so I decided to gamble and order them online. A little less than two weeks later, I had them.

At first, I wasn't sure if I wanted to wear them for running. Since I had already managed to complete 10k a while back, my wife convinced me that I should be attempting a half marathon instead. I had read that there was an adjustment period to running barefoot, and I didn't want to have to scale back the distances I was running for training, so I started out just wearing them while I did my cross-training activities. Curiosity got the better of me soon enough, and I took them out for a jog on the treadmill. I lasted about 10 minutes before the pain in my calves was too unbearable to keep running. I was probably running too far on my toes than I should have been, but my calves were inconsolable. The next day I found it difficult to walk, my legs loudly voicing their opinions on what I shouldn't have done the day before. Nevertheless, I noticed that it was only the muscles that hurt; my joints were what usually gave me grief, but today they were conspicuously silent. This was interesting.

It took a good week before I felt up to giving a run in the VFFs another attempt. I tried landing a bit more on the outside of my mid-foot, as some websites had suggested. It seemed a bit better. My calves still ended up getting sore, but I lasted more than twice as long on the treadmill, and they didn't hurt quite as much the next day. There was a downside though: I was getting blisters. The more I ran in the VFFs, the more I realized that that damn sizing chart was absolutely correct. I had bought a size too big, and my feet were sliding around, ever-so-slightly in the shoes. Sliding enough to give me quarter-sized blisters on both feet, right at the base of my big toes. Ouch. Some healing time was needed once again.

I tried using Injiji socks, which definitely helped, but I finally conceded that if I was to run regularly in these shoes, I would need the right size. I sold my slightly-used 45s and picked up a pair of 44s. Whereas they felt tight when I had first tried them on in the store, now they just felt like they fit. I guess you have to know what you're looking for. The moral of the story here is to trust the Vibram sizing chart. Once I was in the correct size, the blisters were a thing of the past. Over about three weeks, I started building up my time and distance until I could once again cover the 10k distance. That's a shorter amount of time than most people recommend; I think I paid for it in calf pain.

The first time I ran 10k in the VFFs without any lasting effects on my calf muscles (other than normal fatigue, of course), I was ecstatic. My joints didn't bother me anymore either...was it just the shoes all along? Was this why I never really enjoyed running? Well, it probably wasn't the shoes themselves, but they certainly didn't encourage me not to land with a heel-strike, like the VFFs do. Ever since, I've been running exclusively in my KSOs or the pair of Trek Sports that I bought later on. I am still training for that half marathon...so far I'm up to 18k. I have about a month of training time left. I now have no doubt that I'll be able to finish, but I'm working towards a certain goal time that I have in my head. Based on my training, people have told me that I can definitely attain this goal, but I don't want to jinx it :)

I can't credit FiveFingers for my weight loss, as most of that happened before I owned a pair. But I can definitely say that the VFFs and the barefoot style of running that they encourage make running much more enjoyable because the only after-effects seem to be on my aching muscles, and not my joints. I have to consider that a very, very good thing.

Are you thinking about trying barefoot running? Do you struggle with sore joints when you run? Does that keep you from enjoying running? If you answered yes to any of these questions, I think you owe it to yourself to invest the time in trying out a pair of Vibram FiveFingers.

Big Day Downtown (Part IV): MEC, Just Us, & Freak Lunchbox

2010-08-30T11:00:00.002-04:00

Going into my last Big Day Downtown, I had $66.75. Coming out, I am left with a single cent that I am afraid I will be unable to spend. Even if I could find something that only cost a penny, I doubt I could buy it with a Visa gift card. Let's run down the day's purchases :)

Stop 1: Mountain Equipment Co-op (MEC)

When I went to university, I used to make fun of all the Upper-Canadians going to my school with their MEC backpacks all snooty and such. Well, call me a hypocrite, because I am so happy that MEC decided to open a store in Halifax. Since it arrived on the corner of Granville and Blowers Streets back in 2001, I've shopped there many, many times. It's close to where I work, it's right across the street from where I park my car, and well, they just sell so much cool stuff. Very soon, I'm planning to go buy some camping equipment from them, including some sleeping bags for Julie and I. It's a very easy place to spend money, not to mention their kick-ass website! If they don't have something in stock at the store, you can order it online and have it delivered to the store at no charge. That is service.

Since I had to restrain myself to spending only 67 bucks during this visit, I bought a nice fleece for the upcoming cooler fall weather, and a 14L waterproof stuff sack to contain my wares and keep them dry as they sit in my pack.

FYI, if you'd like to help with my MEC addiction, please visit my wish list. I keep it up to date :)

MEC Watchtower fleece + MEC Roll Top Stuff Sack + tax = $64.98
Left to spend: $1.77

Stop 2: Just Us Cafe

Anyone who knows me (and some of my previous Big Day Downtown posts will confirm this) knows that my drug of choice is caffeine. It gets me up in the morning, keeps me going all day, and puts me to bed at night (in tea form, preferably orange pekoe or Earl Grey, thanks). And the dealer I frequent most often is Just Us on Barrington Street. I try as much as I can to remember to bring my re-usable mug with me when I go here because they have a very sensible policy of only stamping your loyalty card when you buy a coffee in your own mug. I think that is a great way to gently nudge people to use less disposable products. Smart thinking, Just Us!

I had a mug full of the darkest roast they had brewed.

Mug full o' coffee + tax = $1.48
Left to spend: $0.29

Stop 3: Freak Lunchbox

At this point, I had 29 cents left on my Visa gift card, so there was not much choice in the matter. There is only one store that I could think of where I could buy something for 29 cents, let alone with a Visa. I walked the block north to Freak Lunchbox, enlisted the help of one of the friendly staff and manged to purchase an amount of chocolate-covered coffee beans that came to as close as possible to my $0.29 when tax was added. I walked back to my office munching on $0.28 worth, or about 15 beans :)

~15 chocolate-covered coffee beans + tax = $0.28
Amount remaining unspent: $0.01

And so that brings to an end of my Big Day Downtown money, I sure enjoyed spending it!

Big Day Downtown (Part III): The Mongolie Grill

2010-08-23T14:58:00.005-04:00

One of my favourite places to eat downtown is the Mongolie Grill on the corner of Granville and Sackville Streets. It's located where the Nova Scotia Sports Hall of Fame used to be. It's one of the few places where you can absolutely know every ingredient that is going into your meal, and over the past year and a half, when my big push was to lose weight, this was a huge benefit to me. It's one of the reasons why the Mongolie Grill is one of my picks for my Big Day Downtown.

I suppose I should describe the premise of the Mongolie Grill a bit before I get started on my experience: You are presented with what resembles a salad bar of raw vegetables, meats, and sauces. You put the ingredients you want in your stir-fry into a small stainless steel bowl, and then have it weighed. This weight determines the price of your meal. You pay depending on how hungry you are! They then dump the contents of your bowl onto the largest cooking surface I've ever seen, and toss it until it's cooked. I should mention that they use water instead of oil when they stir-fry, so you know you're not getting more than you bargained for. There are oils that you can add in the sauce bar if you're into that sort of thing.

I came into the restaurant at an odd time, 2:30pm, so I was the only one there! I got great service :), but even at its busiest, the wait staff are very attentive. Because of the buffet-style nature of the place, the menu is pretty much just appetizers and drinks; I usually opt out of those and go for a water. Besides, each meal is started with a bowl of your choice of either some kind of creamy soup (today was corn chowder) or some kind of spicy soup (today's was hot and sour soup). As a general rule, I try to stay away from cream-based stuff; I went with the hot and sour soup. Wasn't the hottest or sourest soup I've had at the Mongolie Grill, but it was good.

I jammed some of my favourite vegetables into that bowl: broccoli, green onions (and regular onions), water chestnuts, carrots, green peppers. Don't give me any of that baby corn though, I can't stand it. Add some chicken and some scallops and a scoop of some hot oil, and we're off to the scales for the weigh-in. My meal weighed in at just over half a kilogram! A note to the vegans and vegetarians out there: if you don't have meat in your stir fry, you qualify for the vegetarian 20% discount. This has never applied to me, ever. However, those water-laden vegetables can be some of the heaviest things in your bowl. I've tried in the past to create the most weight-optimized meal possible, but I think I got a little too obsessed. I eventually gave that up.

After a few minutes, you're presented with the finished product--a fine stir-fried concoction of your own devising. Mine sure looks good, doesn't it? I don't think I've ever had the same meal twice here. You can vary the ratios of the different vegetables and meats and combine the sauces however your taste buds see fit.

I've come to this restaurant dozens of times over the past two years, and I think I've only had one meal that was a little over-cooked. Other than that, I can't say that I've had a bad experience. Kudos to the Mongolie Grill for being consistently awesome!

Mongolie Grill stir-fry @ 0.565 kg + coffee + tip: $24.00
Left to spend: $66.75

Big Day Downtown (Part II): Cabin Coffee

2010-08-12T07:52:00.002-04:00

So, since my first day of spending my free money consisted solely of a coffee, I guess I'm going to spend this money over a few different days. My second day of money-spending has, perhaps predictably, also involved coffee.

Cabin Coffee, to be precise. I've walked past this place on the corner of Salter and Hollis Streets many times. Sometimes I stop in after I've finished my first coffee of the morning from the Halifax Farmers Market, and I need that 11 am pick-me-up. This time, it was after a delicious chicken shawarma that I had from Venus Pizza; however that shawarma was not officially part of my Big Day Downtown, so I won't talk about it further except to say again that it was delicious.

At Cabin Coffee, I decided to get a cappuccino. This is a drink that I don't usually have; I prefer my caffeine to be shunted directly into my veins, not floating in a milk foam ether. In fact, the only cappuccinos I can remember drinking were those from Tim Hortons, and I don't think those count. I'm still not sure what the difference is between a cappuccino and a latte is (perhaps the more coffee-educated among you can tell me), but nevertheless it was very well-received by my palate. I think I forgot to ask for non-fat milk and I could definitely taste the creaminess I hadn't known since my last "double-double". I'm quite used to using skim these days.

The cinnamon bun was decent. I can't really give it a glowing review, because I have in my head a very high standard to which no cinnamon bun has come close since the closing of the Uncommon Grounds on Argyle Street. They made the best buns that I have ever had, and the remaining UGs make these weird cinnamon muffins that I can't even put in the same category. Some of the main strikes against it, in my books:

No frosting or glaze. A cinnamon bun's gotta have some glaze. Glaze is preferable to frosting, but just mixing some sugar with the cinnamon isn't enough for me.
Fell apart too easily. If I can't hold the thing in one hand and not have the layers separate before my eyes, invariably dropping onto my shirt or shoes, then how can I be expected to enjoy it on the go? This is critical.
Not "doughy" enough. This one is nitpicky, and I think I may be in the minority on this one, but I like a cinnamon bun that is moist and chewy, not dry and crumbly like a tea bicsuit. This was a close call, but I think it fell short.

The ambiance of Cabin Coffee is certainly top notch. It's the quintessential laid back, neo-hippie vibe coffee shop. It actually reminds me of a place I know well: The Bridge Street Cafe in Sackville, New Brunswick. I think the service at Cabin Coffee is a little faster, but that's not really a feat of gargantuan proportions. Seriously though, how can you not like a place that has chandeliers that cast silhouettes of moose and bears across the establishment?

Overall, thumbs up to Cabin Coffee, but then, I've hardly met a coffee shop I didn't like.

