Friday, October 27, 2006

Dumb lyrics and new stuff

One of the advantages of working at home, which I do every Friday, is that I can put music on actual speakers, rather than use headphones, which I sometimes do in the office. Plus, my selection of music is bigger at home than at work, because I haven't ripped my entire CD collection yet. For example, right now I'm listening to Tom Cochrane's excellent live album The Symphony Sessions, which I haven't listened to in ages. But every time I hear the Tom Cochrane song "Good Times", I have to shake my head at the following lyric:

Oh, good times we had
Wouldn't worry about tomorrow 'cause tonight was all we had, yeah
Oh, good times we knew
I'd tell you about them baby, but you were there
you were with me too

"I'd tell you about them, but you were there"? C'mon Tom, surely you could have done better than that.

I got a couple of new things this week: one available to everyone, and one specific to me. Mozilla Firefox 2.0 was released a couple of days ago, and I've already upgraded both my home and work machines. Honestly, I haven't noticed much of a difference. Everything I use pretty much works as it did before — seamlessly. One difference is that there's a spell-checker built-in, so hopefully my blog postings won't contain any speling mistaiks spelling mistakes. Strange how the word "blog" is marked as being spelled wrong, and it doesn't like html tags either...

The other new thing I got this week was a new radio for my car. My old radio was a JVC MP3 player that I got a few years ago, which served me very well, but was starting to get flaky. First off, one of the letters on the display was broken (probably because I dropped the faceplate one too many times), and more importantly, the CD player stopped working reliably. If there was no CD in the player, it would complain a lot, with some cryptic error message, beeping, and cutting the radio out for a couple of seconds. If you tried to put a CD in, it would frequently complain about it and spit it back out, or accept it, spend 10-15 seconds reading the disk, and then spit it out. I'd spend 10-15 minutes trying to get the damn disk in the player, and then I'd have to keep that disk in for the next couple of weeks, because taking it out and trying to put another one in was just too much work.

The new one is made by a company called "Dual", which I've never heard of, but the radio was cheap at Wal-Mart (sorry Tom). Mine doesn't seem to be shown on the Dual web site, but this one looks exactly the same and has the same features, though I think mine has less power. It has all the features of my old one, I think, plus it will play WMA files, which the old one wouldn't. There are a few things that annoy me about the new one, though:

  • You can't see the radio station / CD track name and the clock at the same time. However, powering on and off is much faster, and it shows the clock when the power is off, which the old one did not (unless you pressed the "Display" button).
  • The old radio would let you name radio stations, so if I was listening to Q107, the display would say "Q107" (once I programmed that in) rather than "107.1". This one just shows frequencies.
  • The new one takes a long time to decode MP3 tracks — when I switch from radio to a CD (even one that I was listening to before I put the radio on), it takes upwards of 15 seconds before a track starts playing. Surely the computer in the radio is advanced enough that it can pre-read the CD so that it has the next, say, 30 seconds of music in memory and ready to play once I switch to CD mode.
  • When playing MP3 tracks, my old one would display the album name once at the beginning of the album, and then display the track name, and leave the track name on during the song. The new one shows whatever you ask for (track name for me), but nothing else unless you cycle through the viewing options.
  • When navigating through songs and albums, they've decided that the most useful thing to show is the track number, rather than the song or album name. To jump ahead to another album or track, I need to: (1) let the song play long enough to identify it, (2) wait for 5-10 seconds until it decides to show me the track name, or (3) start clicking buttons until it shows me the track name. Of course, this is a car stereo, so it would have been nice for the designers to give a little bit of extra thought to the usability factor; if I'm futzing with the radio while driving, I want to be able to do stuff as quickly as possible.

All in all, it'll be fine. I'll get used to the limitations quickly I'm sure, and it no longer takes 15 minutes to change CDs, so that's a plus.

