cat /dev/brain

Category: Personal

  • Canoe Update

    I’ve done some more work on the canoe, the sides are covered, and one half of the bottom is complete. Next up is cutting a very precise center line and finishing the other half of the bottom. More pictures available on my Picasa page. From Canoe From Canoe I’m writing this using the new WordPress…

  • Rosie

    Meet the latest member of our family. She’s a Cockapoo, a mix between a Cocker Spaniel and a smaller Poodle. She’ll (hopefully) have the brains of a poodle and the temperament of a Cocker Spaniel, but that remains to be seen. “Rosie” is about 7 weeks old, and well on her way to being house…

  • The Pinery

    Last weekend found us at The Pinery, a provincial park on the shore of Lake Huron. We bought a tent trailer a few weeks ago, and needed to test it out. Any excuse will do for to go on a vacation, so away we went. After going through a thunderstorm in a trailer, we’re sold…

  • Holiday Roundup

    I’ve been off work for the past 10 days, and I tried my best not to touch my computer during that time. It didn’t entirely work, but apart from responding to some personal email and watching a few movies, I didn’t do much else. I do have a vague recollection of spending an entire night…

  • my name in print, take 2

    I wrote another article for BEA’s dev2dev site, published today! It’s about WebLogic 9.0 (released a month ago), specifically about the new JMS (Java Messaging) features. It’s available here for your perusal.

  • Canada’s Immigration Policy

    Perhaps this should be titled “Canada’s Immigration Policy: Just say NO!”. Read this article from a gentleman who works for the Calgary Catholic Immigration Society, a noble and honourable society and you’ll feel sick inside. Perhaps Immigration Canada has forgotten that apart from the native American’s we are all immigrants, if not first or second…

  • April showers? Ya right!

    Between Saturday morning and Sunday evening we were dumped with 30cm (12 inches) of snow. Not showers, but cold, slushy, wet snow. It was so wet that if you touched it with a shovel in a desperate attempt to dig out your car, it turned to slush and instantly doubled in weight. The worst part…

  • tobogganing

    Sometimes you end up doing something that brings back a lot of fond memories. A few days ago Noah (4), his Uncle Ben (16) and I (??) took Ben’s toboggan (the GT Snowracer kind with a steering wheel) down a hill. We quickly decided that a hill needs a ramp. Noah liked the ramp up…

  • blogroll through bloglines

    I’ve been using bloglines to keep track of all the news and blog sites I visit. Rather than visitting them daily or weekly bloglines subscribes to all of them (using RSS or Atom), and I only visit bloglines to see what’s new in the world. The benefits of bloglines are endless, especially when compared to…

  • my name in print

    I recently wrote an article for BEA’s dev2dev site about integrating something called CruiseControl with Workshop Applications. If that piques your curiosity or if you’re just wondering what I do for a living, have a look here. The really cool part is that O’Reilly (the world’s best publisher of computer books) runs the site. So…

  • jumping it out

    About two years ago Jodie (my lovely wife) lost the engagement ring I proposed to her with. Subsequent searching and tearing apart drain traps etc did not turn up the missing ring. A few months ago we bought a new couch, and moved the old one downstairs, where the kids use it as a trampoline.…

  • offsets

    Offsets are the plague-of-the-week in my life. At work, we’re having trouble with messaging, seems some of the message headers are messed up, some of the bytes are offset by one. It causes all sorts of havoc like messages not going where they’re supposed to and other such grief. At home, I realized all the…

  • Happy New Year!

    This post has been a long time in coming. So first of all, Happy New Year! We had an excellent holiday, so good in fact that I didn’t touch a computer for something like 7 days in a row. That’s a record for me, and a well deserved break after the crunch we went through…

  • ponies

    Today’s picture of the week is brought to you by Mikaela, with fresh ‘ponies’ right after her bath. They only stay like that for a few minutes while they’re still wet. Her hair is getting so long she can hardly get through a door like this.

  • Picture of the week

    I’m going to start posting the picture of the week, for two reasons. One is so I’ll be forced to keep up with sorting my digital pictures, and the second is to keep posting. I’ll also post any pictures you may want to submit, but I reserve the right to deny them. The album is…

  • sleeping babies, part II

    A few days ago I posted about sleeping babies. The question crossed my mind later in the day, why can’t I sleep like that? The seemingly obvious answer is that kids have no worries, their parent take care of it all. Oh, perhaps they do have some concerns, but nothing compared to work, marriage, taking…

  • elections

    Seven days and counting until Canada’s national election. Canadians are notoriously apathetic when it comes to elections, with something like 40% voter turnout. Mind you, that’s higher than our friends down south, but it’s rather poor, especially when there’s so much uproar about the current government. The issue of voter privacy is a very interesting…

  • test of version 1.2

    I’ve just upgrade my blogging software to WordPress 1.2. Mostly I’ve done this because the new version can upload files, and create thumbnails. The only pictures I have to show are those of my two children (who thankfully finally went to sleep). So here they are:

  • kids falling all over

    After watching my two lovely children tumble all over the place for the past few years, including falling down stairs, tumbling off bikes, splatting off rollerblades and wiping out on playgrounds, I’ve come to a few conclusions as to why children don’t hurt themselves as often as adults. If an adult fell the same number…

  • Hit Counter

    After a bit of digging in between lectures and labs I have a rudimentary hit counter going on the bottom of my page. Not that anyone reads this blog…. but at least I can see how often I reload this page. 😉