Cabin Coffee large cappuccino + cinnamon bun + tip: $6.50

Left to spend: $90.75

My (first) Big Day Downtown

2010-07-28T09:44:00.004-04:00

Let's start this off with a bit of an explanation. I've been selected, amongst approximately 30 other personalities, to be part of the Big Day Downtown promotion put on by the Downtown Halifax Business Commission. They gave me a $100 Visa gift card that I can spend however I like, as long as I spend it in downtown Halifax. I spend most of my days in downtown Halifax, working here and everything, so I thought I could give this a run for its money, so to speak.

I have been musing about how I should spend the $100. Should I blow it all on something big? Should I make it last over a week (or more)? Should my purchases have some sort of theme to them, or should they have no commonality except that I made them all? I'm still not really sure what I'm going to do; there have been a few themes that have had a commanding presence in my life lately.

One of those themes is fitness. I haven't written about it much here (actually, I don't think I've written about it at all here), but from January 2009 to March 2010, I lost about 120lbs. However, I think Scott over at Your Inner Skinny has that theme covered. As an off-shoot of the fitness theme, I also thought about spending my money as a cyclist. I've been commuting from Clayton Park to downtown on my bike since March. Yes, back then, it was really, really cold. In addition to Ideal Bikes, M.E.C. now has a bike shop, so I might be able to make a go of it, but it would probably fall more into the "blow it all at once category".

I ended up deciding to just try new things downtown that I wouldn't necessarily have tried otherwise, for no other reason than I couldn't decide to do any of the other ideas that I had. My first stop on the whirlwind tour that is Steve's spending of $100 downtown was Cafe Ristretto in Bishop's Landing. I got my standard large dark roast coffee. Wasn't the best coffee I've ever had, but it was only a drip coffee and not espresso-based. It certainly got me out of my caffeine-deprived funk. I had co-worker recommend the Trident as the best coffee in the city, so maybe I'll try that in the future.

If you've got any suggestions as to how I should spend my ~~hard-earned~~ free money, hit me up in the comments of this blog or on Twitter.

Cafe Ristretto large coffee + tip: $2.75
Left to spend: $97.25

View Larger Map

Yesterday destroyed me

2010-03-21T12:06:00.000-04:00

I realize I've been neglecting my blog. I just scrolled down the first page, and I got back to 2007. That ain't cool. Hrm...seems that was about the time that Twitter strolled onto the scene, and I guess I haven't really had much to say that was more than 140 characters since then :) Now that some of my friends have started blogging (again) regularly, I'm inspired to take up the challenge again.

As Sandy would say, yesterday was a large day. Warmest so far this year and blazing sunshine. Julie was over in Burnside at a nutrition course, so she had the car, but I had the day to myself. I had received a call the day before about some fenders for my new bike coming in at Bicycles Plus in Bedford. I'd been biking into work all week, so I thought I'd give biking out to Bedford a go. I got there with out incident (it's mostly downhill from Clayton Park, and the Bedford Highway has a bike lane along almost its entire length), but upon arriving there, I realized I'd forgotten something that I required while in Bedford. I had to bike home, then back again. Wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be, I'm pulling around a lot less weight than I was last year at this time, but still a workout was had.

After I got home for the second time, I had to prepare to go curling! This would be my the first time trying that sport. My work's social committee had organized a group outing at the Halifax Curling Club. We had the whole place to ourselves for about 2 hours. I now have a new respect for what all those people I watched at the Brier did. I had enough trouble staying upright on one of those sliders, let alone sending a 40 lb. rock down the ice to a specific location. Coming out of the hack also nicely stretches the groin muscles. A few people were taking photos; hopefully there are none of me :)

Following curling, a group of us went to Darrell's on Fenwick. [If you click on that link, watch out for the music.] I tried the peanut butter burger. Damn good, if I do say so myself. It's no bacon-infused burger, but then, really, what else is?

But the thing that really set me on my ass, and put me in the state I am today, was the first 2am night I've had in probably more than 10 months, maybe more than a year -- The Thrush Hermit reunion show at the Paragon Theatre. Great band, great show, great time, but holy crap I am tired right now. I can't say for sure whether it was the previous activities of the day or the late night, but at noon the next day, I feel like I was run over. I wasn't even drinking! I have a kettlebell class at 7:00am tomorrow morning, and I'm just hoping I survive.

Cheers, folks. Hopefully that's enough blogging to keep you sated for the time being.

My Jackets! You want to buy them!

2009-09-15T12:37:00.002-04:00

I have some jackets that you want to buy. Well, you may want to buy them if you're a guy that wears this type of clothing. Check them out on Ebay:

Danier 3XL short collared leather jacket.

Tommy Hilfiger 3XL leather jacket

Kenneth Cole 2XL Wool pea coat

Firefox in Chrome's clothing

2008-09-24T13:43:00.000-04:00

I am a fan of the look and feel of Google Chrome, but I found it didn't display some web pages properly, and I had problems with it caching images in mid-download so that the full image wouldn't display. Anyway, I found that the following set of plug-ins makes Firefox look and feel pretty close to Chrome.

Addons:
Chromifox Theme
Hide Menubar (hides the menu bar until you press ALT)
Show Go (Always show the go button at the end of the address bar)

SappyFest '08

2008-08-05T21:10:00.001-04:00

This past weekend, I had the privilege of attending SappyFest for the third year running. I got to see bands ranging from Miracle Fortress to Old Man Luedecke, and of course, the venerable Eric's Trip, re-uniting once again to grace the crowds with their noise and melodies. Good times, great bands, and an awesome festival. How can you beat a festival that brings in a micro-brewer and sells beer for only $3? It's not even worth trying to smuggle it in at that price.

The photo is one I took while behind the stage in the main tent set up on Bridge Street in Sackville, New Brunswick. Check out the rest of my SappyFest photos on Flickr.

The only bad part of the entire weekend was on Sunday morning. I walked to my car in the morning (well, in reality it was more like the afternoon) to find that somebody had hit it while it was parked. My radiator had been punctured, its contents evacuated, and I wouldn't be able to drive the car home; I had it towed to a garage. I ended up getting a ride home with a friend and leaving my car in Sackville because I was unable to contact an insurance adjuster from TD Meloche Monnex. I thought they always had people on call for situations like this.

May 1st is RSS Awareness Day

2008-05-01T08:28:00.002-04:00

May 1st is RSS Awareness day. I feel it's my duty to share the love of RSS that I have with the rest of the world. Of course, many people that are reading my blog probably already know about RSS; maybe you're reading this via RSS right now! How exciting is that? But if you are reading this through RSS, you're in the extreme minority. According to some made-up statistics, 94% of internet users don't know about RSS, or just don't use it for some ungodly reason.

Here's a great video that can help you bring the joy of RSS to your RSS-impoverished friends, courtesy of the Common Craft Show.

Renovations

2008-03-29T14:03:00.002-04:00

I've finally decided to actually do some of the things that I have always talked about doing to my home. After all, I bought it nearly 10 years ago, and I have barely touched it since then, save my theatre room in the basement. It was a hard decision to come by; it's definitely a lot of money, but I have to look at it as an investment in my home, rather than an expense; otherwise, I may never do it :)

Kent Building Supplies had a big sale this weekend; buy one can of paint, get one free, so Julie and I spent last night picking out colours. This was perhaps a bit hasty and a bit ambitious, but I think it's going to work out well. We hit the store as early as we could this morning, and I had a chat with one of the "designers" in the paint department. A new colour was picked for the upstairs bathroom, but for the most part, she thought the choices were pretty good.

Coming home with 11 cans of paint, 18 packages of bamboo flooring, a new fibreglass step-ladder, and a bunch of other crap in the back of my Element was pretty interesting. When the flooring was being loaded in, I wasn't sure if it could handle it all. The boxes of flooring were just barely too long for the tailgate to be closed, but everything remained intact during the drive. Unloading all those boxes was way more fun :) 18 boxes, about 40 or 50 pounds each -- you do the math. Not to mention that they're long and skinny, and hard to get around tight corners such as those on the way into my basement from my front door.

The flooring is going to wait until we finish painting, which I think just makes good sense, but I can't wait to get it down. I am sick of the carpet that's down right now. I'm sick of carpet in general. You can't keep it clean, it gets stained, it looks like crap. It sucks. Carpet sucks. I've seen hardwood floors change the entire look of a place. That and with new paint I could have a whole new home.

I'm excited.

Arm rests in movie theatres can be put up

2008-01-18T11:39:00.000-04:00

I tend to rarely hit the theatre anymore now that I have one in my home, but when I do, I like to try and be as comfortable as I am on my couch at home. Unfortunately, that's not always possible: The arms on the chairs are awkwardly placed, the seats in front of you are too close to sensibly position your legs (well, if you're tall like me anyway), not to mention the other people around you who can annoy the crap out of you.

This is basically a public service announcement to everyone out there who regularly goes to the theatre to see a movie. I just learned that in some theatres, you can put the arms up. They fit back in the slots between the seats and end up flush with the backs. I thought this was the best development in movies at the theatre since I invented throwing Skittles at people in the dark.

Next time you go to the movies, try to put up the arms. My girlfriend and I were lounging on a 6-seat-wide section of seats, right in the middle of the theatre while we watched National Treature 2 last night. It was fantastic. Sometimes you just can't beat a big, big, big screen.

Pandora is back!

2008-01-14T15:27:00.001-04:00

If you were like me, rather than listen to your own (stolen) music, or subscribe to some satellite radio service, you'd head over to pandora.com and set up a station of your favourite music and rock out like you were excreting boulders. That happy fantasy came to an end in 2007 when they were force to limit their streaming to only American IP addresses.

I'm happy to report that GlobalPandora.com is back (at least for Canadian IPs), as good or better than ever, and even works with your old Pandora.com accounts! Looks like the box is open again.

W00t!

I type 89 words per minute

2008-01-04T02:49:00.001-04:00

89 words

Touch Typing

Zunior.com's Boxing Day Sale

2007-12-17T16:00:00.000-04:00

Zunior.com, for whom I work producing the Zunior.com Podcast, is starting what I hope becomes a tradition for them: The Boxing Day Sale. I know Boxing Day may be a new and unfamiliar concept to those of you south of the border, but the Canadian Boxing Day sale is like the American Black Friday.

The long and the short of it is that on December 26th, 2007, you can pick up selected albums on Zunior for only $4.44. That's half price, w00t!

20% Off Cordless Power Towels

2007-11-26T15:57:00.001-04:00

20% Off Cordless Power Towels
Originally uploaded by Steve Dinn.

Score two for big box customer service

2007-11-17T18:41:00.000-04:00

I'm sure that enough people write daily in their blogs about the horrible experiences they've had with various customer service organizations. I'm going to tell you about two great experiences I had just today. Two "big box" stores even. Aren't we supposed to be going to smaller, mom & pop shops to receive better service? I don't know if I could have received better service than I got today from Staples and Home Depot.

Part 1: Staples

Recently, I've been purging. Purging junk. Purging junk from my life that I've held onto for whatever reason; probably because I just had space to do it. Currently in my hallway, there are about 8 garbage bags full of crap that I'm throwing away. Don't worry, I gave all the clothes that were fit to give away to Big Brothers/Big Sisters, and I'm recycling all my cardboard boxes, so all you hippies don't give me any grief. During this process, I've come across various personal documents that I felt should be shredded rather than just thrown away. Well, yesterday my shredder decided to give up the ghost. There was an audible pop, the lights dimmed for a split second, and my shredder had ceased to shred. And it would shred no more. I had owned it for almost a year, I thought, but I wasn't positive. I had shredded the receipt to test it when I first got it, so I knew that was out of the question. Luckily, it was a Staples branded appliance, so I thought I would take my chances in seeing if they'd exchange it or replace it.

