Status update

CD ripping status: I'm just over halfway through the alphabet now — just finished the M's (Malibu Stacey, Marillion, Matchbox Twenty, Max Webster, Megadeth, Sue Medley, Metallica, Midnight Oil, Steve Miller Band, Mr. Big, Kim Mitchell, Molly Hatchet, The Moody Blues, Alanis Morrisette, Mötley Crüe, Alannah Myles). iTunes tells me that I have 16 genres, 153 artists, 391 albums, 4640 songs, 14 days, and 25.10 GB on my iPod. (Note that one double album counts as two, so it's not really 391 albums, but 391 actual discs. I also have a couple of episodes of Battlestar Galactica from last season that I have not yet watched on there. Interesting facts about the CDs I've burned so far:

• I have more songs by Billy's (Dean, Idol, Squire, Talent) than David's (Gilmour, Usher)
• I have fourteen Led Zeppelin albums (including Physical Graffiti as two and the box set as four)
• I have eleven John (Cougar) Mellencamp albums, all single albums. I never would have guessed there were so many, and I don't even have them all.
• I have an album by Helix? One by Heart? Two by Haywire? Four (including a double live CD) by AC/DC? I bet I haven't listened to any of these in fifteen years.
• There are at least four genres of which I have exactly one album:
  • jazz — Kamikiriad by Donald Fagan (lead singer for Steely Dan). Never really though of it as jazz, but I suppose that fits as well as any other category. I guess Steely Dan was kind of jazzy too, so once I get to the S's we'll see what they are.
  • punk — Dookie by Green Day. No argument there.
  • folk — <something unpronounceable> by a PEI singer named Patricia Murray. I think it's entirely sung in Gaelic. Someone gave it to me as a gift, I guess figuring that I'm of Scottish descent and my name is Gaelic (Graeme means "of the gray house"), so I must speak Gaelic.
  • world — the debut album by Leahy. More Celtic music from Canada's east coast. (Update: they're actually from Ontario) A whole family of fiddle players, piano players, guitar players, and singers. I saw two of them play live once, and one of the fiddle players, Donnell Leahy, was just incredible.
• Nirvana's Nevermind album, which spawned the whole grunge scene in the early 90's and is not only a classic in the grunge genre but was basically the first real grunge album, is categorized not as grunge but as rock.

Everyone wants their cut

I ordered an iPod from Apple a few weeks ago. I think I might have written about it already. Because I bought it through apple.ca, they added GST to the price. Apple didn't charge for shipping, and I didn't have to pay FedEx for anything when it arrived. Then last week I ordered a dock for the iPod, so I can plug the dock into my stereo and TV, and then when I plug the iPod into the dock, I can get sound through the stereo and watch videos on the TV. The dock shipped from North Carolina, but when it hit the border, the Canadian government decided that I should pay them GST on this item even though I bought it from a company in the US. I suppose the idea is that I could have bought the thing in Canada, in which case I would have paid GST on it. Being able to order something from the US and not pay GST on it would be a loophole, so I need to pay the GST as if I bought it here. However, that GST (in this case, $21.77) is due the moment it crosses into Canada, so since I wasn't there to pay it, UPS had to pay it on my behalf. Thanks UPS, very sporting of you. Well, no, not really — UPS charged me $39.10 (plus GST, so $41.45) for this service, or almost double the amount that they had to pay. When they deliver the dock tomorrow, I will have to reimburse them for the GST they paid, plus pay this extra service charge, so I'll have to give the driver $63.22. The dock itself only cost about $150, so this extra charge is almost half of the original cost of the thing.

I suppose the GST goes towards things like health care, but it's still frustrating. Actually, I'm not sure which is frustrating me more — having to pay the GST or the fact that UPS is charging me a service charge of almost 200%.

Geocaching

On Monday, we went on our first geocaching expedition. Geocaching is a combination hike and treasure hunt — you get the latitude and longitude co-ordinates of a "cache" from the geocaching web site, plug them into your GPS, and then go find it. The GPS is only so accurate, however, so it's not like once you get to the co-ordinates, you look down and there it is. You need to look under rocks or piles of leaves or in tree stumps, stuff like that. You can find some in the city as well, though I suspect those ones are harder to find — you can't just leave one on the sidewalk.

The web site has thousands of caches listed, and each one has an indication of how hard the cache is to find, and how difficult the terrain is. You can put a cache halfway down a cliff wall, but then only rock climbers are going to be able to find it. There are also caches hidden underwater for scuba divers to find.

The cache itself is generally a tupperware-type box or ammo container that has a log book in it, and sometimes some little "prizes". The idea is that if you take something, you leave something as well. The one we found wasn't in great condition though, there were some rusty coins in it, two pens that didn't work, and a plastic toy. We signed the log book and then took the broken pens and left a good one.