Monday, October 23, 2006

Angels and Demons

A guy at Gail's work has been married for over 20 years. A couple of years after he got married, his wife was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis; since then, she's needed constant care. He's hired a nurse to care for her while he's at work, and he does it the rest of the time. He hasn't been on a vacation in 20 years, and has no social life to speak of. Gail once told me that because of his devotion to his wife, he's a wonderful man; she actually referred to him as an "angel". But it occurred to me — what choice did he have? His only real alternatives are to put her in a home of some kind, or leave her. Either way, what are people going to say then? "He dumped her in a home so he could go off on a vacation? What a selfish bastard." So if he gives up everything to care for his wife, he's an angel, but if he doesn't, he's a scum-sucking dirtbag.

What if he's neither? What if he's just a regular guy?

My wife does a lot of volunteering. She is the chair of the school council for Ryan and Nicholas' school (this is Ryan's fourth year of school; Gail's been chair or co-chair of the council for three of them), and she's on the YMCA School Age Child Care parent committee (though they only meet a couple of times a year). Both of us also volunteer a half-day a month in our kids classrooms, and we have since Ryan was in JK. Ryan's in grade two now, and his teacher doesn't take volunteers (she says she's too much of a perfectionist, wanting to do everything herself and I can understand that), but Nicky's JK teacher does.

This year, Gail has become a Beaver leader. Last week, we were talking about the fact that Ryan is in his last year of Beavers; next year, Ryan will be a Wolf Cub, and Nicky will start Beavers. I asked Gail if she'd move up to be a Cub leader with Ryan, or stay with Beavers. She said "Maybe I'll stay with Beavers, and you can be a Cub leader". I have no idea if she was serious or not, but I have no interest in being a Cub (or Beaver) leader. I like the program, Ryan seems to enjoy it and I think Nicholas will too, but I simply have no interest in being a leader.

Here's where the relation to the previous story comes in. Does the fact that I don't want to volunteer for Beavers make me a bad parent? It seems that if I volunteer, I'm a great guy who gives up his own time to help children. If I don't, I don't care about children — and that's just not the case. It's not like I want to dump my kid at Beavers so I can go drinking, or so I can have an hour's peace without the little brat around, nothing like that. I just don't think I'd be a very good leader. I also think it's important to have the kids do something without us around. If Ryan goes to extra-curricular events at the school, Gail is always there, since she's usually the one organizing them. She knows more teachers at his school than he does. We're on a first-name basis with the YMCA people who run the child care program. Now, Gail's going to be at every Beaver meeting and event. I suppose we're not in the pool with him at swimming lessons every Saturday, but that's about it.

Now that I think about it, though, I was considering volunteering to coach his baseball team next summer, because I love baseball. So maybe it is selfish after all.

Saturday, October 21, 2006

De Do Do Do De Da Da Da

On my way to work the other day, I heard two different songs by The Police on two different radio stations. It occurred to me that I hadn't listened to The Police in a while, and that they were a really good band. They're all really good musicians, and Sting wrote some really good rock songs, before he went all adult-comtemporary and lame. I don't mind some of his solo stuff, but his work with The Police was orders of magnitude better. Spirits In The Material World, Every Little Thing She Does Is Magic, De Do Do Do De Da Da Da (not the cleverest song title ever, but a great song), Don't Stand So Close To Me, King Of Pain, Can't Stand Losing You, Message in a Bottle, Roxanne, Every Breath You Take — they only released five albums, but they had so many great songs. It's too bad they broke up when they did (actually, I believe they never officially broke up, they just went on "hiatus", but after more than 20 years, I think it's safe to say they broke up).

I "restarted" my guitar lessons last Thursday. I've been taking lessons for a little over a year, and I've learned a lot, but I wanted to do more music theory than my teacher (John) can do. He suggested I switch over to the other guy (Terry) that teaches at the same place I go, since Terry knows music theory better and can teach it better. We started out going over basic stuff like the string names, major scales, and major chords (root, 3rd, and 5th), and by the end of the half-hour, we'd also talked about minor chords (root, flat 3rd, 5th), 7th chords (major or minor chord plus the 7th), and he mentioned diminished and augmented chords, though I don't know exactly how they're defined. I even have homework. I think the next few months are going to be challenging, and I probably won't get any better as a guitar player, but having the theory background will eventually make me a better player.