Today, I carted it back over to the store in Bayers Lake, fully expecting to have to argue about this in order to get it exchanged. I walked over to the customer service desk and explained the situation, my shredder had simply stopped working. The manager of the store happened to be nearby when I was talking to the girl serving me, and I thought he was going to start making things more difficult, but he didn't even ask for my receipt or credit card or anything, he just walked over, grabbed a brand new one, and I was out of the store within 5 minutes of walking in. It was one of the most pleasant customer service experiences I have ever had.

Part 2: Home Depot

One of the other ways I'm trying to improve things is by using CFL (compact fluorescent light) bulbs wherever possible. The light fixture in the middle of my stairwell had 4 out of 5 bulbs burnt out, and finally it was time to replace them, lest I be left literally in the dark. I went to Home Depot and bought 5 of what I thought were the most appropriate CFL bulbs for the job, and came home to install them. I found that although the screw part was the right size for the fixture, the narrow shades affixed to where each light is supposed to go prevented me from fully installing the CFL bulbs. I would have to take them back.

I drove back to Home Depot to pick up the identical incandescent bulbs that had just burnt out...At least I know that they fit. Unfortunately, I had managed to lose my receipt in the nominal amount of time I had actually spent with these bulbs outside the store. I decided to try to take them back anyway. After all, the cashier who sold them to me was probably still working there, and at least she could vouch that I wasn't trying to rip anybody off. But I needn't have worried: The returns desk at Home Depot was able to look up my purchase based on my credit card number and no receipt was necessary. Why don't more stores do that? I walked out with bulbs that I knew would fit my light, and all was well.

Anyway, I hope I have brightened somebody's day with the notion that customer service can actually be had in this day and age, even in big box stores. Oh, and did I mention that I didn't wait in any line ups whatsoever at either customer service desk? Crazy, I know.

The Med is Closed?!

2007-11-10T21:18:00.000-04:00

Halifax Pop Explosion 2007 schedule

2007-09-19T21:42:00.000-04:00

Holy kick-ass, Batman. A cursory glance at the Halifax Pop Explosion's schedule lets the casual observer know that this year's HPX is gonna blow the doors off you.

In addition to Polaris Prize nominee bands the Besnard Lakes and Miracle Fortress, Eric's Trip have confirmed to play at the Pop Explosion. The Moncton-based SubPop signees will be headlining the finale show on Saturday night at the Marquee Club. We can also look forward to shows by the Apostle of Hustle, Windom Earle, and two already-sold-out performances by Tegan and Sara. I hope you got your tickets.

With shows at 13 separate venues over 5 days, even the most curmudgeonly show-goer can find something to suit his or her tastes. I know I'll be running between bars like a crazy person trying to catch all my favourites. It's happened every year so far, and there's no reason to assume it won't happen again this time.

See you there!

Arrrr...It be talk like a pirate day!

2007-09-19T07:43:00.000-04:00

Avast, ye landlubbers, for it be Talk Like a Pirate Day! Yarrrr, September the 19th every year be designated the one where ye can let out yer inner pirate. Shiver me timbers, blow me down, and hopefully you don't have to walk the plank ;)

Now I must be off because those damn kids be after me buried treasure.

Yarrrrr!

How do you use a bag?

2007-09-12T16:02:00.000-04:00

I picked up a courier-style bag from a friend, and it had a weird clip on it. I wrote to MEC to figure out how to use it. They have very courteous and friendly customer service.

Me:

I recently picked up the Brenta Courier Bag (used) from a friend of mine. I like the bag, but I think I need an instruction manual for this crazy buckle on the side. I would like to take full advantage of all this bag has to offer, but I am no courier and I can't figure out how it works.

Is there any kind of literature for this bag? Like a PDF that I can download or something? Anything would help.

Thanks,
Steve Dinn

MEC:

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the email.

I have a Brenta bag and a few others that use that crazy buckle. I think by that you mean the large one that adjusts the length of the main carry strap.

I don't have a PDF or other documentation on it but don't find it that hard to use. Usually you simply lift the large plastic tab (sort of like very old school car or airplane seat buckles) and simply slide the strap up or down to make the overall length adjustment. This creates a loop below the buckle (especially when the strap length is fairly short), but is very secure for carrying heavy loads and produces not long trailing end of excess strap that can get caught in things.

There is also of course the cross body strap that needs adjustment. Essentially the smaller strap just triangulates the other strap keeping the bag stable, but can be undone easily so that the bag can be slung down to the side or front of your body to access the contents or just to wear at your side, not on your back. This strap should meet the other strap at your sternum, roughly.

The defacto standard in Courier bags is the Timbuk2 brand, and I have found a link on their site that shows how to wear their bags which are very similar to ours and use the same buckle type.

http://www.timbuk2.com/tb2/cms/popup/howToWear.htm

Please let me know if you have more questions.

An open letter to the Firefox developers

2007-09-07T18:45:00.000-04:00

Dear Firefox developers:

I get the feeling I'm probably alone in my criticism on this particular issue, but bear with me :)

In order to maintain a super-human level of productivity, I typically use a combination of right-hand mouse and left-hand keyboard when I browse the web. (Please, no jokes about one-handed typing.) So, if I right-click, I'll usually hit the hotkey for an item rather than moving the mouse down to click on it. Click, key-press is almost always faster than right-click, move mouse, left-click.

My problem, or rather my annoyance, is this: Why are the hotkeys for the right-click menu on a link not the same as the hotkeys for the right-click menu on a bookmark? My most common action when right-clicking is to open the link (or bookmark) in a new tab. For a link, the hotkey for "Open in New Tab" is T. Guess what T is when you right-click on a bookmark. CUT. So instead of opening my bookmark, I've removed it. Wow, that's awesome :)

Now, I understand that T is the time-honoured, traditional hotkey for the cut action, but couldn't we have the same key for both menus? The bookmark menu's "Open in New Tab" hotkey is W. That seems like a nice letter. Honestly, I don't care what keys they are, as long as they're consistent across all the right-click menus.

I hope I haven't bored you.

Thanks for reading this,
Steve.

Eric's Trip

2007-08-07T11:40:00.001-04:00

Eric's Trip
Originally uploaded by Steve Dinn.

SappyFest: Day 3

2007-08-07T11:38:00.000-04:00

The third and final day at SappyFest 2007 was a whirlwind of activity. It started off with a breakfast show put on at Struts Gallery. I had a curry wrap and a grilled cheese sandwich. I stayed for a couple of hours, but the sun was brutal, and as the afternoon wore on, there was less and less shade to cower in. Regrettably, I made my way back to the dorm.

After trying for the third time to get Chris to rip the CDs I had bought (because I didn't remember the CD-ROM for my laptop) so I could get the music on my iPod, I remembered that the last show for the trapeze artist, Poisson D'Avril, was going on at 1400h, and I hadn't yet seen her. I rushed over there and just made it as the show was starting. It was pretty amazing.

Now it was time to relax a little bit. I didn't really feel like going back to the afternoon show because of the sun, and besides the Singing Saws performing at 1700h, there was nothing going on until 1800h. I went back to the dorm, finally got my new music onto my iPod and played around on the internet a bit. Chris and I went to this family restaurant for supper that gave you the choice of "frozen french fries, or homemade ones that we cut fresh here." Well, that's not much of a choice, is it? I took the homemade ones.

Six o'clock rolled around and we headed down to the final show of the festival. It was gonna be a monster 9 hours, and I think just as many bands. I got a great interview with Julie Doiron, and saw some fantastic sets from B.A. Jonston, The Stance, the Memories Attack, the Monoxides, and of course Eric's Trip. It is always amazing to see a band play live when you have an extreme intimate familiarity with the music. Especially when you're right at the front of the stage, and they're basically playing directly in front of you. I had an amazing time, and I'll definitely be on the lookout for SappyFest 2008 :) I would have taken more pictures, but my camera started flashing the battery light at me, so I decided to save the juice for when Eric's Trip played.

Back at the dorm, I got my pictures posted, and I was in bed by 0400h or so. I decided to take the scenic route home (through P.E.I....I had never been across Confederation Bridge before), so if you're interested, you can check out the pics from my whirlwind three-province tour.

SappyFest: Day 2

2007-08-05T00:57:00.001-04:00

Day two of SappyFest had a late start for me. Like I said in the last podcast, I was starving and I went looking for a diner at which I could get some breakfast. I found Mel's Tearoom on Main Street in downtown Sackville and grabbed a booth. The place wasn't even that crowded, but it seemed to take forever for me to get served. On the upside, ham and eggs and coffee only cost me $4.35.

I don't think I described my room very well...it's a typical dorm room: single bed, desk, shelves, small closet, and a mini fridge. The only real problem I had was getting network connectivity. The wireless network here at Mount Allison goes through a gateway where you have to enter a username & password, but the wired network just lets you get online. Unfortunately, the network drop is not under the desk, where you think it'd be, but rather across the room, by the mini-fridge. The cable that I brought wasn't long enough to reach the desk while still being plugged in so I had to basically sit at the fridge in order to be online. I took my chance this morning while nothing was going on to drive up to Moncton (about 35 minutes away) to Futureshop to get an SD card reader and a 25' cat-5 cable. So, the upshot of that was that I was able to get some of my photos online and I'm now sitting at the desk :)

I missed two shows from Poisson D'Avril, the trapeze artist, but luckily she's putting on one more show tomorrow. I have heard nothing but rave reviews from those who have seen her show.

The weather in Moncton was something you just had to see. As I drove into town, there were numerous strikes of lightning in the sky, but no thunder, and no rain. On my way back to Sackville, I drove through some of the worst rain I have ever seen, but it stopped about 10 minutes before I got to the Sackville exit.

At 1700h, there was a show from Sappy's sister festival, Ok, Quoi? going on at the Sackville United Church. There was some wacky shit going down in there. The various classical-style instruments in the 'Motion Ensemble' were dishing out some experimental (and I mean ex-per-i-mental) sounds that I'm not sure were music, but they were certainly interesting. Certainly a break from the norm of even the fare from SappyFest. As I left this show, the rain finally caught up to Sackville.

As there was last night, there was an outdoor show scheduled for 1900h outside of Struts Gallery, and there was supposed to be a barbecue. If it was raining, I wasn't going to go, because as attendees of that Summer Rush concert know, watching music in the rain quickly becomes not much fun. Around 1930h, the rain let up and I ventured out. I'm glad I did, because I got to see the Superfantastics.

After the outdoor show, we migrated to the Vogue Theatre about two blocks away. This was fantastic because being located on a marsh, Sackville has more than its share of flies, and I am apparently fine dining for them. However, karma being what it is, it was hotter than hell's armpit in that theatre. I was sweating like it was going out of style and I ended up leaving after Rick White played, and I missed Ohbijou and Chad van Gaalen, who I really would have liked to see, but I just wasn't prepared to torture myself to see them.

I managed to get a great interview with Paul Henderson, one of the three main people behind SappyFest, but I forgot my microphone in the car, so the audio will have to wait until tomorrow.

The Maynards

2007-08-04T15:03:00.001-04:00

The Maynards
Originally uploaded by Steve Dinn.