Sometimes, the cache owner makes a game of it, and creates several caches, each of which contains a "clue". Once you find all the caches and put all the clues together, that gives you the location of the final cache. Some caches also contain a trackable item, which is something that has a code you can enter on the web site. The idea with those is to take the item from that cache, leave it in another one somewhere else, and then update the web site. Then you can follow the item's progress around the world.

I borrowed a GPS from a guy at work, just to see if this is something that the kids would enjoy, and sure enough they liked searching in the bushes once we found the general location. According to the web site, there are numerous caches around our area, and there are some up north near where our parents live. We've even found a bunch in France, so we might try a few of those when we're over there next summer (bought our tickets last week!). We've signed up for a geocaching "class" at the Royal Botanical Gardens in October, so that should be fun as well.

ProgNOTsticator

I am in a football pool with some guys at work, run through ESPN.com. In week 1, I got 11 picks right out of 16, and was tied for second place. I lost the tie-breaker, so I didn't win anything. This past week, I tied for third place with 10 correct picks, so I didn't win anything there either. Currently, I'm leading our pool overall, I'm ranked 816th out of the hundreds of thousands of people in the ESPN pool, which is the 99.3rd percentile. This sucks.

It sucks because I know jack about football — I've just gotten lucky two weeks in a row. If I come in second or third every week all season, I have an excellent shot at winning the whole thing, but the odds of that are infinitesimal. My best shot of making any money in this pool was to get lucky and win a week or maybe two. I'm ranked near the top of the list right now, but in the long run, it'll mean nothing. Part of me thinks that I've burned up all the luck I had, while the other part of me that doesn't believe in luck thinks that I have as good a shot as anyone else. We'll see...

Update: Turns out I came in second in week two, not third, so I actually won $10. Also, I joined a similar pool at the local Boston Pizza and used the same picks for that pool, and I won the week and a $25 gift certificate!

More fun with the English language

While ripping CDs onto my iPod, I've noticed at least one and possibly two songs that have grammatical errors in the titles. This seems unbelievable to me. It's not unbelievable that the original songwriters got it wrong, but that they and everyone else who read the song's title before the album was released got it wrong.

Interestingly, the errors are similar in both cases. The songs in question are "Given The Dog A Bone" by AC/DC (should be "Givin'...") and "Taken The Pain" by Haywire (should be "Takin'..."). Errors in the lyrics themselves I can understand, and I'm sure sometimes they're put there intentionally, but I think these are just plain ol' mistakes. I haven't confirmed the lyrics of the second one, but it sounds like "You're takin' the pain from my heart...". However, it could be "You've taken the pain from my heart...", in which case it's not an error.

At one point, I thought there was some serious redundancy in the Paul McCartney song "Live And Let Die". The lyrics sound like "But in this ever-changing world in which we live in...", but it's actually "But if this ever-changing world in which we're livin'", which makes more sense. There's "A Horse With No Name" by America, which contains the mind-boggling "In the desert you can remember your name 'cause there ain't no one for to give you no pain". I've completely given up trying to analyze lyrics by some bands; Matthew Good (he has songs called "While We Were Hunting Rabbits", "Advertising on Police Cars", "Ex-Pats of the Blue Mountain Symphony Orchestra" and "Girl Wedged Under The Front Of A Firebird") and The Tragically Hip ("There's a cannon shooting coconut cream, forty gallons in a steady stream" ) are good examples.

Of course, in the original cases, it could easily be that whoever was responsible for the liner notes was solely responsible for the error. Tool's album "Lateralus" has a song called "Lateralis", but that is apparently a typo on some pressings of the CD. But if it's just a typo, the story's not that interesting.

On a radio show from Friday (which I listened to today via podcast), they were briefly talking about the English language — the difference between "further" and "farther" (I have no idea what the difference is), and how you don't "revert back", you just "revert". One that always bugs me is "rate of speed", as in "the car was moving at a high rate of speed". Speed is a rate, so there's no need to say "rate of"; just saying "...moving at a high speed" is perfectly correct, and "moving very quickly" is even better. Another one of those examples of people who try to sound more intelligent by using big words but end up sounding dumber because they use the big words wrong. I have heard people talk about others being "ignorant" when they really mean "rude", but "ignorant" sounds better. They, of course, are ignorant of what ignorant really means. The classic line from The Princess Bride comes to mind: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Ironically, earlier in the same show, one of the guys had used the term "literally" incorrectly. He talked about someone who "literally took the bull by the horns". Unless the guy was a cowboy or bullfighter, I don't think so.

