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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Even More Separated at Birth

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

Belinda Stronach	John 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.

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?

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!

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!

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:

• Actual and Made-up Adages Used to Promote the Consumption of Pork
• Possible Names for a Supergroup Consisting Solely of Jack Black and Jack White
• Other Names Sting Could Go by, as Suggested by My Thesaurus
• Hit Songs of the 1970s and '80s If the South Had Won the Civil War
• Smart Sequels and Spinoffs That Failed With the 18-to-34-Year-Old Demographic
• Upcoming Jean-Claude Van Damme Film Titles That Show a Lack of Imagination on the Part of the Director and Screenwriters
• Obscenities Uttered by Jesus Christ

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

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.

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.

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!

Technorati tags:
breast cancer

Crossing Jordan premiere bumped

From TV Squad:

Sorry, Crossing Jordan fans. NBC has pushed back the season premiere, in favor of a new game show hosted by Bob Saget. The game show is called 1 vs 100 and it's a game where one contestant battles 100 other people to win $1 million. It's the American version of a game show that is already popular in Europe. The series premiere is at 8 pm on October 20th, as a lead-in to the season premiere of Las Vegas.

NBC hasn't announced a new premiere date for Crossing Jordan.

Question: Why is Bob Saget still on TV? Has he ever been funny?

Comnetix redux

Stuff I remembered about Comnetix after publishing the last article:

• We decided to get a 1-800 number for Boston police officers to call if they were having technical problems with our system. We tried during one meeting to come up with an easy-to-remember number -- 1-800-CALL-BOB was our first choice (Bob was a retired RCMP officer and our head salescritter). A couple of suggestions, 1-800-DUMB-COP and 1-800-NO-DONUT, were nixed by management. We eventually got a number that didn't correspond to any words.
• On reflection, I think calling Joan (the VP) useless was a little unfair. She had zero technical knowledge, and occasionally asked some dumb questions, but it wasn't her job — she did HR and accounting stuff. I didn't much like her personally, but I did get paid every month, so maybe she was really good at what she did. Joan, if you're reading this, my apologies.
• One of the guys I worked with at Comnetix (Henri) is the brother of one of the guys I work with at Sybase (Jack).
• One of the guys I worked with at Comnetix (Greg) left Comnetix about a year before I did and came to work for Sybase, though in the Mississauga office. His brother (Tim) used to work at Watcom (which eventually became Sybase).
• Security in the Boston Police Department headquarters was a joke. I routinely just walked in the front door and either upstairs to where the IT people were, or downstairs to the server room, and the officer by the front door didn't even look up. The code to by the door lock to the server room was '154', which was the address of the building (154 Berkeley Street). I'm safe in posting this since the BPD headquarters has since moved to a brand new building, presumably with better security.
• We also had a system in at the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (i.e. the Boston subway / bus cops) — they were far more concerned with security than BPD.
• We went to a restaurant in Boston for dinner one night, and one of the guys asked for vinegar for his french fries. The waiter looked at him weird, then went away and came back with balsamic vinegar. Americans just don't get it.

Of fingerprint scanners and Elroy Jetson

Before I started at my current job, I worked at a small company in Mississauga called Comnetix. (Well, it was a small company when I worked there. When I left in 1997, there were less than 15 employees, but they've since grown a fair bit.) We made custom software for law enforcement agencies and the like — when I was there, customers included the Insurance Crime Prevention Bureau (of Canada), the RCMP, the Boston Police Department, the Metro Toronto Police, the Spanish National Police, and the Rochester Police Department. By the time I left, I was the team leader of the Boston police system; the system was quite cool. Whenever a person was arrested and booked in Boston, their personal, physical, and crime information was entered into the system, their mugshots were taken with a digital camera, and their fingerprints were scanned using a digital fingerprint scanner (I wrote the driver for that puppy), and everything was stored in a database. They could also take pictures of any scars, tattoos, or other distinguishing marks. The system would then make the information available to the Central Identification unit, who would classify the fingerprints (storing the classification data in the database too), and then perform searches on the classification to see if this person had ever been arrested before. If so, they could update the record to let the people at the booking station know who this person was. This could all happen within minutes.