SappyFest: Day One

2007-08-04T11:40:00.000-04:00

I'm going to try to make some short audio posts for the time I'm at SappyFest, hopefully with some music each time. Here's my first installment.

Check out the song at the end. It's the Maynards with 'Break Out the Make out'.

Download Podcast

Arrived in Sackville, N.B. for the Sappy Music Festival

2007-08-03T17:15:00.000-04:00

I know it's been a long time since I've written anything on here...just about a month, but I figured that now that I'm actually doing something that it might be fun to post about it :) I have just made the slightly more than two hour drive to Sackville, New Brunswick from Halifax, and checked into my room at the Mount Allison University dorm (Windsor Hall, to be precise). It's hotter than an armpit in the sauna in here. But there's a dorm-sized fridge, so I've just plugged it in and left the door open. We'll see how good of an air conditioner it is. I have my doubts.

Anyway, I'm here in order to see various shows associated with the Sappy Records Music Festival. They even have "Sappy Fest" tacked on the bottom of the big sign on the highway that says "Welcome to Sackville". I managed to forget my SD card reader, but I am going to try downloading the drivers for my camera to see if I can get the photos off of it directly. Here's hoping I can pull it off.

Salmon Sushi

2007-07-05T10:17:00.000-04:00

From 'Scott Pilgrim'

Twitter is dead

2007-05-02T21:49:00.000-04:00

It was going to happen sooner or later, but for me, Twitter is now dead. Facebook can now do everything that Twitter does, and more; not to mention that there are orders of magnitude more people on Facebook.

For those of us in Canada, Facebook just added Canadian cell carriers to their Mobile section. Bell Mobility, Aliant Mobility, Fido, and Rogers (Telus was curiously absent) are now able to be selected. Once you activate Facebook Mobile, you can post status updates to Facebook using your mobile phone, and you can specify which of your friends' status updates you want to receive as text messages. That's pretty much Twitter in a nutshell. The only things lacking are the IM integration, which was flaky at best anyway, and the third party app support, i.e., Twitterific.

Since Twitter couldn't manage to set up a Canadian short code, and I don't really feel like paying for international charges for using the UK number, I don't know how much I'm really going to be using Twitter anymore. You're on Facebook already anyway, right?

Right?

I'm on shakey moral ground here

2007-04-09T11:32:00.000-04:00

Last week, I was grocery shopping. When I'm grocery shopping, I often avoid grabbing a cart when I enter the store in order to limit myself to only what I can carry. I find that I'll often buy more groceries than I can really eat before they go bad, given my proclivity for eating out, and not filling up a cart is a great way to stop myself from spending money on food that's just going to spoil.

On the day in question, I started grabbing a little too much stuff to hold in my arms, so I stuffed a bulb of garlic into my pocket, just so I wouldn't have to carry it. When I got to the check-out, I completely forgot about the garlic. I inadvertently shop-lifted produce.

Every day I have that garlic, I feel like somebody's going to squeal to the cops. Gil Grissom and his team are going to serve me with a search warrant and test my garlic's DNA and match it to the garlic that was at the scene of the crime. I'm going down. It's only a matter of time.

On the plus side, stolen garlic is delicious.

My next phone might be a Google Phone

2007-03-16T10:31:00.000-04:00

According to some of Google's European executives, there's going to be a Google phone in our future. I currently have the java applications for Gmail and Google Maps installed on my Motorola SLVR, and I thought that was pretty hot. But imagine the sweetly integrated nature of having all your contacts' information immediately synchronized to Gmail, being able to send a email via Gmail as easily as a text message, or chatting using Google Talk, having integration with Google Calendar too! Don't even get me started on Google Docs and being able to remotely edit documents on your phone.

The potential of this device boggles my mind; hopefully it will not turn out to be vapourware. It would be like a Blackberry on steroids. And I think I'm going to really, really want one.

North End Pub on fire

2007-03-07T15:07:00.000-04:00

Damn. I've had brunch at the North End Diner more times than I can count. It was one of those old-style greasy-spoon diners that there are less and less of these days...perhaps because they keep catching on fire.

I remember about 15 years ago when the restaurant at the other end of that block, The Acropolis, caught on fire and burned to the ground. There's still an empty gravel lot there now. I hope the same isn't true 15 years from now about the whole block.

At least we've still got the Ardmore Tea Room and the Armview.

You can still see the smoke on this webcam as of my writing this.

IMDB gets an update

2007-02-20T15:06:00.000-04:00

Sometime between the 17th, and the 20th of February 2007, one of my favourite websites, IMDB.com got a fresh new look. The name and title pages (so far) are sporting the new styles, with the rest of the site to follow. I think it looks really good. It's about time IMDB got an update.

ECMA Podcast

2007-02-19T11:30:00.000-04:00

Since Jeannine was trapped in an Ottawa airport, I put together an episode of Spine Radio that consists of several songs from artists either nominated for East Coast Music Awards, or playing around town during the ECMAs. Check it out.

Air Miles finally pay off

2007-02-13T08:29:00.000-04:00

I got my free Griddler! Good thing I was up though...the Sameday courier guy came to the door at 08:10. I had to answer the door in a towel.

I made a peanut butter and strawberry jam panini on an English muffin.

Scotch: Aye, it's good for wha' ails ye

2007-02-12T21:05:00.000-04:00

For the past couple of months, I've been trying to break into the world of Scotch. Keep in mind that previous to this couple of months, the only whiskey I'd ever had was accompanied by at least two parts of ginger ale.

Getting into Scotch isn't as easy as getting into wine, mainly because a bottle of the former is several times more expensive than one of the latter. Scotch also has at least as many idiosyncratic adjectives as wine, trading 'plum' and 'cherry' for 'woody' and 'peaty'. It's an odd experience to learn these terms. It's kind of like when you were in pre-school (or earlier) when you were first learning colours -- You can't really understand what exactly 'red' is until somebody shows you a stop sign, so the only way to be able to talk to another Scotch drinker about what you're tasting and experiencing is to try a whole bunch of different Scotches. That in itself can be a bit exciting and more than a bit frustrating.

So far, I've tried GlenFiddich, Oban, Dalwhinnie, and Lagavulin, and I've discovered that I'm partial to the ones that are described as 'peaty', particularly Lagavulin and Oban. Anybody else a Scotch drinker? What are your favourites?

I couldn't leave it in the store.

2007-02-12T19:34:00.000-04:00

Whilst shopping for wares in the grocery store, I came upon a bottle of lemonade that I had never seen before. I was taken by the friendly, lemon-shaped head on the bottle. I had to have it.

Pucker up lemonade, not only makes their URL remarkably hard to find on the bottle, but is remarkably good lemonade to boot. At $1.99 / 473 ml, it's not cheap, but people are paying just about that much for the same amount of water these days.

Best line from the bottle: "Made in Canada by a guy in an apron (inc.)".

Process priority should apply to other resources

2007-02-10T19:42:00.000-04:00

I have an application that doesn't take up many CPU cycles, but it does write a large amount of data to my hard drive; the same hard drive on which my virtual memory file is located. As you can probably imagine, my system slowed to the speed of an intoxicated sloth crawling on flypaper. It got me thinking that it would be nice if there were a way to not only give a priority to a process as far as the CPU is concerned, but to other system resources as well. How is it possible that this process that was using less than 10% of CPU cycles was able to bring my computer to a crawl? It really shouldn't be.

Quality of Service kind of does this for the network, process priority does it for CPU cycles. But CPU speeds haven't been the bottleneck in modern personal computers for a number of years -- now it's the hard drive. I can't understand why any OS I've used still doesn't support a way to limit access to the hard drive the same way they've done for CPU cycles for decades.

Form inheritance in Visual Studio 2005

2007-02-09T00:45:00.000-04:00

I'm sure many people are familiar with the principles of object-oriented programming such as inheritance, polymorphism, etc. However, not everybody may have considered is the potential for creating a class hierarchy of forms and dialogs. It can be very beneficial to have the ability to extend an existing form class to create a more specific type of form. For example, I constructed a group of C# forms and controls that allow me to design a page as a control and place it in either a wizard or a property sheet. I can just extend my custom page from the base page type and drop on whatever controls I need for that particular page. That's something that I think should have been in the .NET framework, but that's another story.

In any given class hierarchy, it's probable that at least some of those classes will exist purely for the purpose of polymorphism, and they'll be abstract classes. This is no less true with a hierarchy of forms or controls. In my particular example, there's not much use in instantiating an instance of the base page class because it'll have no controls on it, so I marked it as abstract. As I soon found out, the designer in Visual Studio 2005 takes great exception to this.

For some reason, the VS2005 designer tries to actually create instances of these abstract base classes and I'm not quite sure why. If all the abstract methods and properties in the base classes are made virtual and given simple, default bodies, so that the classes can be instantiated, the designer will start working again. It's a real shame; I love using abstract methods in base classes because I find myself often forgetting to implement the derived-class versions of virtual methods like I'm supposed to, and it's nice to have the compiler remind you if you don't. It's just unfortunate that this can't happen if you want the designer to work with your abstract forms or controls.

iMate Jasjar for sale

2007-02-05T01:15:00.000-04:00

I am selling my iMate Jasjar. It does a whole lot of stuff; probably more stuff than I need. Because it does so much stuff, it's a little large for a guy who just wants a cell phone most of the time. I ended up buying a Motorola SLVR a few months back, so the Jasjar has been sitting idle. It's still in great condition (a few superficial dings, but working flawlessly).

The auction is on Ebay now, so get bidding if you're interested :)

Edison Force?

2007-02-04T18:24:00.000-04:00

Walking through Blockbuster today, waiting for a table in Cora's, I saw this movie for sale in the 'previously viewed' section: Edison Force. It has an ensemble cast that I thought would have been less possible to get together than Tom Cruise and Brooke Shields: Morgan Freeman, Kevin Spacey, L.L. Cool J, and Justin Timberlake. What in the hell?

Who in their right mind would bring all those people together for a movie? I can't even fathom Justin Timberlake and Morgan Freeman in back to back movies, let alone the same movie. That being said, now I must own it. It was only $7.99. I'll give my review after I actually watch it.

Shouldn't a supermarket know about grocery bags?

2007-02-02T22:25:00.001-04:00

I went to the Real Atlantic Superstore today for the first time in a long while. Typically, I shop at Sobeys, and now I remember one of the reasons why. No, it's not just for the air miles.

The Superstore's bags must be easier to produce. They must be, because I cannot conceive of another reason that they would be so retarded. The handles of Superstore bags are on the ends of the bags instead of the sides. If you're trying to carry a frozen pizza or something that is much longer than it is wide, the handles are the whole length of the pizza box away from each other. Obviously, that is very awkward.

Sobeys got it right. The handles on their bags are where handles ought to be on a sensible bag. One hand can easily go right through both handles, pizza box and all.

Shouldn't a supermarket, of all places, understand what makes a good bag? These places do research into customer behaviour and put the staple items in distributed locations so you have to traverse more of the store to get them all. Just today, I went to get milk, and it was at the complete opposite end of the store from the entrance. If I were handicapped, I'd probably never buy milk -- you'd have to walk too far. The Superstore is just dumb, and they have dumb bags. I do like the President's Choice brand though.

Speaking of Air Miles, while I was writing this blog, and gathering the links for those websites that I linked to, I explored the potential rewards I can get with the number of points that I have. I haven't yet redeemed any points in the 7 or so years that I've been collecting. I think I'm going to get myself a Griddler.

You are a douche.

