Driving through Waterloo today, a guy in the next lane flagged me down while waiting at a red light. “Hey buddy, wanna buy a home theatre? It’s still in the box, I got the receipts! Real cheap!”. My only response was to laugh and drive away. It left so many unanswered questions…

We have just returned from yet another camping trip to Algonquin Park. I’ve uploaded some pictures to my flickr page. It rained a lot, but we caught some fish, swam, saw some sun, investigated a bear print on the trail, and generally had a good time.

I’ve very recently switched to using a MacBook Pro at work, and consequently have moved from using Microsoft Outlook to Microsoft Entourage as my main email client. As an aside, I rather dislike Outlook, and have tried Thunderbird, but Exchange’s IMAP implementation is broken, causing all sorts of grief, and the lack of calendar integration…

Is the Caps Lock button on your keyboard useless? Mine is… or it was until yesterday. The old HP console keyboards, found only in datacenters attached to very large servers, had the ‘Esc’ key where the Caps Lock key traditionally is. It took a bit to get used to that, but very quickly you realized…

This morning I received an email with a knock-knock joke from Mikaela (age five). It said: nok nok hooz thar kamol kamol hoo i thot you wr supoost to wok a mile not 2 sekinz love MIKAELA. She wrote it phonetically, spelling the words the way they sound. If you read it out loud, you…

A few days ago my garage door broke. Specifically the big spring broke. Having helped a few times with replacing a similar spring, I understood the dangers of doing, but this guy made me laugh out loud with the title “How I replaced deadly garage door springs, and lived to tell the tale”. He has…

I spent too much time on this today. RedHat’s documentation on “Channel Bonding Interfaces” for RedHat EL 4 is mostly correct, but seems to forget a step. I had to add this line to /etc/modprobe.conf: install bond0 /sbin/modprobe bonding -o bonding0 miimon=100 mode=1 Hope that saves some else some time.

Stuck waiting for a train yesterday evening, at a country-side crossing that’s rarely used, I had to check three times to make sure I was seeing what I thought I was seeing. When you expect the regular and mundane, and suddenly see the unexpected, you sometimes doubt your sanity. Rather than a regular old train…

Anyone who’s done any sort of programming for profit (instead of for fun) will enjoy this article. And the rest of you should read it to understand what we sometimes go through. 🙂

Seems I’ve been slacking in keeping this blog up to date. To keep you amused while I try to remember what I’ve done for the past six months, I bring you this picture, courtesy diy.despair.com and Noah Hart. For those curious, this photo was not deliberately setup. It simply happened. Those with young boys in…

Yesterday I drove to Mississauga, and used Google Maps to give me an initial idea of where I was going. I was annoyed because it took me over the 407, a very expensive toll road. Unfortunately there was no way to change the route, so I made one up on my own and used BlackBerry…

I finally figured out how to do the equivalent of a “CTRL-V” or Paste on a BlackBerry: hold down the Alt or Num key and click the trackball. Sounds really simple, but it took forever to find it.

I scored a 74. What is your score?

I use vmware on my laptop (Thinkpad T60p running Linux) since for a few remaining items at work I still have to run Windows. However the last update brought my Linux kernel up to 2.6.20 and vmware would no longer run. I found this lovely hack (1oth response down) that worked as advertised. Now I’m…

While walking down a tree-lined path, two of my colleagues who have just arrived from the UK asked me about some birds that were making a tremendous racket in the trees. The conversation went something like this: Them: Mike, what kind of birds are those Mike: Which ones? Them: Those black ones with red spots…

Check out how this guy fixes high voltage power lines. Absolutely fantastic.

I’ve been running Linux on my laptop at work for the past six weeks and have gotten to really like the Thunderbird email client (which works on Windows and Mac’s too). Version 2.0 has been released today, it’s excellent. It ties in nicely to Exchange, threads messages somewhat reasonably, and is usually quite stable. If…

This thought is brought to you by one of Jodie’s professors, about the various religious and meaningful holidays turned into chocolate holidays. Christmas: we celebrate the birth of chocolate. Valentines Day: celebration of the love of chocolate. Thanksgiving: give thanks for chocolate Easter: celebrate the rebirth of chocolate after giving it up for forty days…

I have been neglecting this space for a while. My sincere apologies to anyone who actually wants to read the gibberish I write. My only excuse is that I’ve switched jobs. I now work for I can’t tell you. As I’m finding out, switching careers is not a task taken lightly, especially not when you…