Once the classification was done, the fingerprint images could be sent electronically to the FBI, and they would be stored in their database as well. (I wrote the code to do that, and BPD was the first police department in the world to be able to do this.) In fact, when this part of the system went live in August of 1995, they made a big deal of sending the first set of real prints to the FBI. Within a couple of hours, the FBI had received the prints, done a search, and determined that the suspect had been arrested several times before, including once for assault with intent to kill, in another state — something the BPD wouldn't have found out for weeks, if not months, with the old system.

We had other cool features in this app, like the ability to create a "lineup" — you chose a particular person in the database, then chose which physical attributes (height, weight, hair/eye colour, race, etc.) you wanted included in the search, and we would find other people in the database that matched (or matched closely) on the criteria you selected. You could then drag and drop the pictures into a photo array and print it off, and you'd have a bunch of pictures of people who look similar, which the officers could then show to witnesses, without having to get your suspect and witness into the police station at the same time.

I once installed a viewing station at the Secret Service office in Boston, so the Secret Service could do searches on the BPD database. While setting stuff up, I was sharing a room with an agent who was looking over a big stack of bills ($20's or $50's I think), checking which were counterfeit and which were real. One particular bill was giving him trouble, and he flagged down another agent who happened to be walking by. He showed her the bill and asked "This is real, isn't it?". The other agent looked at the bill for maybe three seconds before telling him that it was indeed real. I expressed my amazement, and he confirmed to me that she really can tell real money from fake that quickly. I was impressed.

The funniest story from that part of my career was when we were doing some on-site training. We had a test database set up, and during the training as well as testing, we could book ourselves and insert the records into the test database whenever we wanted. One day, I accidentally set the app to talk to the live database, and forgot to reset it back. Then we booked ourselves a few more times. It wasn't long before we realized that these bookings weren't showing up on the other test machines — that's when I figured out what I had done. We had to confess our sin to the Deputy Superintendent of the BPD, and he allowed us to delete the records from the BPD database. There was no mechanism for doing this (once a booking is entered it's supposed to be permanent), so I had to connect to the database directly and enter the SQL manually. However, the FBI link was up at the time, so one of my colleagues had her fingerprints sent to the FBI under the name "Elroy Jetson". (Luckily, only one booking submitted during this time had fingerprints attached to it.) Once we figured that out, we had to get the Deputy Superintendent to issue a court order to get the records expunged from the FBI database. I guess there were some problems with this process, because I got a call from this colleague a number of years later (long after I had left Comnetix), saying that she was now living in the US, and had applied for something (don't remember what) that required an FBI check, and one of these test records popped up in a search. She had to jump through a few hoops, but I think it all got straightened out in the end.

I have to say, I really enjoyed that job, mostly. Not only was the application itself really cool, and working with the police, FBI, Secret Service, and RCMP was cool as well, but we were using NeXTstep, which was just the coolest operating system I've ever used, with an amazingly powerful development environment. I've seen and used Mac OS X a couple of times, and it's quite cool too, which is not surprising, considering it's basically the next generation of NeXTstep.

But the job wasn't perfect. Not only was I a project leader and developer, I was part of the testing team, the documentation team, the technical support team (carried a pager every other week for the better part of three years), the end-user training team, I set up demos for our head salescritter at a couple of sales conferences (on-site -- New York City, Florida, Ottawa), and I was also the company sysadmin. Bonuses we were promised never showed up. The company was privately owned, so stock options were nonexistent. The VP was the president's wife; he was technically savvy as well as a pretty good business man, while she was useless. She once gave me crap for leaving at noon on a Friday without permission — given the amount of unpaid overtime I had put in over the previous couple of years (including staying until 9 or 10 the night before this happened), I figured she could have given me some slack (and I'm still bitter about that 9 years later). And I had one raise in three years. All things considered, I'm perfectly happy in my current job, where I get to the do the stuff I love to do (development), and not the stuff I don't want to do (support). Oh yeah, and my salary is more than double now what it was then.

Funny - I just realized that today I'm wearing the Hard Rock Cafe shirt that I bought on one of my many trips to Boston during my Comnetix years.

Perky

True love is the greatest thing in the world — except for a nice MLT, mutton, lettuce and tomato, where the mutton is nice and lean and the tomato is ripe — they're so perky, I love that.
Miracle Max, The Princess Bride

We had pancakes and peameal bacon for dinner the other day, and had a few pieces of peameal left over. When making my lunch this morning, I put the peameal in a ziplock and made myself two sandwiches with tomato, lettuce, and mayonnaise. At lunch time, I planned on nuking the peameal to warm it up, then putting it on the sandwiches. All morning, I found myself looking forward to lunch time. I just finished my lunch, and I must say, I was not disappointed.