2007-01-31T21:35:00.000-04:00

Ever wanted to end a conversation quickly and efficiently? Hand the offending party a douche card, and walk away. Lousy service? Don't want to leave a tip? Douche card. Looking for something to replace those little packets of silica gel inside the new shoes at Walmart? Douche card.

The possibilities are endless.

Want some shoes? How about $5 too?

2007-01-31T17:52:00.000-04:00

I've recently learned that there is a war brewing over which website will be the top shoe seller online. For years now, it's been Zappos.com, but recently, Amazon started up their own online shoe store, Endless.com.

The first volley was fired by Endless, as it started by offering free overnight shipping. This was something that Amazon does for many of their other web stores, so it was no big deal for them. Zappos soon countered by offering the same. Endless then did the unimaginable: offer free shipping for -$5. That's right. they're going to pay you to get shoes delivered via overnight service. I think it's a little bit retarded, but I'm not going to complain about a discount.

Endless also has the better website, all full of AJAX-y goodness and plenty of 'wow' factor. Making your way through multiple pages of search results does not even reload the current page! Instead, it fades out the old display set and fades in a new one. Very slick. Also pretty cool is a javascript magnifying glass thing that you can drag over the pictures of the shoes to see a close-up of a particular section.

Anyway, if you're in the market for shoes, maybe you want to check out one or both of those online stores. Personally, I can't buy shoes without trying them on.

Constructors vs. factory methods

2007-01-30T23:17:00.000-04:00

I have come up with some coding conventions that I seem to spend a not-insignificant amount of time explaining to some of the people I work with. Specifically, I have a convention for what actions are performed in a class's constructor vs. a factory method that creates an instance of the same.

Constructors. It's not very easy to figure out what's going on if your constructor manages to throw an exception. Furthermore, if you've derived from a class whose constructor can throw exceptions, it's even more difficult to debug. Constructors should just initialize a class's members, but do no real 'work'.

Take the .NET class System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryEntry. You can construct an instance of this class with a completely bogus LDAP path in the correct format, but the constructor will not throw an exception. It is not until an action is performed using the instance that anything will go wrong.

Factory methods. In my convention, if you want to create a new instance of a physical object like an object in Active Directory, you'd have to use a factory method. If I had written DirectoryEntry, it would have a static Create() method on it, rather than having to add to the children collection, which I find a bit weird.

eg. DirectoryEntry.Create( DirectoryEntry parentContainer, string commonName, string className );

If you have two constructors, one which just encapsulates an existing physical thing, and another which creates a physical thing, that just doesn't feel right to me. Obviously this is comes down to personal style of coding, and there is nothing technically wrong with doing work in contstructors, I find that I have written more intelligible, easily readable code by clearly differentiating between the two.

My inspiration for this convention came from a Magritte painting, "The Treachery of Images". The painting, just as it says, is not a pipe. It is merely an abstract representation of a pipe. Just like the DirectoryEntry class is not actually a directory entry; it is merely an abstract representation of an object on a server that you can manipulate via code. To construct a instance of a DirectoryEntry class, you'll first need an actual existing directory entry. Let your factory method create that entry, and then return an instance of the class wrapping around it.

Am I babbling yet?

I got a letter and a new card from MasterCard

2007-01-29T19:56:00.000-04:00

Completely out of the blue, I received this letter from MasterCard today, complete with a new card with a new number:

Dear Customer,

At MasterCard, we are constantly working to protect our cardholders from credit card fraud. In connection with a recent investigation, we have reason to believe that your MasterCard #---- ---- ---- ---- may have been compromised. This means that your card number may have become known to an unauthorized person(s).

Although there is no evidence of fraud on your account, we feel it prudent to replace your existing card to avoid any potential misuse. Attached please find a replacement card with a new number. We sincerely apologize for any inconvenience this matter may cause you and appreciate your understanding.

Hrm...this really makes me wonder what the hell happened to my card number. They have attached an FAQ section to the bottom of the letter stating, "Due to an ongoing investigation, we are not able to specify how, when, or where your card was compromised, however, we can confirm that it was not at MasterCard."

Update: I spoke to a MasterCard representative on the phone to activate my new card (on the activation website, neither my old card number nor my new card number would let me in), and he told me that it was Winners/HomeSense who recently had their customer information stolen. Apparently anyone who used a credit card at Winners or Homesense between April and September of 2006 has had their card number compromised.

Now I have to update all of my automatic bills to use my new credit card number, not to mention PayPal, and countless other websites on which I have an account. Fuck you criminals. Fuck you right in the ear.

My first burlesque show

2007-01-29T16:48:00.000-04:00

Saturday night, I did something I had never done before. It wasn't because I thought it was a bad idea, just that I hadn't gotten around to it. I went to a burlesque show at the Seahorse. I was promised beautiful women and breasts covered by nothing but the smallest of pasties.

I wasn't disappointed.

Several of the girls from the Pink Velvet Burlesque troupe performed and it was everything that I hoped it could be -- in a public place. If, when you were growing up, and your mom always watched figure skating on television, and since there was only one TV in the house, you had no choice but to watch it with her, but you had no interest in figure skating, so all you could do was fantasize about the women in tight outfits with blades on their feet, then burlesque is a natural progression.

I'm not sure what kind of (proverbial) balls it takes to get up on a stage while barely clothed with no expectation that people in the audience are going to throw money at you, but these girls have got 'em. There was really nothing strip-club-skanky about the whole thing...it was just hot.

Listen for me on the radio

2007-01-25T10:54:00.000-04:00

I'm going to be a guest on Mixtapes for Heartbreak this Friday evening from 2130h to 2230h. Check it out on CKDU 88.1 FM in Halifax, or on the interweb at ckdu.ca.

Later on, I'll also be taking part in a CKDU-run podcasting seminar. If you're going to be in Halifax on the 2nd of February, and you're interested in learning about the ins and outs of podcasting, feel free to drop by. It'll be at 1800h, February 2nd, on the 4th floor of the Student Union Building at Dalhousie University (6136 University Avenue).

Quest Idol

2007-01-23T14:51:00.000-04:00

I really don't know what to say about this...but I think they did a pretty good job. NetPro, eat your heart out ;)

My Eastlink IP is changing!

2007-01-19T07:59:00.002-04:00

Somewhere around the 12th of Jnanuary, 2007, Eastlink started messing around with the IP blocks that they're handing out to residential customers. For literally years my IP address was completely static, and in the 24.224.0.0/16 range (I don't want to actually give it out in case it is ever given to me again ;)). Now, it's in the 71.7.0.0/16 range.

What's up Eastlink? Are you reorganizing things?

My grand scheme (new URLs and feeds)

2007-01-19T00:16:00.000-04:00

As I've started to do other things, I've started to feel that I no longer really want to have to maintain a website powered by code that I wrote. It's not that it's bad code, I mean, it's served me well. It's just that if there's ever a feature I want, I pretty much have to do it myself. Since a good programmer is a lazy programmer, I have found many other ways online to accomplish what I wanted to do with Spine.cx. As a result, I've decided to start a more professional blog on a domain I should have registered years ago: stevedinn.com, and to move my personal blog over to blog.stevedinn.com.

Don't freak out, spine.cx isn't going anywhere. It's going to stay exactly as it is.

If you would like to find me, however, check out one of those previously mentioned www.stevedinn.com or blog.stevedinn.com.

I also have a grand plan for feeds for all my various things that have feeds. First of all, I'm going to use Feedburner. Everything is going to be available under the umbrella of http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevedinn/. Here's a list of my feeds you can subscribe to:

My new professional blog:
www.SteveDinn.com
http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevedinn
My new personal blog:
blog.SteveDinn.com
http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevedinn/blog
My photos on Flickr.com:
flickr.com/photos/stevedinn
http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevedinn/photos
My links on del.icio.us:
del.icio.us/stevedinn
http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevedinn/links

And of course, there are my other feeds:

My weekly podcast:
SpineRadio.com
http://spineradio.com/rss
My monthly podcast:
zunior.blogspot.com
http://feeds.feedburner.com/zunior

My grand scheme (new URLs and feeds)

2007-01-18T23:28:00.000-04:00

My new professional blog:
www.SteveDinn.com
http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevedinn
My new personal blog:
blog.SteveDinn.com
http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevedinn/blog
My photos on Flickr.com:
flickr.com/photos/stevedinn
http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevedinn/photos
My links on del.icio.us:
del.icio.us/stevedinn
http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevedinn/links

And of course, there are my other feeds:

My weekly podcast:
SpineRadio.com
http://spineradio.com/rss
My monthly podcast:
zunior.blogspot.com
http://feeds.feedburner.com/zunior

Coding with FxCop

2007-01-18T20:59:00.000-04:00

Like my co-worker, Brent, I have recently been in the process of designing an writing components of a prototype for the next version of the project I work on. I haven't been this excited about going to work in quite a while. There's nothing like designing and building something new, rather than testing and fixing bugs, and maintaining legacy code. However, today was the first full day that I had experienced the full onslaught of compiler errors that is FxCop. I felt like I was in university again. For the newbies out there, FxCop is an add-on for your .NET compiler that will check your assemblies for non-conformity and smack them down if they step out of line. It's kind of like the Borg, if the Borg had assimilated an hard-nosed, ruler-smacking elementary school teacher.

I was writing code that I thought was pretty good, but FxCop had other things to say about that. Everything from telling me not to initialize member variables to null (something that was ingrained in me to DO from an early age) for performance reasons, to standards of naming any public members of your classes, to globalization, to security considerations, to suggestions for maintainability, it really has something to say about all aspects of my code. At first, it seemed like it was pointless, like I was never going to get through the nearly-endless stream of errors produced by the tool, but slowly and surely, they dwindled to practically nothing. The only ones that remain (and I've since changed the settings so they only report as warnings) are ones that tell me that nothing is using a certain class or a particular method. Well no shit. We're in the process of building a prototype!

This was one of my favourites...take the following class:

    public class Foo

    {

       private Byte[] privateBytes;

       public Byte[] Bytes{ get{ return privateBytes; } }

    }

The compiler with FxCop tells me that I shouldn't return arrays because it could impact performance. Instead, I should return a strongly-typed collection...of bytes.

Whatever.

But I'm bashing a little too hard, perhaps. On the whole, it's right on the money. I think I only suppressed two or three instances of errors in all the projects that I worked on. I want to have FxCop fully turned on (does that sound dirty?) during the entire development process. Nothing makes you feel better than when what you've created conforms to just about the strictest standards out there, not just of functionality, but of aesthetics. And because nothing is worse than going back and fixing errors in reams and reams of non-compliant code.

However, it can be difficult when your compiler is nudging you, nay, forcing you to implement more, and MORE just to stop the errors. FxCop is like a ghetto pusher, "Just one more method, man...come on, you can fix those errors. Just one more method." Everyone else left the office around 5:30 or so, but I stuck around until 7:15 because I couldn't stand seeing errors. And I enjoyed it.

I think FxCop and I are going to have a love / hate relationship.

There's a Google Store?

2007-01-17T23:39:00.000-04:00

Did you know that there was a Google Store? I'm shocked that I am only just finding out about it today. Incidentally, who knew that a beanbag chair was so expensive? You're probably just paying for the name ;)

I am totally picking up a Blogger t-shirt.

It's Free Subwoofer Day!