David Gilmour

I went to see the David Gilmour concert movie today. It was recorded at the Royal Albert Hall during his "On An Island" tour last year, and will be released on DVD in a couple of days. A bunch of theatres across North America and in the UK showed some of the DVD, which was followed by a live half-hour Q&A session with QGilmour, and then a 10-minute live jam session. The whole show was unbelievably cool. Gilmour is an amazing guitar player — he can play fast but doesn't always feel the need to (unlike others), his note-bending is amazing, and he puts so much emotion into the music it's unreal. For this tour, he also surrounded himself with other amazing musicians, including Pink Floyd bandmate Rick Wright on keyboards, Roxy Music's Phil Manzanera on rhythm guitar, and Graham Nash and David Crosby on backing vocals, and David Bowie also makes a cameo appearance. The concert was amazing — as a guitar player myself, I love to watch close-up video of great guitar players, and Gilmour is a master. If the entire thing had been two hours of footage of just his fret hand, that would have been fine with me. The Q&A afterwards was a bit disappointing, since Gilmour managed to avoid answering many of the questions. Still, I may pick this DVD up once it's released next week.

Interesting but useless fact: while browsing the Wikipedia entries on Gilmour, Wright, and other members of Pink Floyd, I came across this: Floyd drummer Nick Mason owns a house that used to be owned by Camilla Parker-Bowles, the current wife of Prince Charles. David Gilmour used to own a house in London that he sold to Earl Spencer, brother of Diana, Princess of Wales, the late wife of Prince Charles.

Blake ain't no Gretzky

Leaf coach Paul Maurice said in an interview this morning that this year's Leaf team is "the most talented team I've ever coached". This is a guy that coached Carolina to the Stanley Cup final in 2001/02. Are Jason Blake and Vesa Toskala really that good? They are really the only changes to the team since last year, and last year, the Leafs didn't make the playoffs.

I realize he doesn't want to come out and say "this team won't suck quite as much as last year", but let's not stretch things too far.

Interesting note: I originally spelled Gretzky wrong in the title, and Firefox flagged it as a misspelling. Then I corrected it, and the flag went away. This tells me that the word "Gretzky" is in Firefox's dictionary.

classmates vs. facebook

I can't remember who I was talking to about this the other day but we decided that the people at classmates.com are probably really P.O.'ed about this whole facebook thing. If you've never seen classmates.com, it's a place where you can register yourself and all the schools you went to and when, and it can hook you up with classmates from those schools. It allows you to set up a profile, list your likes and dislikes and such, send and receive messages, all that kind of stuff. Very similar to facebook, but the difference is that classmates.com is not free. You can sign up for free, and people can see your entry, but if they want to actually contact you or read anything you've entered, they have to be a paid member. Similarly, if they send you a message, you have to be a paid member to read it.

I signed up with clasmates.com a bunch of years ago, just in case those people that teased me in high school were dying to look me up and apologize. I signed up with a free account, since it was not something that was important enough to me to warrant paying for. But everywhere you look, there are upgrade messages, and a bunch of things that you can't do unless you upgrade. I just checked now, and two people have apparently viewed my profile and signed my guestbook, but it won't let me see their names unless I upgrade for $39/year. Bite me.

Then along comes facebook.com, and does roughly the same thing but better and free. Now facebook is one of the most popular sites anywhere, while classmates.com continues to ask me for money. See that boat floating away from you, classmates.com? That's facebook.com riding on a ship called "Opportunity". Looks like you missed it.

9/11

I'm late with this one — I meant to do this yesterday, for obvious reasons. Yesterday was the 6th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, and I have to say I'm a little surprised how little was made of it. I expected to have memorials all over the place and articles written about it all over all the newswires, but I didn't see much. What I did see written was not so much about the event itself or even the commemoration events, but the politics surrounding them.

Anyway, I'm sure that in years to come, it will be one of those "Do you remember where you were when..." moments. For me, some other such moments were the explosion of the Space Shuttle, the assassination attempt on President Reagan, and both times the Blue Jays won the World Series. On September 11, 2001 I was working from home because of a doctor's appointment (allergist) in the afternoon. I was sitting in the kitchen when I got an email from a friend which said, in its entirety, "Check out cnn.com! Holy shit!" I tried to go to cnn.com, but the site was so bogged down that I couldn't get there. On my news headlines home page, I saw the headline "Plane crashes into World Trade Center", and I remember thinking that some idiot in an ultralight plane had been flying over Manhattan and clipped one of the towers. Maybe he's dead and a couple of windows got broken. Jenny must have sent me the link because there's some footage of the crash or something. Ten minutes or so later I tried cnn.com again, and still didn't get anywhere, but that's when I saw another headline: "Second plane hits World Trade Center", and I distinctly remember the first thought that went through my head then: "Oh shit. One plane hitting the tower might be an accident, but there's no way two is an accident." I didn't know at the time that it was passenger jets we were talking about, not little Cessna's or anything, otherwise I wouldn't have considered the possibility of an accident at all.