I think I'll change the tagline for this blog to something like: "Cut the Chatter — a blog that touches on the important issues of the day". Or maybe that should be "important issues of my day."

Golf tournament

I played in the Deiter's Love Memorial Golf Tournament this past weekend in Strathroy (west of London). I played in it last year as well, and also designed and built the website. The tournament is in memory of Deiter Rombouts, who was born prematurely and needed a liver and bowel transplant, and possibly a stomach and pancreas transplant as well. Deiter passed away at the age of six months while still on the transplant waiting list. These are the same four organs that our friend Sarah received when she was six months old, and that was over nine years ago. While Sarah was in the hospital in London for one of her many surgeries, her mom Cindy met Deiter's parents (Stacy and John) and became friends, and we met them through Cindy. Stacy and John started running this golf tournament and silent auction to raise money and awareness for organ donation, and I am proud to be part of it. <blatant plug>I've signed my organ donation card -- have you?</blatant plug>

I played with my friends Steve, Jeff, and Doug, and we finished the day with a 2 under par 69. I got to use my new driver, and actually hit it pretty well a couple of times. One of those times, I hit it too far, and we used Steve's drive (it's a best-ball tournament) because it was further back and gave us a better shot at the green. (Of course, he used a 5-iron, and I only outdrove him with my big-ass driver by about 30 yards, but still.) The winning team shot 10 under, so we didn't come close to winning (not that we expected to), but we had fun.

Didn't buy anything at the auction this year. I bid on a few items (Tiger-Cat tickets, some outdoor speakers for my dad, and I can't remember what else), but was outbid on all of them. Not true - I actually bid on and won a little green ribbon (for organ donation) charm for Gail, but found out later that she already had one. Silly mistake, but not very expensive ($10), and Gail said it was a very sweet thing to do, so it won me some husband points. Gail got a couple of crafty things, and the boys each got some toys. I bid on and won a putter last year, but I haven't touched it since, since I like the putter I have. I should have called Stacy and donated it back so they could auction it off again this year, but I didn't think about it until a day or two before the tournament. I'll probably donate it to the school silent auction in February.

Coincidence of the week: At last year's tournament, I bought one of those bracelets that everyone is wearing (like the Livestrong ones). This one was green and said "Donate Life". I didn't wear it much during the winter, but other than that, I've worn it almost every day since. I wore it again at the golf tournament, and then when taking it off yesterday, the day after this year's tournament, it broke.

Technorati tags:
organ+donation

My Obi-Wan has no head

Wil Wheaton, already one of my favourite bloggers / writers, posted this article yesterday. Man, did it bring back memories for me. It's all about how Wil went through a phase during his childhood when he played with Star Wars figures, as I did. He remembers to this day which ones he had, which ones he had that were broken (and what was broken about them), and which ones he wanted, as I do.

My first SW figure was Obi-Wan Kenobi. Eventually, his head broke off, and despite several efforts to glue it back on, it ended up just rolling around in the box where I kept the figures. I also had:

• Luke Skywalker (lost light saber)
• Princess Leia
• Han Solo
• Chewbacca
• R2-D2
• C-3P0
• Darth Vader (lost cape)
• Jawa (lost cape)
• a stormtrooper
• a "sand person" (known at the time as a Tusken Raider, though that phrase wasn't used in a SW movie until Episode 1) (yes, I'm a Star Wars geek)
• power droid
• R5-D4 (similar to R2-D2, but orange)

I always thought Hammerhead was the coolest, even though he was only in the first movie for a couple of scenes. That was it for figures, and the only vehicle I had was a landspeeder (and Wil has a great story about one of those), but I was jealous of my friend Jody who had the an X-Wing Fighter (the wings open up when you press down on R2-D2!) and Darth Vader's TIE Fighter. Spoiled rotten, that kid was.

In 15 years, I'll be 52

Warning: Hockey article ahead. See you later, John.