Friday, October 20, 2006

Cool Tool: Mozy

I discovered a cool new web site last week, called mozy.com. Mozy is a web backup tool — you install some client software on your Windows machine (only XP and 2003 are supported), and set a schedule, and it backs up whatever data you want to their site, using https and blowfish encryption. It's smart enough to not back up files that haven't changed since the last backup, and you can store up to 2 GB of data for free. If you need more space, you can pay for it, but I'm only using a small fraction of my quota so far.

I installed it and backed up some stuff, and it's worked like a charm so far. It's certainly easier than remembering to burn a CD now and again. I keep some copies of personal stuff (like my family web site and a spreadsheet containing my weight loss information, for example) on my work machine, and it occurred to me recently (when someone at Gail's work was let go) that if something happened to my job (which I think is unlikely, but you never know), I doubt that they'd let me burn a CD with a bunch of stuff from my laptop before leaving. Obviously in the case of the web site, I could simply download everything, but there are other files that I'd lose. Now I have a copy of all that stuff online, and I don't have to think about backing it up.

The best part, other than the fact that it's free, is that there is no spyware or other crap installed with it, and no advertising either. Now, I haven't tried restoring any data yet, so perhaps that part is painful. I should probably try that, but so far, Mozy is a really cool tool.

Note: If you click on the mozy.com link above and install and start using Mozy, you and I will each get an extra 256MB of free backup space. So if you decide to start using it, use that link instead of going there yourself, and we both benefit! Alternatively, you can use my referral code EN5GHI or my email address gperrow AT ianywhere DOT com when you register.

Monday, October 16, 2006

Questions for People Over 30

Got this from cahwyguy.

1. Do you prefer solicitors and service staff to address you by first name or by title+last (e.g. "Ms. Smith", "Dr. Adams", etc.)? Title unless I know them outside of their job, or have dealt with them numerous times in the past. I was at the bank the other day, and the guy I met with came out and said "Hi Graeme" although I'd never met him before. I didn't like that.

2. How many careers have you had? Just one – software developer.

3. How many jobs? How many employers? 6 co-op terms at three employers: 3 at IBM in Toronto, 2 at Sears Canada in Toronto, 1 at Microsoft in Redmond, WA. After graduation, a year and half at Corel in Ottawa. After grad school, three years at Comnetix in Mississauga, and just over nine years at iAnywhere Solutions/Sybase in Waterloo.

4. What was the best employer you worked for? iAnywhere, of course!

5. What was your favorite job? Some of the work I was doing at Comnetix was really cool, but the company itself had problems. I love what I do at iAnywhere.

6. How many companies, businesses or incorporated organizations have you founded? None.

7. Did you grow up to be what you wanted to be when you were 5? When you were 10? When you were 15? When you were 20? My parents tell me that I wanted to be a baker when I was a kid. Apart from the standard fireman, policeman, etc., I never really had any career plans. I didn't even know what I wanted to major in at university; I was in the math faculty, but was "non-specialist" until I picked computer science in 2nd year.

8. Have you published any books or academic papers? How many? A couple of technical articles at UWO, and an article in the proceedings of the Third International Symposium on Integrated Network Management back in 1994.

9. Do you hold any patents? How many? iAnywhere has applied for a patent for our web-server-in-the-database-server technology, and my name is one of four on the patent application.

10. Are you licensed or certified to practice a profession(s)? If so, what? Nope.

11. Ever served in the military? What branch and how long? Nope.

12. What's the largest number of employees you have ever managed at a time? I've supervised several co-op students, and I think I had two at the same time once or twice. None in the past, oh, five years or so though. I have no interest in being a manager.

13. How many countries have you lived in? Canada my whole life, except for four months (September to December 1991), when I lived in Redmond, WA, USA, while working for Microsoft.

14. How many times have you been married? Once.

15. How many kids do you have? How many grandkids? Two sons, born 1999 and 2002. No grandkids for at least another 15-20 years, hopefully.