2007-01-13T16:43:00.001-04:00

The Futureshop crazy extended warranty has come through for me for a second time. The first time, I ended up bringing back a laptop because the battery wouldn't charge anymore. This time, 6 years (the warranty was good until 2009) after I bought it, I took back a 10" Velodyne subwoofer that had developed a nasty rattle somewhere inside the casing.

The guarantee says that if they take more than 60 days to get it back to you, or if you have to send the same item back more than twice, they'll just replace the item for you with one of equivalent value. 60 days + 1 later, I'm waiting in the customer service line at Futureshop, and it's moving surprisingly fast. The fact that they're going to replace it means to me that I have the opportunity to upgrade. It's like a 6 year layaway plan ;)

I left the store having upgraded to a 15" Velodyne subwoofer (total cost $999). I only paid $310, including a new warranty (I mean why not, it's certainly served me well so far) that covers my new subwoofer until 2016. It is currently sitting in the back of my Honda Element...It's large, heavy, and awkward enough that I haven't quite figured out how I'm going physically move it to the place I want it to be. I'm probably going to have to clean up the downstairs hallway :|

Check back here later...I'll have pictures of the behemoth both in the box and out.

IDSObjectPicker - Why isn't there one for .NET?

2007-01-11T23:32:00.000-04:00

About a year and a half ago, I was writing a piece of software that did a lot of things in Active Directory, with Group Policy Objects specifically, but that's not relevant here. What is relevant is that I wanted to pop up a dialog to allow the user to select one or more user objects from active directory. I had used the IDSObjectPicker interface before, however, all the other times I had used it were in unmanaged C++. This was the first time I would attempt it in managed code.

For the uninitiated, IDSObjectPicker is a goddamn miserable interface. If I met its author on the street, I would punch balls first and ask questions later. It looks unassuming with only two exposed methods, but those methods belie a seething underbelly of complex nested structures and obscure enumerations. You could write a whole page of code just filling out all the required bit masks, creating arrays of other structures to assign to the previous structures, etc.

I honestly thought, given my previous fantastic experiences with C# (especially with COM interop) that this was going to be easier than before. I would reference the COM DLL in which the interface resided, and everything would be marshaled for me.

I was mistaken.

It turns out that this was my first time using COM interop with a COM interface that didn't stick to automation types (BSTR, VARIANT, etc.) for its parameters -- They would just get marshaled across the interop boundary as Objects. I spend about two days writing tedious C# code to re-create enumerated types and manually marshal as much of the parameters and return values as I needed until I got to one particular structure that vexed me.

DSOP_INIT_INFO.apwzAttributeNames

It's not even really a complicated structure. MSDN describes it as a "Pointer to an array of null-terminated Unicode strings". As simple as that sounds, I went as far as manually allocated the array's memory using the Marshal.Alloc* methods, and attempting to binary-copy the memory in an attempt to get it to take that value, but it just wouldn't.

Giving up when it comes to something I'm pretty sure is possible is not something I usually do, but I was ready to punch my monitor at this point (and it was the big, heavy, 19" CRT kind). I eventually threw in the towel and wrote a wrapper COM object in unmanaged C++ for IDSObjectPicker which translated the input parameters from automation-types to pass in, and the return values back to automation-types to pass back. That was the only way I managed to get the IDSObjectPicker working in .NET.

I recently stumbled upon this guy who had the exact same problem that I did, which is what prompted me to make this post. We're not alone.

So WHY isn't there an equivalent, .NET-ified version of this godforsaken interface?

New Windows Server OSs

2007-01-09T13:57:00.000-04:00

In the past few days, I've heard about two new Server OSs that Microsoft is producing. The first, well, we've all known it was coming for some time now: Longhorn. The second, for me at least, popped up almost out of nowhere, but it think it could be a very cool addition to many homes and/or small offices: Windows Home Server.

Windows Home Server

Watch this video. WHS is a server "appliance" that will basically have power, ethernet, and some USB ports. It promises a central repository of drive-letterless, raid-like disk space. Just add a new drive, whether it's PATA, SATA, or USB, and it will be incorporated into the existing internal spaciness of WHS. This in itself is a godsend...no more worries that drive D is running out of space, so you'd better put that movie on drive E, even though all the other movies are on D. It also claims to be able to backup every computer in your house overnight. I don't know how many hard drives I'm going to have to put in this thing so that it can store all my media and back up every computer in my house, but at least it's smart enough to use a single-instance-store; i.e., if two computers are both running XP SP2, they probably have some files in common, so WHS will only store one copy.

The feature that both excites me and worries me is that WHS will automatically organize your files. I typically abhor automated systems of organization (read: iTunes) because they don't often match up with mine ;) But since it will probably have some sort of Windows Desktop Search integrated into the interface, I'm sure I'll still be able to find everything I put on it.

Overall, the concept of a headless box that I can stick in the closet, or somewhere equally discrete is appealing. I mean, it's pretty much what I have at home now, but the ability to just add drives and have it incorporate the new space automatically is a feature that I would be willing to pay for.

Longhorn Server

I recently read this ComputerWorld posting about Longhorn Server and I was intrigued. It seems that Active Directory is going to become a hybrid of a Windows 2000 style multi-master domain controller system and an NT 4.0 style of primary and backup domain controllers. This "new and improved" Active Directory will have the concept of a "Read Only Domain Controller" (or RODC). On the surface, that sounds a whole lot like a BDC with a different acronym, but it's actually more complicated than that.

From the same article:

The RODCs will not cache administrator credentials. I'm still not clear on whether it just won't cache the domain or BUILTIN\Administrator credentials, or the credentials of any account with administrative access, which would make more sense.
The RODCs can be run without a GUI since they require little to no administration on their own.
RODCs can have their own set of "administrators" so that the guy in the branch office where the RODC lives doesn't have to be a domain admin.

Longhorn also promises an updated DFS replication algorithm, which should be good news for anyone who has experienced SysVol replication problems (Why aren't that GPO's settings being applied?). But probably the most significant enhancement is that you can now restart the services responsible for Active Directory without actually restarting the entire machine.

I'm looking forward to both these new server products...Guess I'll have to buy some more hard drives.

Hinterland Ho's Ho?

2007-01-08T20:03:00.006-04:00

Through Jeff MacArthur, via Mike Lazazzera, I bring you the funniest video I've seen this year. It's a fantastic spoof of those classic Hinterland Who's Who videos that always used to run on TV when you were a kid.

A few years ago, I wanted to see if my company was monitoring internet usage by downloading "Beaver.mpg". Nobody ever called me on it, but I kept the file around just in case I had to back up my story. I guess they've reorganized the website since the last time I went there...134_1_E_150.mov doesn't seem to have the same censor-inviting ring to it.

24 Season 6

2007-01-08T01:08:00.004-04:00

Word on the street is that the first four episodes from 24 Season 6 (not intended to be aired until the 14th of January) have been leaked onto the intarweb. Now, should you choose to seek to obtain said episodes, that is your business, and even if I knew how to do such things, I wouldn't say so here. Harumph.

Rumours also flying around (I heard from somebody who might have watched them tonight) is that starring in at least two episodes is Canada's own Shaun Majumder, and in at least three episodes, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine's Siddig El Fadil a.k.a Alexander Siddig. I don't want to give away any plot elements here, so I won't say what roles they're in.

The proposed story line is (no surprises here) that some middle-eastern-looking gentlemen are looking to blow up something American, possibly using nuclear weapons.

Personally, I'm looking forward to Jack Bauer killing various people of all races and creeds. I can't get enough of this shit.

Bauer / O'Brian '08

Is the Noodle Nook finally opening?

2007-01-04T13:40:00.002-04:00

Hopefully, the Noodle Nook on Blowers Street is finally going to open after a lengthy time when nothing was visible inside the place. When I walked by yesterday, however, I noticed some actual woks inside. Maybe that means something?

Save your podcast subscriptions online

2006-12-19T19:54:00.002-04:00

If you're using iTunes to download your podcasts, have you ever had it crash, or otherwise screw up your library of music? Chances are, you didn't lose your actual music, you just had to re-add it to your library. But what about your podcast subscriptions? You probably had to scour the web looking for the websites of podcasts which you never visit just to get your RSS feeds back.

Here's a solution that lets you subscribe to your podcasts using online tools so you never lose a subscription again.

Ok, first, let's go through all the tools I'm going to use:

1. Google Reader
2. Feedburner

That's it!

First, if you don't have one already, get yourself a Google account, and head over to the Google Reader website. Google Reader is an RSS aggregator that lets you tag your different feeds with arbitrary terms. Since we're talking about podcasts here, I suggest you tag your podcast feeds with 'podcasts'. I use the plural podcasts rather than the singular because it lets me distinguish the media feeds from the blogs I read about podcasting. Podcast, the singular form, would match them both.

If you have your feeds in an existing aggregator, like Juice, that lets you export an OPML file of your feeds, Google Reader will allow you to import all of them at once by clicking on the settings option in the upper right and then clicking on the Import/Export tab. This is by far the easiest way to go. If you can't export your feeds, you'll have to copy each one, and subscribe to them in Google Reader individually. Fortunately, this is the only painful part of the process.

After you have all your podcast feeds imported into Google Reader, and you've tagged them all with a uniquely identifiable term, you need to export the feed for all items tagged with that term. Click back to the main google reader page, and then click on settings again, and go to the Tags tab. You should see your 'podcasts' tag along with an RSS icon, a series of concentric orange quarter-circles. Click the icon to make the feed public.

Click on the 'view public page' link to view the exported items. This page should have an ATOM feed associated with it. ATOM is similar to RSS, but most podcast readers can't understand it. We have one more major step to go before iTunes can download your shows.

Copy the ATOM feed for your podcasts and head over to Feedburner.com. Drop the URL for your ATOM feed in the box on the front page, and check off the "I am a podcaster" check box. Click the next button. If you don't already have a Feedburner account, the website will give you the chance to sign up for one now. You can also take this opportunity to pretty-up the name and address for the feed you're going to be subscribing to in iTunes.

That's pretty much it. Now just take the new feed you've created, and subscribe to it in iTunes using the Advanced menu, Subscribe to Podcast (or the podcast downloader of your choice). The URL for your feed will be something like http://feeds.feedburner.com/<what you typed in>. Now, when you want to subscribe or unsubscribe to a podcast, just go to Google Reader, add the RSS feed, and tag it with 'Podcasts' and the shows will get automatically downloaded.

.NET complaint of the month: XmlDocument is not serializable

2006-12-19T19:04:00.000-04:00

I gotta say, on the whole, I'm quite pleased with this .NET Framework that Microsoft has provided us with to develop software with. It's not often that I find something worth complaining about. But this is one of those times.

One of the cool features of .NET is that you can mark a class, or other data structure as serializable, which basically means that the structure and all its data can be easily tossed across a wire, performing a 'deep' copy. This is typically performed by creating an XML representation of that object and its data in a SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) envelope, or some binary form.

Now for the irony: The System.Xml.XmlDocument class is not fucking serializable. Yes, that's right. Microsoft's implementation of the very stuff used to serialize arbitrary objects is itself not serializable. I had to implement my interface with strings instead. Figure that out.

Being sick sucks

2006-12-13T23:23:00.000-04:00

I don't get sick very often, but because of that, when I do get sick, I hate it that much more. In retrospect, I felt this particular sickness coming on a few days in advance, but I was reluctant to admit that I was getting sick, and if I heeded the statistics, chances are that I wasn't.