So Rick DiPietro signed a 15 year $67.5 million contract with the Islanders the other day. This means he's getting $4.5 million per year until 2021. There is even a clause in there that says that if he gets injured (hockey-related injury) and has to retire, he still gets paid. If he decides to retire for any other reason, the deal is null and void, but why would he? Great deal for Rick, but why in hell would the Islanders do this? He's now on contract until he's 40, and very few NHL goalies are still playing, let alone competitive, at age 40. If he doesn't pan out as a top level goalie, you're still paying him that whole time, since this contract makes him untradeable. No other team would want to take that contract on — especially if the Islanders want to trade him because he didn't pan out.

You could argue that DiPietro might still be a competitive goalie in 10 years when he's 35, which may be true, so maybe the Islanders are thinking of it as a 10-year deal "amortized" over 15 years. If he happens to play the last 5 years as well, then that's a bonus for them. Looking at it that way, he's getting $6.75 million per year for 10 years (paid out over 15). The highest paid goalie in the league, Nikolai Khabibulin, currently makes $6.75 million per year (coincidence?). Is DiPietro the same caliber goalie as Khabibulin? No, so this way of thinking doesn't make much sense either.

Granted, the $4.5 million a year is not a huge amount by NHL standards, so if the cap goes down, it shouldn't affect them too much (it's not like it's A-Rod's "$250 million over 10 years" albatross), but I think it's still a big risk for the Islanders to take on an unproven goalie.

Update: A-Rod's contract is actually $252 million over 10 years, but hey, what's another $2 million?

Technorati tags:
Hockey

The Great Gilligan Conspiracy

If you thought Gilligan's Island was just a silly comedy show, think again. The truth has finally been revealed — it was really a crime drama.

It makes you wonder about other shows as well; the most obvious one being: why did so many murders happen whenever Jessica Fletcher was around on Murder, She Wrote? She lives in a quiet little Maine town — which has a murder rate of one a week. She goes to visit friends in another town, someone dies. She goes on vacation, someone dies. Mystery writer or serial killer? You decide.

Thanks to cahwyguy for the Gilligan's Island link.

Geek humour

A bunch of funny geek comics here. My favourites: Escher, M.C. Hammer, and Sandwich

Spiritual Machines

I'm in the middle of re-reading The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil. It's a very interesting read: all about what might (will?) happen in the very near future when computers are able to process information as fast as or faster than the human brain. Will they begin to actually think? Will they become self-aware? Will they grow a conscience? Will they, as the title suggests, become spiritual?

One of the things I found most fascinating was his descriptions of how the human brain works — sometimes he puts this process into computer terms, which is good for geeks like me. This particular part stuck with me:

When a batter hits a fly ball, it follows a path that can be predicted from the ball's initial trajectory, spin, and speed, as well as wind conditions. The outfielder, however, is unable to measure any of these properties directly and has to infer them from his angle of observation. To predict where the ball will go, and where the fielder should also go, would appear to require the solution of a rather overwhelming set of complex simultaneous equations. These equations need to be constantly recomputed as new visual data streams in. How does a ten-year-old Little Leaguer accomplish this, with no computer, no calculator, no pen and paper, having taken no calculus classes, and having only a few seconds of time?

The answer is, she doesn't. She uses her neural nets' pattern-recognition abilities, which provide the foundation for much of skill formation. The neural nets of the ten-year-old have had a lot of practice in comparing the observed flight of the ball to her own actions. Once she has learned the skill, it becomes second nature, meaning that she has no idea how she does it. Her neural nets have gained all the insights needed: Take a step back if the ball has gone above my field of view; take a step forward if the ball is below a certain level in my field of view and no longer rising, and so on. The human ballplayer is not mentally computing equations. Nor is there any such computation going on unconsciously in the player's brain. What is going on is pattern recognition, the foundation of most human thought.

One key to intelligence is knowing what not to compute. A successful person isn't necessarily better than her less successful peers at solving problems; her pattern recognition facilities have just learned what problems are worth solving.

It should be somewhat obvious, but it was a bit of a revelation to me when I first read it. Now it seems that with neural net software, computers are starting to do pattern recognition almost as well as humans. Kurzweil talks in this book (which is 6 years old, BTW) about computers that can transcribe human speech (spoken at a normal speed) with almost perfect accuracy, and computers that can recognize faces — to the point where some banks trust their computers to perform face recognition on people to provide automatic cheque cashing, i.e. if the computer fails, real money is being given to the wrong people. The bank would have to be pretty damn confident in the face recognition software to make that puppy available to the general public.