I ran and put the TV on, and sat with my computer in my lap for the rest of the morning. I remember that I was working on a new memory management system for SQL Anywhere clients, and that the project was eventually shelved. I remember calling my mother, who worked in an office building in Toronto, and she told me they were already sending everyone home. I remember hearing about the Pentagon attack and the fact that a fourth plane had gone down in a field, and thinking that the fourth one must have been bound for the White House. I remember going to the doctor's appointment and everything seeming surreal, like now that this has happened, who cares what I'm allergic to? That evening, I went to get the tires rotated on my car, and I remember the guy at the counter writing the date on the bill: "September 11th. That's a date we're going to remember for a long time." and all I could think to say was "Yeah."

I don't pretend to have followed all the politics afterwards. Everyone seems to be down on President Bush for going to war with Iraq under the guise of a "war on terror" when Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. It seems fairly obvious to me what happened. Bush looked for Osama for a while and got nowhere, and got antsy about not making any progress, so he figured "Saddam is a bad dude, he hates us, he probably had a hand in this", a belief that turned out to be wrong. But Saddam was a bad dude, and he did hate the US, so you can't really fault W for believing it at the time. The problem was that he acted on that belief before confirming it. By the time they figured out that Iraq wasn't involved and had no WMDs and such, it was too late to get out without admitting he was wrong, something that politicians in general and W in particular don't seem all that good at. I heard the other day that a survey of civilians in Iraq shows that many of them are less happy now than they were when Saddam was in power. Considering the nasty things Saddam did, that's saying something.

Oh crap — political content on my blog! Quick, must scramble to find something more in line with my blog's usual content... Ummmm.... New iPod! It's cool! Got lots of songs on it!

More names from the past

After thinking about Bob Layfield for the last few days, I thought about other people I used to work with, and googled a couple of them. Most of them I either couldn't find, or found minimal information, but one turned up in a number of places: Alykhan Jetha (known as AJ) is the CEO of a company called Marketcircle, based in Toronto, which makes Mac software.

I don't remember much about AJ. I worked with him at Comnetix for about a year, maybe a little longer, before he left. One thing I do remember — he was an Amway rep, and tried to get me into it as well. He invited me to lunch one day, saying he had a "business opportunity" for me. I had no idea what Amway was, but he gave me the whole dog-and-pony show. He told me that software development was what he enjoyed doing, and it paid the bills, but the Amway thing was going to make him rich. "In ten years," he said, "I won't need to work anymore." Don't know how well that worked out, AJ, since you're still working. Then again, he's CEO of a company that looks pretty successful, so I'd say he made a good decision or two somewhere along the line. Congratulations AJ!

I have been given the Amway spiel three times now, including once by a guy I didn't know while in line at Harvey's. My logic for saying no was that I did not go to university for 6 years, obtaining two degrees in computer science, to get rich selling toilet paper to my friends. That sounds snooty, and I suppose it is, but the real reason is that selling toilet paper and whatever other products they sell will not make you rich. The way you get rich with Amway is by selling the concept of Amway itself, and recruit people to be below you in the pyramid heirarchy. Then when they sell toilet paper to their friends, you get a cut. Do that enough times, and have some good sellers (or even better, more recruiters) below you, and you can make a bundle. Of course, I don't actually believe in the concept of Amway (it's just a legalized pyramid scheme that sells products to generate the income, rather than just having people "send $x to the person at the top of the list and then add your name to the end of the list"), so it would be hard for me to sell it, and I would make a lousy salesman anyway.

AJ is actually the second person I used to know who is an executive of a tech company. I first knew Cameron Ferroni through my buddy Jeff, since they were both engineers at UW. I remember thinking his girlfriend Gail was really cute, but way out of my league. Gail and I eventually became friends, and then she and Cameron broke up a couple of years later. A year or two after that, in 1992, she asked me out, we started dating, got married in 1995, had two kids, and are still happy together. After graduating, Cameron started working at Microsoft, where he worked on Windows for a while (writing some Winsock specifications that I've actually happened upon at work), and then basically invented the freakin' Xbox and was General Manager of the entire Xbox software team. Now he's also happily married and is CTO of a company called Marchex. Hey Cam, if you're looking for your RAMPage rugby shirt, you left it at Gail's place, and she gave it to me. I think I might still have it somewhere. Oh, and congratulations to you too!

Update: Forgot a couple: Crispin Cowan was a Ph.D. student at Western when I was there doing my Master's. He was CTO of a company called Immunix until they were acquired by Novell. Don't know if he's still employed by Novell. I remember him describing hockey as a very stupid game, which was as exciting to watch as a packing peanut bouncing around in an air duct. Bastard.