16. Whom do you observe Thanksgiving with? Usually my parents and Gail's parents (on different days). This year, we had some non-Thanksgiving-related things to do that weekend, so we stayed home.

17. How many parents have you had? Just the two...

18. How many of your parents are still alive? How close are/were you to them? Both are still kicking. I talk to them a few times a month, and we see them maybe every other month or so. My sister talks to them almost daily.

19. What's one way you were surprised to find out you turned out like one of your parents? Can't think of anything. I'm more like my dad than my mom, but not in any way that surprises me.

20. What's one way you expected to turn out like your parent(s) and were surprised not to? Again, nothing comes to mind.

21. Do you own or rent your home? If the former, how many years on your mortgage, if any? Own. We bought in 1997, so we have 16 years left.

22. Do you have roommates (i.e. non-family adults living with you)? If not, how long has it been since you had roommates? No. I lived with three other grad students in 1994 at Western, and moved in with Gail right after that, and we got married the next year.

23. Have you ever sat on a jury? Yep, though it resulted in a mistrial, so we never really got to do anything. Details are here (Day one), here (Day two), and here (Day three).

24. Have you ever run for office? Held office? Nope.

25. Are you a member of a political party? Do you volunteer with it? Do you donate money to it? No, no, and no.

26. What's the nicest restaurant you've been to in the past year? We've been to Milestone's in Burlington a couple of times, including last Saturday for our 11th anniversary.

27. What's the nicest item of furniture you've bought? (Gifts don't count!) Our entertainment center. Holds our 36" TV and all the stereo equipment. The only problem with it that if we ever decide to go plasma, it's useless.

28. What kitchen appliance are you most happy you bought? (Gifts don't count!) Our side-by-side fridge, though the water dispenser does not have a pump in it. It uses the water pressure from the pipes, which isn't very good, so it takes forever to fill up a glass of water, and the ice cubes it makes are hollow. We don't use it (the water dispenser) anymore because of that.

29. Do you have a preferred airline? How many frequent flyer miles do you have? Air Canada. We have a few hundred thousand Aeroplan points, which we may use next year for a trip to the Big Apple, or we may save them for a couple more years and go to Hawaii.

30. Where do you like to go to vacation? Our trip to Fern Resort is always fun, and we've been to the Carribbean twice (once to Sandals Ocho Rios on our honeymoon, and once on a cruise. I would love to go to Hawaii or Australia. Gail wants to go to Paris for her 40th birthday in a couple of years.

31. Women: Do you wear skirts or trousers on the job? N/A

32. Men: Do you currently have facial hair? No. I've had both a full beard and a goatee in years past, but Gail's not too fond of them.

33. Do you have grey hair yet? If so, do you try to hide it? Yes, around my temples. Never tried to hide it.

Thursday, October 12, 2006

Battlestar Galactica

I've heard in a number of places about what a great show Battlestar Galactica is, so I finally rented the pilot mini-series last weekend. Gail and I have been watching it over the last couple of days (and we're not done yet), and I'm very impressed. We both remember watching the original show back in the late '70s; it only played for one season (1978 — thanks Wikipedia), but we both remember Starbuck, Apollo, Commander Adama, and Boxie (annoying little kid and his weird robot dog), plus the Cylons (with the cool red light bouncing back and forth across their face). The new series is different but cool — Starbuck and Boomer are now female characters (though Starbuck is still a cocky bastard; that I remember from the original series), and some Cylons are human-looking, and the special effects are obviously better. There are a few familiaries in the show — the scientist Dr. Baltar looks and sounds a lot like Dr. Julian Bashir from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and Colonel Tigh used to be on Cold Squad, a cop show set in Vancouver that we used to watch. Also, one of the early scenes on Caprica is shot at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver; I visited there when I was living in Redmond back in '91.

Now all I need to do is find someone who owns the first season on DVD and borrow it! I could probably find them on the internet and download them, but that would be illegal. Then again, if I were to download them, watch them once, and then erase the files, how would that be different from borrowing the DVD from someone?