Movie reviews

Movies Gail and I have seen in the last week or so:

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest: I enjoyed it, though I found it kind of long. The sword fight on the big wheel was neat, but just kept going and going... I also found the scene where Elizabeth yells and throws rocks at Will, Jack, and the Commodore rather weak and out of character for her. I liked the ending though. Maybe it's just me, but I think the way they ended it left it wide open for another sequel!

Superman Returns: Excellent. I like Kevin Spacey as an actor, but for some reason I didn't think he could pull off Lex Luthor. I was wrong. Brandon Routh plays Superman, and he must have watched the original Superman movie a zillion times as preparation, because he captures Christopher Reeve as both Clark Kent and Superman really well. When we watched the original Superman the next day, we were surprised at how many lines in this movie were copied from the first one.

V for Vendetta: Excellent acting, intriguing story. We didn't know who the actor playing V was; turned out to be Hugo Weaving (Elrond from LOTR, Mr. Smith from The Matrix). He was excellent — you'd have to be a good actor to pull off a character like that without showing your face (a la Andy Serkis as Gollum in LOTR, though Gollum's face was kind of based on his anyway). Natalie Portman was very good as well, and she had an interesting accent; it sounded more South African than English at times.

Superman: Apart from the clothes and things like smoking in the office, it's not as dated as I was expecting. The special effects weren't all that bad, either. Gene Hackman was a great Lex Luthor.

Superman II: I remember this from my youth (I was 11 when it was released) as being way better than the first one. Boy, was I wrong. The story was good, but the special effects were really bad. Not just bad, awful. Not just awful, terrible. Half of Gene Hackman's lines sounded dubbed, and after reading the IMDB entry, it looks like they were. When watching any superhero movie, you have to have a certain level of suspension of disbelief, but even still, there were a lot of "yeah, right" moments. Is Lois Lane really stupid enough to jump into the rapids on a hunch? How could Lex Luthor build a holographic projector while in jail? Superman spent a long time figuring out who he was and why he was sent to Earth, and he uses his powers to benefit mankind; would he really give up his powers for Lois (the hell with mankind!), when (a) she didn't ask him to and may not want him to, and (b) they've been "together" for only a few hours? Where did Lois and Superman get the car they drove to the diner after he lost the ability to fly? Once he decided to go back, did he really just leave Lois and start walking north again? I'm amazed this movie did well enough to warrant another sequel, let alone two.

X-Men: The Final Stand: Pretty good. Considering it's the final X-Men movie (I believe), it was a fitting ending to the story. Having Rebecca Romijn naked didn't hurt either.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider: As expected, it's like watching a live-action video game. The plot was secondary to the action and effects. I'm not a big fan of Angelina Jolie, but she pulled off the "action star" role here pretty well.

Lara Croft: Cradle of Life: Better than the first one, but still not very compelling.

18 Blocks: Very good. Bruce Willis is convincing as an older cop who seems like he's just counting the days until he can retire, while rapper Mos Def is excellent as the kid he's escorting to the courthouse. I really enjoyed this movie.

Blasphemy and irony

Note to those who might see "Hamilton Tiger-Cats" at the beginning and skip the rest, that this is not a sports article...

Last Saturday, the Hamilton Tiger-Cats got absolutely smoked by Saskatchewan, 51-8, one of the worst blowouts in team, if not league, history. The headline in the Hamilton Spectator on Monday was "Oh My God!". This morning, there was a letter to the editor (not sure if you need to be a subscriber to see that) complaining about the use of this phrase. My first thought when I read the letter, ironically, was "Oh, good Lord." (I'm not kidding, those were the exact words that came into my head. I swear to God.) Is this really worth writing to the editor about? Do people really have nothing more important to do than complain about stuff like this? ** It's just a phrase. Nobody's calling to God, asking Him to fix up the Ti-Cats, or asking why He let such a thing happen. It's just a group of words that people say when something happens that shocks them. Next, people will be protesting the old Batman TV show because Robin keeps using the word "holy" in reference to things that are not, in fact, holy. Get over it.

** Before you ask, yes, I do see the irony in blogging a sentence like that...

A few years ago, someone at Sybase corporate sent a company-wide email out about something, and prefaced the email by saying "Good Friday morning!", since it was sent on a Friday. Someone else replied to that email (to the whole company), complaining that to Christians, the phrase "Good Friday" refers to a particular day, and not just any Friday, and should not be used out of context. Good God, For crying out loud, the guy was just trying to be friendly. Some people will complain about anything.