Also forgot Brad Siim, another friend of Jeff's from engineering. He was one of the founders of PixStream, a Waterloo company that was eventually bought by Cisco for many millions of dollars, making Brad very rich. He was also bored, apparently, since he left Cisco and went on to co-found another company called Sandvine, where he is now COO.

Mobilizers baseball

Our baseball season ended today. (We all call it "baseball", but it's really softball, or even more accurately, 3-pitch.) This past year, I was the captain of the iAnywhere Mobilizers, one of our company's two teams. We play in the "B" division of the league, whereas the other team (the "Sybase Sluggers") play in the "A" division. We usually refer to the Sluggers as "The A Team", and after playing in this league for two years, it's only recently that I don't giggle every time I say that, thinking of Mr. T in a baseball cap and glove, yelling "C'mon, guys, force play at second, let's get this one".

The "B" division is for those teams that aren't good enough to play in the "A" division, but don't completely suck — those guys are in the "C" division. Well, for most of this season, I suspected that they'd move us down to "C" next year because we more or less completely sucked. We started the season 0-10, including scores like 24-3, 19-4, 33-11, 11-2, and 24-1. The week after the 24-1 loss, I went away on vacation and someone else made the lineups, and we won 13-12. Then I came back and we lost the next 6. I like to think that was coincidence.

In late July, we lost a game 20-15, but the 15 runs was our highest run total to date, and we played pretty well, and I started to realize that we were actually playing better as a team. In August, we won another game, this time in convincing fashion, 26-20. I was actually at the helm for that game, so that broke my personal losing streak at about 18 (including the 0-3 showing at last year's September tournament). We ended the season in last place at 3-18, two games worse than the second-last place team. Doesn't sound like there was much reason for confidence going into The Tournament, but we actually had some guarded optimism, since we played much better in the last month, and two of our three wins came in the last four games.

The tournament was played yesterday and today, and rather than one or two games per week, we suddenly had to play four in one day, and up to three more the next day. Our first game was 8am, and we played pretty well. We lost by one run, but because the score differential matters in the tie-breakers, we played the bottom of the ninth even though the home team was winning. They scored one more, so it goes in the books as a two-run loss. 0-1 and -2 in the run differential column after one game. Not great, but considering we were 0-3 and -30 in last year's tournament (the max run differential in any one game is -10), this was an improvement. The second game was pretty good too, and we were losing by 1 when the umpires called the game because of time constraints. I went and argued that the time limit had not yet been reached (we were two minutes shy), and we wanted to keep playing. They agreed that the game should continue, and we proceeded to not score any runs and allow 5, so we ended up down by 6. After two games, we were 0-2 and -8. Still better'n last year, but not great.

The third game never happened. Someone on our team had heard from someone else (who heard from someone else who... ) that the team we were playing in the third game did not have enough eligible girls — the rules say that you must have at least three girls who have each played at least nine games during the regular season, or you forfeit the game. I asked the umpires and the other team's captain, and he confirmed that they had three girls available, but one had not played the requisite number of games. The umps called the game a forfeit, and we were considered the winners (by a 10-0 score), but said we could play anyway if we wanted. We declined, saying that we didn't want anyone getting hurt in a meaningless game, but in reality, I think we were just hot and tired and wanted a break. So we were now 1-2 with a +2 differential.

The fourth game was great, except for the part of the game that really sucked, but I'll get to that in a second. We hit well, played defence well, and won the game by 8 runs. I don't think I made any errors on the field during that game, and I missed turning a 5-3 double play by this much. Runners on first and second, I'm playing third base, and the ball is grounded in my direction, just to my right. I run forward, grab the ball, step on third, and heave a throw to the first baseman, who catches it just after the runner hit the base. Normally, that's the kind of play where I'd (a) miss the ball completely, forcing the left fielder to come in and get it (probably allowing a run to score), (b) boot the ball, loading the bases, or (c) make the play at third and then blow the throw to first, so I was very pleased with the fact that I made both ends of the play.

The part of the game that really sucked was during the bottom of the third inning. I was playing left field, and the batter grounded the ball to the second baseman. I didn't see what happened, but some of our players were yelling "Throw it to first!", and I didn't understand why it was taking so long to do so. Eventually, the ball made it to first, the first baseman stepped on the bag, and then everyone walked towards the plate. I had no idea what was going on, until I saw that the batter had never left the batter's box. He swung, hit the ball, and then must have dislocated his knee when taking off towards first base. Someone called 911, and an ambulance showed up 10 minutes later and took him to the hospital. The whole thing caused a delay of about a half hour, and since the games were a max of an hour and fifteen minutes long, that was almost half the game right there. Eventually, we got back onto the field, but I think the whole game lasted five innings. I haven't heard since about how the guy is doing, but I can't imagine he'll be walking much in the next couple of weeks.