Monday, October 09, 2006

Even More Separated at Birth

Tie Domi's ex-girlfriend (from cover of Maclean's) and ex-boss:

Belinda StronachJohn Ferguson, Jr.

Lots of article changes

I changed my blog over to the new blogger format today. Visually, there isn't much difference, but it makes it very easy to change the layout and stuff. One new thing is the addition of "labels", which you can assign to each article. Down the side of the blog, there's a list of all the labels, and you can see all the articles with that label. So if you want to see all the lacrosse articles, you can click on Lacrosse. Kinda handy, so this morning I went back and tagged a whole bunch of older articles. I didn't do all of them (I've posted almost 200 articles to this blog since I started it a year and a half ago!), but quite a few. If you have an RSS subscription to this blog, you might notice a whole bunch of new articles - that's why.

Sunday, October 08, 2006

Do you KNOW what your kids are watching?

There's a kids show called Go, Diego, Go! — a spin-off of Dora the Explorer. It occurred to me the other day that if you add a space and some punctuation, you could rename the show "Go Die! Go! Go!"

Does Jerry Falwell know about this?

Saturday, October 07, 2006

URL changed

OK, the URL for this blog is now officially http://cutthechatter.blogspot.com/. I've created a new blog over at the old address, and I changed the feedburner.com feed. Turns out that the LiveJournal syndication user was using the feedburner feed anyway, so I didn't have to do anything with that. The only other thing I've done is edit some old postings on this blog that contained links to other postings — I updated the URLs in the links.

If you notice anything weird, please let me know!

Friday, October 06, 2006

A magical visitor

The tooth fairy will hopefully be making her first visit to our house tonight! Ryan lost his first tooth this morning. He told us a couple of weeks ago that his two front bottom teeth were loose, and he's been wiggling them ever since. This morning while brushing his teeth, one of them came out. The other one is really loose as well, so it probably won't be long before it comes out as well.

Ryan was very excited by this event, and while Nicholas was excited for Ryan, he was quite upset when we told him that he probably won't lose any for another two or three years. In his words, "Why does Ryyyyyyyyan's tooth fall out and not meeeeeeeeeeeee?"

When Gail was a kid, only one of her teeth fell out by itself. The rest all had to be extracted, and to this day, Gail is not a big fan of dentists. When Ryan told us his teeth were loose, she was as excited as he was, and she was positively thrilled this morning when it fell out. She's very glad (as we all are!) that he won't have to go through the same dental nightmares that Gail did.

Saturday night update: Ryan's second tooth fell out today! We forgot (!) to put the first tooth under his pillow last night, so he's got two teeth under his pillow tonight!

Thursday, October 05, 2006

Change to blog URL

I've decided to change my blog's URL from graemeperrow.blogspot.com to cutthechatter.blogspot.com. I've never liked the original URL (boooooring), I just created it because I couldn't think of anything more clever. "Cut the Chatter" wasn't even the original name of the blog, but I like that name, so I'm going to change the URL. Bonus points for you if you know where the phrase "Cut the Chatter, Red Two" comes from.

If you're using the feedburner RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/CutTheChatter), I'll change that as well, so hopefully you won't see any difference. If you are using the regular RSS feed, that will vanish, so you should switch over to using the feedburner one. There's a LiveJournal feed as well, but I'm not sure how to change it — hopefully that's not too difficult. I'll probably create a new blog on the old address that just contains a link to the new address.

I'll probably do this tomorrow, or sometime on the weekend; I'm just my readership giving some advance notice now. Hopefully I don't lose too many readers by doing this, but if you've been looking for an excuse to stop reading this blog, here's your chance!

How Are We Going to Get These Dogs Back In?

McSweenys is a site that contains hilarious lists of stuff. Things like:

My favourite: Possible Follow-up Songs for One-Hit Wonders. "(Won't You Give Me A Ride Home From) Funkytown" is the best.

Tuesday, October 03, 2006

Man of the House?