BTW, when I first typed in the title of this article, I was really tempted to add "live together in perfect harmony" to the end, but decided against it. Made me laugh though.

Fern

We went to Fern last week, and as expected, we had a great time. The weather co-operated, for the most part; we only had rain on one day, and only for a couple of hours. We went to the indoor pool during that time, so we had fun anyway. The guys went golfing (9 holes) on Tuesday morning. I got one par, and missed chipping in for birdie (would have been my first one) by a fraction of an inch. I got to try my new driver out for the first time — the ball went left a lot, but it went a lot further than with my old driver. Obviously going further into the trees is less than ideal, but once I figure out how to hit it properly, it'll be very cool. I'm hopefully going to the driving range tomorrow evening with my neighbour (the guy who made the driver), so he can give me some tips on how to straighten out my swing.

Back to Fern; a summary of things we did:

• pedal carts and bikes — Nicholas was big enough this year to get the carts going
• Gail and I each tried archery (Gail did it two or three times; I think she's getting addicted)
• I played 4-way volleyball twice (I think I'm getting addicted)
• I had casino (blackjack, roulette) and Texas Hold-'em lessons
• Gail went for a walk (2.5 to 3 km) every morning at 6:30 (I was very impressed)
• Ryan and I played golf — Ryan did really well, for his second time ever on a (non-mini) golf course (his first time was last year), and I got two pars in five holes!
• I made it to the top of the "vertical playground", which is a sort of obstacle course that you climb, consisting of rope ladders, poles with wooden spikes that you climb, and some tires as well.
• Ryan went fishing and caught a minnow and a catfish

The vertical playground was actually easier than the rock climbing wall that I climbed last year. Next year, maybe I'll try the teeter-totter, which is just your basic see-saw, except that it's mounted at the top of a 40-foot telephone pole.

I didn't manage to get a ride on Jeff's jet-ski; whenever he had it out, I was busy doing other stuff. I also wanted to play tennis but never got a chance, and we didn't get the lacrosse sticks out either.

We then dropped Nicholas off at Gail's dad's place and Ryan off at my parents' place on Saturday, and drove home, stopping to see Pirates of the Carribbean in Barrie on the way. We also stopped at the Colisseum at the 400 and 407 to see Superman Returns, but the timing didn't work out, so we went home. Sunday we saw Superman Returns at the Imax theatre in Mississauga, and Monday we tried to go and see X-Men: The Final Stand, but the theatre had technical difficulties and had cancelled the movie, so we went to see that tonight. Since Saturday, we've also rented a bunch of movies, painted the bathroom and replaced the light fixture, installed a new cover on the bathroom vent (to keep birds from making nests in there like they did this past spring), and we're going to order a new garage door this week as well.

I'll post mini-reviews of all the movies we've seen this week a little later.

A couple of quickies

The headline in today's Hamilton Spectator is "New Weapons of Terror", along with a picture of various bottles: water, hair gel, shampoo, V8, contact lens solution, toothpaste, etc. This is in response to the new airline rules banning passengers from bringing any type of liquid or gel in their carry-on luggage. I'm all for security, and I have no problem getting x-ray'ed and searched before I get on a plane, but this is just getting silly. When we went on our cruise in 2001 (2 months after 9/11), our luggage was searched, and we were forced to break off the little nail file on our fingernail clippers. (Note that we didn't have to throw it away, we just had to break it off.) Nobody would have batted an eye at a 6-inch sharpened pencil, which is arguably more of a weapon than the nail file.

Here is a funny article about the next step in this "war on terror". The terrorists may not have succeeded in significantly affecting the Western economies or changing government policies on anything (which, presumably, is at least one of their goals), but I'm sure they're all having a good laugh at the stupid policies that have resulted from their activities.