Fast forward to two days and one holiday party later. I wake up on Monday morning and feel like a bucket of smashed assholes. Feeling this way is enough to make me email in sick for (I think) only the second time this year. Don't tell my boss, but I wasn't really sick the first time...I think I just wanted to sleep in. For those of you who think emailing in sick is weird, I say calling in sick is just a good way to get caught in a lie.

Monday was a horrible day. I was burning up, but still felt, no matter how many clothes I put on, like I was freezing. I'm sitting in front of my computer wearing a sweatshirt, a fleece jacket, and a blanket, shivering. Between catching up on my TV watching, and calling into a scrum meeting, I actually managed to do some work, testing, mostly.

Tuesday morning I felt largely better, save a cough which persists to this day. From experience, this will probably last until at least after the Holiday season, and I get up at 4am to go stand in line at Futureshop for Boxing Day deals.

Interesting way to sell digital music

2006-12-06T10:40:00.000-04:00

I'm regularly browsing Zunior.com, checking out new music that I can play on the podcast, and I came across an interesting idea that they had: a digital box gift set where MP3s get snail mailed to you on a USB thumbdrive that you get to keep as well.

It's obviously not as speedy as a download, but you actually get something physical, which is kind of cool, and thumbdrives are definately useful. I thought this was a cool idea, especially for a gift. Sending someone a download doesn't exactly feel "festive", but the thumbdrive could actually be wrapped and given as a present.

My episode of commandN is online

2006-12-05T14:49:00.000-04:00

In case you weren't clicking 'reload' on the page as much as I was, looking for this week's episode of commandN, it came online just moments ago. My segment starts at about 2 minutes in.

@#$%! Snow

2006-12-04T20:51:00.001-04:00

I'm surprised I'm the first one to post about this. Maybe the rest of you are still stuck in traffic. More people should do audio posts...It's very therapeutic.

As you might expect, this audio is loaded with expletives. Handle with care.

Steve017SnowRant.mp3

(audio/mpeg)

2.6 MB

[ Download ]

You like Christmas music, right?

2006-12-03T14:05:00.000-04:00

I'm sure that some of you know that in addition to Spine Radio, I also do a music podcast for Zunior.com. This month, I produced a mostly-holiday-themed episode that you might enjoy. Don't worry, it's not overly sappy sweet with holiday cheer...I don't think I could stand that either.

If you're interested, you can find it at zunior.blogspot.com, and if you like it, you can subscribe with the Zunior.com Podcast's RSS feed.

For anybody who missed the chance to win the Thurstons album I gave away in a previous episode of Spine Radio, you have another chance to get it in the Christmas episode of the Zunior.com Podcast.

ZuniorPodcast008.mp3

(audio/mpeg)

60.6 MB

[ Download ]

Windom Earle at Stage Nine

2006-12-01T15:05:00.000-04:00

I'm killing myself waiting for this show. Go check out Windom Earle tonight at Stage Nine or you'll regret it. I mean it. They rocked the house at the Sappy Records Music Festival, and they'll rock the house again, I'm sure of it.

MySpace is a scourge (to tabbed browsing)

2006-11-30T08:15:00.000-04:00

The worst thing about MySpace isn't the ugliness of the site. It isn't the fact that it's horribly slow. For anybody who uses tabbed browsing regularly, it's got to be the music player that starts playing as soon as the page loads.

I can appreciate the use of MySpace for discovering bands that I haven't heard before, but I often want to click on somebody's friends and open them up in new tabs for me to peruse at my leisure. If any of them have music players, they will all start playing. <sarcasm>And nothing sounds as awesome as 4 completely different songs playing at once.</sarcasm>

Why can't the song play after I click play? I don't have a "music" myspace account, but if this is a setting, I'm going to start cursing every band who doesn't turn it off.

Image courtesy of xkcd, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language.

Also, does it piss anyone else off that the retarded graphical madness that goes on in myspace's music player has absolutely nothing to do with the shit that's playing? They look like VU meters, but they correspond in no way to the actual output levels.

I'm going to be on commandN

2006-11-29T21:15:00.000-04:00

Jeff MacArthur, one of the co-hosts of commandN came by my house tonight to film a segment about audio podcasting for their next episode.

Jeff does the techTIPS segment for commandN, and along with his sister Amber MacArthur, and a few friends, they kick out a 15-minute-long, tech-centric video of news, tips, and web-picks every week.

Be sure to check it out. Jeff tells me that my episode will be on the web on Monday (December 4th).

New condom technology

2006-11-27T23:16:00.000-04:00

Who would have thought that they could improve on the condom? I mean, everybody knows they suck, but they do the job, right?

I must admit, I haven't thought about it much myself, but you wouldn't think there was much room to advance in prophylactic technology, but then there it is, a huge fucking advance (no pun intended) in prophylactic technology.

FREE Shotgun and Jaybird Tickets

2006-11-27T22:27:00.000-04:00

For anyone who doesn't typically read the Spine Radio blog, I'm posting this on the main page because in this week's show I'm giving away two free passes to the Shotgun and Jaybird show on December 9th.

You're dumb if you don't try and go. My company holiday party is that night, and I'm still going to try to go. Shotgun and Jaybird are worth paying to go see, and you could do it for free, I can't imagine why you wouldn't.

Listen to the show for instructions on how to cash in. Check out Shotgun and Jaybird's MySpace for examples of what you'll miss if you don't go.

Random thought

2006-11-23T16:13:00.000-04:00

Body parts are like remote controls: They cost almost nothing to produce, but they're very expensive to replace.

Selling vintage computers on Ebay

2006-11-23T01:03:00.000-04:00

I am selling some vintage computers on Ebay right now. If you're in the market for some museum pieces or just looking for a better doorstop, go on and take a look at my auctions. If you're in Halifax, I'll deliver them to you for free.

Just think, YOU could own the machine that launched my career as a software developer, the Commodore Vic 20. At the tender age of 5, I wrote my first line of BASIC on that very keyboard. Or you could proudly display your very own MacQuarium made from the MacIntosh Plus. The possibilities are endless.

Bid Now!
Commodore Vic 20 head unit only untested
Apple MacIntosh Plus with 20SC external hard drive
Commodore Vic 20 with TV adapter and manual

Sounds re-instated after IE 7 upgrade

2006-11-20T22:30:00.000-04:00

I recently upgraded to IE 7 thanks to Windows Update. I thought everyone could benefit from something that I noticed after I started using it for a while.

The machine I upgraded was the one I use to record the Spine Radio and Zunior.com Podcasts on. If you noticed in the latest episode of Spine Radio that there were a couple of beeps and clicks, then you'll know what I'm about to complain about.

I had my system sounds turned off; "No Sounds" was the profile that I had chosen. After installing IE 7, it had gone ahead and added all explorer's sounds back again -- very annoying. Definitely something to be aware of if you use your PC for recording things.

CCTV Cameras + Google Video = Halifax's next income source

2006-11-20T11:06:00.000-04:00

I've been thinking about the new video camera that Halifax has focused on the corner of Grafton and Blowers, "Pizza Corner" for us locals. Cameras are great for capturing all the stupid shit we do -- especially when we're drunk. And where do most drunken videos end up?

YouTube. Or basically, due to the recent 1.6 billion dollar acquisition, what the internet is calling "GooTube".

Now that the concept of revenue sharing has been introduced for videos on Google Video, the City of Halifax should take advantage of all the closed circuit TV cameras in the downtown area, and get some of the content up on the web for the rest of us to enjoy and laugh at. This might do more to discourage vandalism and crime, when the potential criminals know that there could be millions of eyes watching them break the law. Of course it might encourage people to show off for the cameras as well, but at the very least, Halifax can make a quick cash grab from one of the most lucrative sources on the web: Google Ads.

Best purchase I've made all day

2006-11-17T14:16:00.000-04:00

Enough said.

My photos on LeftHip.com

2006-11-13T18:12:00.000-04:00

The rumours are true -- I'm all kinds of new media. Not only do I have a mean radio voice, but I take a wicked photo as well. A couple of my photos from the Halifax Pop Explosion were used for a feature on the Pop Explosion by Left Hip Magazine.

Headphones

2006-11-06T14:19:00.000-04:00

About once a year, I go on a hunt for a pair of headphones. Last year, I picked up a Sennheiser HD570 set. I found them to be a great pair for home listening, but they're not exactly what I'd call 'portable'. I also bought some inexpensive cans for the Spine Radio Studios, but they're hardly ideal.

VS.

What I'd really like to find is a set of headphones that can block most of the ambient sound so that I can only hear what I'm monitoring. More than once I've tried to record a rock show, and I only found out afterwards that my recording was crap -- I couldn't distinguish between my recording and the actual show, and the levels were completely overloaded. I only have a little MP3 player to record on, and I suppose the real solution is to buy a proper solid-state recorder with VU meters and other indications that the recording was peaking, but those are generally pretty expensive.

My other problem is that my head is just fucking huge. This presents two issues with the majority of headphones out there today. Headphones that fit other people constantly squeeze my head and give me massive headaches if I wear them for any appreciable amount of time. Headphones that don't cover the entire ear are just uncomfortable.

Those HD-570s I talked about before completely cover my entire ear, and are actually very comfortable for me. Does anyone know if there is a "closed" style of those? Closed, as opposed to open style, is important, because when you have a microphone in your face, and headphones on your ears, sound can bleed back into the mic. While this doesn't cause the feedback squeal that having your speakers & mic on at the same time would, it'll give you a weird sounding reverb.

I don't expect anyone else has these problems, but on the off chance that somebody does, what did you do?

Sons of Butcher, TONIGHT at Stage Nine!

2006-10-23T13:23:00.000-04:00

They're playing here, in Halifax, tonight, at Stage 9.

Halifax Pop Explosion 2006

2006-10-22T23:45:00.000-04:00

How I could I write about the Halifax Pop Explosion without playing music? I decided to put my thoughts in an MP3.

Check it out.

Links:
Shotgun and Jaybird
The Sourkeys
Pony Up!
The Diableros
Duchess Says

Steve015.mp3

(audio/mpeg)

25.1 MB

[ Download ]

My own personal feed, burned

2006-10-17T17:49:00.000-04:00

Just now, I went and hooked myself up with a feedburner feed for my personal blog here on Spine.cx. What's really cool is that I found out that I can have all the links that I post with del.icio.us, and all the photos I post on Flickr spliced into the feed with no extra effort from me. I'm all about being lazy. I think it will also automatically change any MP3 I link to into a podcast enclosure as well, if you're into that sort of thing.

So, if you want the one-stop-shop for all things Steve, check it out:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/stevedinn

Motorola SLVR L7 Review

2006-10-16T23:25:00.000-04:00

Last week, I bought a Motorola SLVR L7 from a guy on eBay. It's basically like the RAZR, but it's the candy bar style of phone instead of a flip phone. So far, I'm liking it. It's not that I didn't like my iMate Jasjar, but there are some obvious advantages that the SLVR has over it. For one, it's an insane amount smaller and lighter. It also has an almost completely metal body, which I'm sure adds to the weight, but makes it feel very sturdy in your hand. The Jasjar has WAY more processing power, and a much bigger screen, but after carrying it around in my pocket for more than a year, I really started to yearn for something that wouldn't weigh my pants down and clunk against my leg when I took every step. (Not that I don't have that problem already...rimshot!)

The SLVR is just a smidge over a centimeter thick, and not very much taller than a RAZR when it's closed. You can honestly hardly even tell it's in your pocket. The things that drew me to the SLVR/RAZR over other phones was not only this form factor, but also the fact that its connection for data and charging was not some esoteric $80 cable that my older Nokia phone required, but a standard mini-USB cable.