So at the end of the day, we were 2-2 and +10, a tournament record with which I was completely thrilled. As I said, the only experience I'd had in the tournament was the previous year, in which we got smoked three games in a row. Both teams that we beat won against (since we didn't actually beat anyone in the third game) ended up going 0-3 on the day, with one game left to play this morning, while the other two teams in our grouping were 3-0 yesterday with one game this morning. So regardless of the outcomes from today's games, we ended up third in the grouping, which meant that we played a quarter-final game today at 11:30 against the team that finished third in the other B-division grouping.

Yesterday, the weather was great for baseball. Sunny and hot. Today, the exact opposite — rainy and cold. It just flat-out rained for the first three innings or so, though after that it was just drizzly. We had one guy show up to play that I didn't expect, since he said the day before that he couldn't make it. I don't want to put any blame on him at all, since the team is certainly better with him in the lineup than without, but the defensive lineup I had was done assuming he wasn't going to be there, so I spent most of the first inning tinkering with it to make sure that he was included, but that nobody was sitting too often or in consecutive innings, that we didn't have people playing in positions they weren't comfortable with, and we didn't our best defensive players all sitting at the same time. I didn't do that great a job, though, since we ended up with too many or too few fielders in at least half the innings, and I had to make last-minute "You sit! You play right! You play third!" decisions on the fly. I think I ended up sitting out about four times just because I didn't have time to figure it out properly. And to cap it all off, the hitting that came along so well in the last month of the season and all day Saturday completely vanished, and we ended up scoring all of two runs. We lost by about 12, and so ended the Mobilizers' dream "worst-to-first" playoff run. The A Team (heh) got spanked in their game today as well, so both Sybase teams were eliminated.

Despite the win-loss record, I really enjoyed playing ball this year. It was much more work than in previous years because being the captain, I couldn't just show up to games and play wherever someone else told me; I had to be the one to tell others where to play. One thing that I told everyone at the beginning of the season was that being the team captain does not mean that I'm the best player on the team, and it does not mean that I'm a good coach. I know the game itself as well as anyone, but I'm generally a crappy teacher, and I tend to forget that not everyone knows the intricacies of the game as well as I do. We had plays during the season where a fielder caught the ball while stepping on the base, but the runner was called safe because it wasn't a force play. I knew it wasn't a force play, but it didn't occur to me to yell "Tag him!" because everyone knows that, right? Well, no, as it turns out. Anyway, due to complicated reasons that I'm not going to bother posting here, the league may not even exist next year, which means I may be looking for a new league. I remember looking into a league in Waterdown a while ago, but it was only for men 35 and older, and I didn't qualify at the time. Now I do. Sigh.

It occurred to me earlier this year that if I played golf once a week during the summer instead of baseball, I'd become a much better golfer than I am now, and that concept certainly has some appeal. But can you imagine life without baseball? I can't. I've played in a baseball league of some kind every summer since university, and I played pick-up baseball with friends every summer before that since I learned to walk, so until I get to the point where I am physically unable to play, I'm playin'.

Bob Layfield

I've posted before about my old company, Comnetix. The head salescritter was a retired RCMP officer named Bob Layfield, who passed away last week after a long battle with cancer. Here are some of my memories of Bob, as a sort of online memorial.

First of all, let me say that I always used the term "salescritter" in a sort of endearing way with Bob, as a number of us did. We even used that term when talking to him, as well as about him, and he always took it in the joking manner in which it was always intended.

Bob was very proud of his RCMP career (and justifiably so). He retired as a Staff Sergeant, and was a part of the Musical Ride for a while. He was posted in numerous places all over Canada in his years as a Mountie. He had two daughters and when I knew him, one grandson, all of whom he talked about frequently. His family was always the most important thing in Bob's life.

Bob was the consummate salesman. He knew the products inside and out, and could spin just about anything to his advantage. Occasionally, he sold our customers on features that hadn't been written yet. Sometimes he gave them a specific date by which the feature would be ready, and then came and told us what he had promised. This, of course, annoyed us to no end. He even sold customers on features that we had no intention of implementing — he told people our application was ODBC-compliant, and that we could use any database product that supported ODBC, when in reality, none of us knew what ODBC was, and our back-end stuff was completely Oracle-specific. He had no CS education and often told us that he didn't understand the technical stuff that well but could fake it well enough, but occasionally he would surprise us with how much he did understand.

Bob grew up in, I believe, northern Alberta, and one story he used to tell was about when he lived in a log cabin as a boy. In the middle of winter, the walls of the cabin would be covered with ice a couple of inches thick — on the inside. They'd light a fire in the middle of the cabin first thing in the morning and keep it going all day, and by the time they went to bed at night, the ice was gone and the cabin was warm and cozy. Overnight, the fire would go out, and by the time they woke up in the morning, the walls were covered in ice again.