The doorbell rang last night just before dinner. Our visitor was a teenage kid, trying to get me to subscribe to the Toronto Sun. I said no (more on that below) and he left, but I just had to laugh at the first thing he asked me: "Are you the man of the house?" I said yes, but thinking back, I'm not quite sure what he meant. Did he perhaps think that I lived with my parents, and he should be talking to them? Maybe he was standing at such an angle that he couldn't see the gray in my hair. In reality, I should have just said "I don't know — hold on, let me ask my wife."

About a year ago, I did get the Sunday Sun for a few months, thanks to a similar offer — something like $12 for 20 weeks. It's such crap. The sports section is good, but I don't like the way the paper reports the actual news. I currently get the Hamilton Spectator every day, and one of the things I enjoy reading is the letters to the editor section (I've even had a letter published). With the Sun, each letter has an editor's comment after it, and they're usually snarky unless you agree with them; this just seems childish to me.

The thing that bugs me the most is that the paper is so anti-Liberal, it's not even funny. Shortly before the last election, they ran a front-page headline that read something like "100 Reasons Not To Vote Liberal". It's not that I'm pro-Liberal so I disagree with their position (I have no particular political leanings at all, actually), but what bothers me is the fact that the paper has a position. When I read the news, I want just the news. It want it presented to me in an honest unbiased way, so that I can read the facts and make up my own mind. Maybe that's naïve, but when reading the Sun, I have no confidence that what I'm reading doesn't have their own little (or not-so-little) spin on it. How do I know that some facts that might present the Liberals in a positive light aren't missing, or distorted, or spun somehow to make it look more negative?

There's also the fact that it's a Toronto paper, and the Toronto papers all hate Hamilton. I'll stick with the Spec, thanks.

Monday, October 02, 2006

On the radio again

On my drive home, I phoned into the FAN 590 during Bob McCown's show. He was talking about an incident during a football game the other day where one of the players got his helmet knocked off and once the play was over, one of the opposing players walking off the field stepped on his head. The player has been suspended 5 games by the NFL for this moronic, blatant attempt to injure. I called in and told Bob about a similar play in a lacrosse game I saw a couple of years ago -- Rock vs. Bandits. John Tavares hit Patrick Merrill and knocked him down (perfectly legal hit), but then after the play ended, he stepped on Merrill's back on his way back to the bench. JT was given a 2-minute unsportsmanlike conduct penalty, but no other punishment. It was different though, JT didn't intend to hurt Merrill, just humiliate him a little. It was certainly unsportsmanlike, but not as bad as the football play.

It wasn't the first time I've seen JT do some dirty stuff either. He's an amazing player — one of the best ever, no question — but in addition to this incident, I remember another nasty play in Toronto. JT had the ball when the whistle was blown, with the ref signalling a Buffalo penalty. He waited a couple of seconds and then fired a blistering shot directly at the goalie. It hit him square in the chest protector, but the shot was way after the whistle. Pissed me off, and I'm sure the Rock players weren't too happy about it, but no penalty to JT.

This was my second time on the radio; I called in to the same show about a year and a half ago and blogged about it. I was just a young blogger then — it was only about my 6th blog enrty.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Run for the Cure

We participated in our third Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation Run for the Cure in Burlington this morning. We walked the full 5 km — well, just like last year, Gail and I walked the full 5 km, while the boys rode in the wagon most of the way. We did make them walk some of the way; Ryan walked about 1½ km, while Nicholas split his kilometre between walking (and whining about the fact that he had to walk) and being carried on Gail's back. Maybe next year we'll get them to actually walk — as I told Ryan, it ain't the "Ride in the Wagon for the Cure".

We raised $400 ourselves, which beat our total from last year (I think we had $350 last year). I'm pretty sure you can still make donations after the event, so if you want to sponsor us, please click here. Great reasons for doing this are twofold: not only will you be helping out a great cause, but you also get to see a nice (two-year-old) picture of my family, taken at the Whispering Canyon Café restaurant at Disney World's Wilderness Lodge Resort. Thanks for your support!


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