Given that the phone has a standard USB jack in the side of it, I can plug it into my computer, and automatically have my contacts synchronized to it...I didn't have to re-type in a single one. I can also easily get the photos onto my computer to post via flickr or anywhere I choose. I really pity most people that have to use their data plans to send themselves photos through email or some other such kludge. The camera isn't really that great; it only takes 640x480 images. Obviously camera-phones don't replace real digital cameras unless you really don't care about your photos.

Contacts on Motorola phones took a little bit of getting used to for somebody who's only used Nokia phones up until now. Nokia phones' contacts were grouped by the contact name, whereas the Motorola doesn't seem to group contacts at all by default. I managed to get this worked out, but it wasn't as intuitive as I would have thought.

I'm sure some of you are yelling at the screen that I should have just read the manual. Well, that's where you'd be correct. However, I did read the useless, waste-of-pulp, craptastic, bundle of pages that sullies the name of manuals everywhere and it has not much more than a diagram labeling the buttons. Fortunately there are many, many people who use the RAZR, which uses the same software as the SLVR, and one of them was able to tell me what I needed to do. It's not like it would have made or broken the phone for me, but it's nice that I can make it do what I want.

For all you crazy kids who like your ring tones, it's easy to add them to the SLVR. Just like you can drag all your photos off of the phone, you can drag MP3s onto it. I've managed to add a separate ring tone to each person who I would normally call or would call me. There's only about 6 megs of space on the phone, so I made them 15 seconds or less and encoded them at 48 kbps and 22 kHz. When played on the phone, there's no noticeable loss in quality, because that's about as good as the speaker is anyway.

That's all I have to say about it after a week of using the phone. It's actually more remarkable that I don't have more annoyances to report. That's something in itself. I guess that means it's pretty good :)

Sunday Shopping

2006-10-15T16:50:00.000-04:00

As I'm sure everybody here expected, I made it my mission to go out shopping on Sunday. I headed for Bayers Lake and shopped at both Futureshop and the Superstore.

Futureshop was completely unprepared for how busy their store was going to be. Only one checkout was open and the line-up quickly wound its way past all reasonable lengths. Even when the second checkout opened, it still took quite a while to get through. At the Superstore, it was even worse -- they were prepared, but the crowds still overwhelmed the cashiers. See the pictures below.

Spine.cx mentioned in the Halifax Herald

2006-10-11T17:41:00.000-04:00

In case you hadn't caught it, Spine.cx was mentioned in the Halifax Herald a couple of days ago. I'm wouldn't be surprised if you didn't catch it; it was quite inconspicuous. It was only after it was pointed out to me by Brent that I saw it myself.

Anyway, it looks as though they were looking for confirmation of public opinion for their story on musicians licensing their music for ads, and they googled something and found my previous blog post about hearing Joel Plasket in a Zellers ad. They then shamelessly stole the text without so much as a link back here or a nod to the original poster (Keely).

I maintain that I posted that a full 5 months before it showed up in the Herald. I'm on the fucking ball, you all know it :)

The Michelin RAZR?

2006-10-07T14:28:00.000-04:00

This case for the Motorola RAZR makes it look like it was made by Michelin. I suppose it might also save it from a fall down the stairs:

It's about time

2006-10-04T13:21:00.000-04:00

A Nova Scotia judge has issued a ruling stating that the provincial government went beyond its powers by preventing grocery stores from opening 7 days a week.

The article goes on to say that the Premier would "clear the way for wide-open Sunday shopping". Hopefully this means that full-blown, non-grocery store openings aren't far behind. I feel like we're finally catching up to the rest of the world -- too bad it had to involve the courts.

I should write the Coast with this

2006-09-26T08:29:00.000-04:00

So, the Rolling Stones were here. They set up on the Commons nearest the corner of Cogswell and North Park streets. North Park street was blocked off and the traffic light pattern was changed. I am not going to complain about sitting on Rainnie drive at a constant red light for 10 minutes last week (I ran it, despite the fact that there were 5 uniformed cops right on the other side of the intersection). I understood that things would probably be fucked up until the stage was torn down and all the tractor trailers were removed from North Park Street.

Would somebody please tell me why that nobody took at look at how those lights were supposed to work before they changed them? I drove through that intersection today, as it is my regular route to work, and whomever set it back to "normal" obviously didn't understand how much of a bitch that 5-way intersection is and that some of the lights are supposed to have an advance flashing green. Well now they don't; I spent about 25 minutes waiting on North Park Street in a huge line-up of traffic trying to turn left. This is a distance that I can usually cover in less than 4 minutes in heavy traffic.

This really seems like something that should be pretty fucking brain-dead: Back up traffic light pattern. Apply Rolling Stones traffic light pattern. When Rolling Stones leave, re-apply backed up traffic light pattern.

Ugh.

Here's the intersection I'm talking about, so you out-of-towners can commiserate with me.

Spine Radio on CKDU redux

2006-09-25T23:13:00.000-04:00

After receiving confirmation from the powers that be, I am more sure than ever that Spine Radio will hit the actual airwaves tonight at 0100h. I realize it's a bit late to post this in the hopes that anyone is going to listen live, but if you're curious what it actually sounded like on the radio, you can download it from the CKDU archive page. If you're reading this on or after September 26th, this link should download the show that was aired, plus about 5 minutes on either side.

Transformers fan film - The Rude Awakening of Optimus Prime

2006-09-14T09:24:00.000-04:00

This has got to be one of the funniest fan-made videos I've seen in a long time. Of course, I probably find it funnier than most because I watched every damn episode of the Transformers like I would break out in hives if I didn't.

Rodimus, give me back that fucking matrix immediately.

Spine Radio on CKDU

2006-09-12T23:50:00.000-04:00

For anybody who listening for it like I was, Spine Radio was NOT broadcast last night (Tuesday @ 01:00) on CKDU, 88.1 FM in Halifax, nor was it the previous week as I had thought. I sent an email to the program director at the station and she's looking into why it hasn't been airing. I guess most of the overnight programming is automated, and it is set into motion by the last actual live DJ to be in the studio the previous evening. My guess is that that DJ just didn't know the schedule had been updated and was still setting the overnight playlist to what it had been previously. Hopefully before the month of September is out, we will have heard Spine Radio on the actual airwaves at least once :)

To all you insomniac students out there who may want to listen, the web version is going to be at least a full week ahead of the one on CKDU, so the best way to get it is still to head over to SpineRadio.com and subscribe.

Apple releases iTunes 7.0

2006-09-12T23:41:00.000-04:00

Earlier tonight, Apple released iTunes 7.0, mainly a vehicle to allow the sale of movies through the iTunes store, and an update to the video iPods to allow them to play downloadable games. I'm happy because the updates fixed a few of the biggest problems that I had with the iPod/iTunes combo.

First off, they fixed a simple problem by having the iPod's screen stay lit (at the minimum brightness) when it's connected to your computer. This is useful because when you dock your iPod, the screen changes to a flashing "Do not disconnect" message that you can't always see if the screen goes dark. Since the iPod is charging anyway, there are no worries about your battery going dead because the screen is on.

Second, I had a weird problem that occurred most of the time when I docked my iPod. It would forget what I had listened to! If I listened to 10 podcasts before I docked, and then checked the status of my iPod in iTunes after I docked, my iPod would forget that I listened to those 10 songs. What a pain in the ass! More often than not, I found myself scrolling through those tracks again, just to mark them as played. I had heard from some of my Mac-using friends that they didn't have this problem, so I think it was probably only a PC thing.

Combined with the small little utility I had to write to monitor my podcast share on my server machine and automatically sync the new shows to my iTunes library and then to my iPod, I'm quite happy with everything now. My next step is to write a service to continually monitor iTunes to see if my iPod is docked, and then to do the syncing automatically instead of having to run the damn thing manually.

At least it asks...

2006-08-31T14:57:00.000-04:00

Camping is fun

2006-08-24T16:35:00.000-04:00

I need a hobby. Well, a hobby other than one that involves me sitting in front of a computer. Anything that doesn't involve me being sedentary. I've established for myself that I hate softball, so that's out. What else is there?

Recently, while on my trip to Boston, we camped to do it on the cheap. (With 4 people in the car, and discounting all the stuff I bought, the trip only cost us $95 each!) Besides the few trips to Blomidon that a group of us did a few years ago, I hadn't really been camping since I was a kid. I kind of like it. In the past couple of weeks, I found myself buying a tent and some hiking boots. I think I'm even going to try and fit my girthy frame with a pack large enough to go on a multi-day hike. And I'm more than a bit excited by the prospect. I'm not interested in many things that don't have circuit boards and a power source, so this is pretty cool.

There are a group of people at my place of business who are planning such an expedition, but I'm not sure I want to go too fast too soon and more importantly, I don't want to be the guy at the back slowing everyone else down.

I guess this kind of links into my post about cool camping locations, but I wanted to see if anyone's game for heading out to Kejimkujik sometime in September and maybe trying to get to one of the campsites that aren't directly accessible by roads. It would be cool to see if some newbies like me would be willing to go because then we can move at our own pace and commiserate if things go poorly :)

I'd also be into attempting some hiking and camping in the winter months too. You might think, "Why the fuck would you go out camping in the winter?" I'd reply that it's the perfect time to go camping: There are no bugs, and you'll never have appreciated a campfire or hot chocolate as much in your life. You have to be prepared for the weather, for sure, but you can't have a snowball fight in the summer.

If anyone is interested, post here or fire me off an email.

Go see David Picco at Ginger's and/or Gus'

2006-08-17T11:00:00.000-04:00

My step-brother, David Picco is going to be touring Atlantic Canada in the next few weeks. (He's from Newfoundland, but is currently living in Toronto.) He's playing on Saturday, August 26th at Ginger's Tavern on Barrington Street, and then again on Wednesday, September 6th at Gus' Pub on Agricola.

Anway, it would be really cool if people could come out and support him because I think this is the only way he gets to eat. Check out his music on his myspace page: http://myspace.com/davidpicco.

18 ways to stay focused at work

2006-08-15T09:01:00.000-04:00

Blogger Dave Cheong has come up with a list of 18 ways to stay focused and more productive at work. I'll bet one of them is not posting on your blog...unless your blog is your work...I wonder what that's like?

Free CDs (for the price of postage)

2006-07-25T21:29:00.000-04:00

I mentioned this a couple of weeks ago in a Spine Radio episode, but Brobdingnagian Records is giving away albums for the measly cost of packing material and postage. I can't think of a much better deal.

When they're gone, they're gone, so stock up!

ANOTHER new radio station?

2006-07-22T21:56:00.000-04:00

Driving around today, I noticed a van beside me in traffic with 88.9 something something on the side. Unfortunately, this is another fucking classic rock station.

Yes, exactly. That is exactly what Halifax needs. We have a huge shortage of classic rock stations in this city and I, for one, am a huge proponent of being able to fill my car radio presets with nothing but stations with cheesy-ass DJs playing the Rolling Stones and Aerosmith 24/7. Please, can we get 4 more classic rock stations? That's all I need. I don't get to hear Stairway to Heaven enough times in a day.

Fuck.

Now, this "new" station is just an FM re-broadcast of the AM station 960 CHNS (or vice-versa, depending on how you look at it). Oldies 96 is apparently no more; not that I care. As much as I dislike Z103, at least they're trying to give us something that we don't yet have.