When we first delivered the Boston Police system, all the developers spent a lot of time in Boston, and Bob was there as well. I'm sure he was down there for the better part of several months. He had a suite at the hotel, and his room eventually became the storeroom for spare parts. He had a stash of keyboards, mice, workstations or fingerprint scanners yet to be installed, platens for the fingerprint scanners, and cables galore. In addition to the hardware, Bob always had a large bottle of rum in his room as well (he was a rum-and-coke man), a couple cartons of smokes, and sometimes a few bottles of Sam Adams chilling in the snow on his balcony.

I took the GO Train into work every day, since I lived within walking distance of the Burlington station, and the office was within walking distance of the Port Credit station. One day while I was on my way into work, Gail called the office to say that she had gone home but had locked herself out, and asked Denise the receptionist (who is still working at Comnetix and is a freakin' director now - way to go Denise!) to ask me to return home to let her in. Bob was there when Denise gave me the message, and without a moment's hesitation, tossed me his car keys.

Bob was doing a demo for some company at some very expensive hotel in Naples, Florida, and I was going to go with him to set up the hardware and such. Since I was going to be in Florida for a couple of days, Gail took some vacation and came with me. The company that was bringing us down would only pay for one room, so Bob insisted that Gail and I take the room, and he would get a room at a nearby Howard Johnson's or something, rent a car, and drive into the hotel every day. We offered to take the room for half the trip and then switch hotels with him (seeing as it was him the company was paying to see, not me), but he refused.

Bob could be a PITA sometimes, and we had many disagreements in the three years I worked with him, but he was a stand-up guy, a loyal friend, and I truly liked and respected him. I regret not having kept in touch with him since I left Comnetix. My condolences go out to his family.

The iTunes Store and new Linkin Park

My first purchase from the iTunes store was Linkin Park's new album, Minutes to Midnight. First of all, more kudos to Apple — buying the album was brain-dead easy. Since my credit card number was already saved from my iPod purchase, I selected the album, clicked "Buy now", it confirmed my password, and began downloading the songs, which were automatically saved in the right place and added to my iTunes library. The next time I sync'ed, the album was on my iPod. Couldn't have been easier.

Anyway, the album is a little weird. Not Primus-weird, but just quite different from the first two Linkin Park albums. I'm not a big fan of rap or hip-hop music in general (though there are a few songs that I don't mind; Eminem's "Lose Yourself" is flat-out a great song), nor the whole "electronica" genre. However, I do like the way Linkin Park "fused" their hard rock music with both rap and electronic music on their first two albums. The weird thing about this album is that the band couldn't seem to decide what kind of music to make. There are a couple of Linkin Park-esque songs, but there are a couple of rock songs with no rap at all, a pop song or two ("Shadow of the Day" could be on any Matchbox Twenty album), a couple of much more mellow songs, and "Given Up" is arguably thrash metal, complete with "Cookie Monster vocals". There was a lot more guitar and less keyboards on this album, which I'm certainly OK with, but it is quite a departure for Linkin Park. I'll have to listen to it a few more times to be sure, but so far, I like the new sound.

The one thing I don't like about buying online music is this: no liner notes! I love reading the liner notes of any album I buy, mainly for the band information, guest musicians, and stuff like that. There is almost no rapping on this album, and there were a couple of songs where the vocals sounded so drastically different from other Linkin Park songs, that I wondered if they had gotten a new "rapper"/vocalist, but because of the lack of liner notes, I had no idea. According to the band's Wikipedia page, they simply went in a new direction, and the guy who does the rapping also sings on this album (for the first time), which is why I didn't recognize the singing voice. If there is one thing I'd change about the iTunes store, it would be the ability to get liner notes for downloaded albums. Lyrics I'm not so concerned about because (a) I don't often read them anymore, and (b) there are lyrics web sites all over the internet; I'm sure all the lyrics to this album are available online somewhere.

Even newer toys

Apple just introduced the new 160 GB iPod, and dropped the price for the 80 GB ones by $120. I think 80GB is just fine for my needs, so I just called Apple to tell them I wanted a refund of the price difference. After 40 minutes on hold (thank you speakerphone), a very friendly guy answered and told me he would refund the $120 on my credit card! Thanks to cahwyguy for giving me the idea to call, and kudos to Apple for top-notch customer service!

IvanAnywhere

And I thought I had a tough commute... A guy (Ivan) on the query processing team lives just outside of Halifax, Nova Scotia. He's been living out there for a few years now, and has been telecommuting. His ability to interact with the rest of us was greatly improved a couple of months ago when IvanAnywhere was introduced. IvanAnywhere is a "telepresence" robot, built by another guy in our department, Ian. One of Ian's hobbies for many years has been flying RC airplanes, and after Glenn (Ivan's boss) semi-jokingly asked him to build a flying RC blimp with a webcam that Ivan could control, Ian thought about it and decided it was possible, though with a robot, not a blimp. He took an RC truck and mounted a tablet PC and webcam on it as a proof of concept, and once that worked, he built a robot that Ivan can control. It has a webcam as well as a digital camera, microphone, speakers, proximity sensors so it won't run into walls and such, and works over our internal wireless network. Now when Ivan wants to talk to someone, he can just go on down to their office, and he can attend meetings and even give presentations. The robot has a monstrous battery, but can run all day without being recharged.

Ivan can't do everything himself, though. The robot can't turn and move forward at the same time, so to go around a corner, it had to go forward, then spin 90°, then go forward again. Update: Yes it can! For tight manoeuvring, Ivan has to point the webcam down so he can see what he's doing, so it's easier to stop first. He can't open doors, and manoeuvring around chairs and stuff in meeting rooms can be challenging. In one meeting, Ivan misjudged how far away a chair was, and the robot crashed into it (ironically, it was Ian's chair). Also, someone here has to plug the thing in at night to recharge the battery.

Regardless of how cool this technology is, it's almost no big deal anymore. We're all so used to seeing Ivan (well, the robot, who we generally refer to simply as Ivan) roaming around, we don't think much about it. One big difference is that our area is now pretty much mandatory on all building tours, so when customers or other partners visit, they are always brought through this area to see Ivan. Thankfully they haven't changed our dress code (i.e. given us one) because of this.

As someone who telecommutes on a regular basis, I can certainly see the appeal of this for Ivan. For me, talking to co-workers via email, IM, or telephone is almost always sufficient, but I'm only at home one day a week (though it's more if the weather is bad or I'm not feeling well or whatever). If I was at home every day and it was pretty much impossible to get into the office, I'm sure I'd miss the face-to-face interaction, and I find attending meetings over speakerphone (when everyone else is in the same room) difficult. Unfortunately, I think I live too close for the company to consider creating GraemeAnywhere.

Cool — just found out that we've been slashdotted!

Update: Ian informs me that IvanAnywhere can move forward and turn at the same time, so I updated the paragraph above. Also in the comments I say that it's running a 9.0.2 server, but it's actually running 10.0.1, and it stores status and monitoring information, which is used for diagnosing problems.

Can I see your receipt, please?

Here is a story about a guy who bought something at Circuit City, refused to show the receipt when leaving, and was physically detained by the security thug at the door and the store manager. He called the police, who showed up, and arrested him for not showing his driver's license. Obviously the cop was wrong for arresting him, and personally, I would have complied with the cop, but I applaud the guy for having the stones to assert his rights and not show his receipt. I don't like the store's policy of assuming all of their customers are thieves and forcing them to prove otherwise in order to leave. If the store wants to inspect your receipt before you leave, fine, but this cannot be a condition of purchase unless they tell you this up front. None of this even addresses the fact that showing your receipt doesn't prove you didn't steal anything unless they strip search you at the same time.

The only store I shop at that requires this is Costco, but it's possible that the agreement that you have to sign when you become a member includes the right to examine your receipt when you leave. I've never questioned this — when asked, I simply hand over the receipt and wait to be allowed out. I don't like this practice, but I simply don't have the aforementioned stones. If we had Circuit City in Canada, I'd boycott them, but we don't. We do have "The Source by Circuit City", but according to their web site, they're owned by a company called "InterTAN", and not by Circuit City. Perhaps they've just licensed the name, or Circuit City owns InterTAN, or something. Anyway, I won't be shopping there, nor do I shop at Best Buy, because of the numerous stories I've heard about how badly they treat their customers, including one I blogged about last March. I'm not generally one for boycotts, as they rarely accomplish the change they are supposedly trying to bring about, but even if the store never changes their policies, I feel a little better not shopping there.

Then again, in Canada, Future Shop and Best Buy are owned by the same company, and I have no problem shopping at Future Shop. I'm not sure if that makes me a hypocrite or just naïve.

Word to the Wise

When ripping your entire CD collection, sync up your iPod every now and again. Don't wait until you've ripped 100 CDs and then try to sync. Who knew that syncing 1000 songs would take over two hours?

I've ripped a bunch of my latest CD purchases (which were sitting on top of the CD cabinet), and a few other odds and ends (some Christmas CDs and such), and then I started on the alphabetized collection. The scary thing is that I'm only in the B's right now (Blue Rodeo), and I've got 115 CDs (1609 songs, 4.7 days, 8.67 GB) already ripped.