On a completely unrelated note, I went out to Quizno's for lunch today. Man, do they have it wrong. Their food is great, that's not the issue; their ordering system is just silly. You get in line at one end of the counter and when it's your turn, you tell the guy what kind of sandwich you want, what type of bread and extras you want, and whether it's to eat in or to go. Then he makes the sandwich and puts it into the Magic Yummy Sandwich Making machine (aka toaster). You then get into a second line, behind all the same people you were in line behind the first time, and go to the payment counter, where you have to tell the person there what you already ordered. They handle the payment, then cut and wrap your sandwich and give it to you. Why do I need to give my order twice? This is the only restaurant (fast-food or otherwise) that I know of where I have to do this. What's worse - the first guy doesn't want your whole order, just the sandwich part of it. If you want soup with it, or a combo with chips and a drink, he doesn't care. Surely they can figure out a way to handle the customer giving their order once and once only. Every other restaurant in the world can do it...

How NOT to coach

On the drive home tonight, Bob McCown (my favourite sportscaster) was talking about an article by Rick Reilly (my favourite sports writer) in this week's Sports Illustrated (which I haven't received yet). (Here is a link - not sure if you need to be a subscriber or not to read it) It talks about the championship game in a kids' league (9- and 10-year-olds) in Utah. The home team is down by one, batting in the bottom of the ninth, with two outs and the tying run on third. Their best hitter comes to the plate, and is intentionally walked to get to the next batter, Romney, who is the worst hitter on the team. He strikes out to end the game. The kicker (well, one of them) is that Romney happens to be a cancer survivor who has to take human growth hormone and has a shunt in his brain. The coach of the winning team defended his decision, saying that it's "just good baseball strategy". Well, sure it is, and I initially agreed with him. Cancer survivor or no, if he can't play at the level expected in the league, then he shouldn't be playing.

That's when I heard the second kicker — in this league, everyone gets to bat, there's a four-run limit per inning, and there's no stealing until the ball crosses the plate. Given those rules, it's obvious (or should be) that this isn't a rep league — the primary focus of this league is fun. There is no "level expected in the league". Because it's not a rep league, things like intentional walks shouldn't happen, and pitching to the slugger was the right thing to do. Walking him to get to the kid who could barely swing the bat made it all about winning. Obviously the winning coach never heard the old saying "It's not whether you win or lose, it's how you play the game".

Man, I love summer

Gail got me quite a cool present for my birthday this year: a custom-made driver. Our neighbour makes golf clubs, so one day last week, Gail told me that he had called, and wanted me to come over and give him a hand with his wireless router, which was giving him problems. So I went over, and he informed me that I was not there to fix his router, but to have a fitting for a custom driver. He measured my arm length and swing speed (85-90 mph), and we chose which type of head, shaft, and grip to use. (Well, OK, he pretty much chose all that stuff — he gave me some options, then told me what he would choose, and I gave him a lot of "sure, that sounds great".) He came by Tuesday night with the final product. I wasn't allowed to swing it, since the grip adhesive hadn't finished drying yet, but he said it should be OK by Wednesday evening. I may have a chance to go out to the range with it tonight (Thursday), but more than likely, I'll have to wait until next Tuesday morning when we go golfing at Fern (see below). I used to hate my driver because I simply couldn't hit anything with it. I entered a "longest drive" competition at Fern one year, and brought my three iron because I knew I could hit it farther than my driver (though I was completely smoked by others who could hit their drivers). I took some golf lessons last summer, and since then, I've had better luck with my driver, When I went out with my dad a couple of weeks ago, it was actually the best club I hit all day. But it's 11-year-old technology now (and that's assuming it was the latest technology when we bought our clubs 11 years ago, which it wasn't), so I'm really looking forward to trying this new one out.

We go to Fern for a week in August every year — this year it goes from this coming Sunday (the 13th) to Friday the 18th. We've been looking forward to this year's trip since, well, since last year's trip ended. Fern has a ton of stuff to do for the kids as well as for us. The kids love the Playvillage, where they have activities all day, as well as free time to just play. (Note that the kids don't stay in Playvillage all day, but there are always things for them to do.) There are also shows, where they bring in magicians and musicians as well as a group from the local wildlife center, and they have a hay ride every night, as well as a zip line, a couple of big climbing structures, trampolines, and mini-golf. For kids and adults, there are tennis and basketball courts, three pools (two outdoor, one indoor) and a beach, bikes, pedal carts, canoes and pedal boats, a 5-hole golf course, batting cages, a 4-way beach volleyball court (which is a lot of fun), a rock climbing wall (yes, that's me in the white shirt), and a few other extreme sports. You can borrow all kinds of sports equipment, and they have other sports-related activities; Gail really enjoyed archery last year. There are other programs as well, like a cooking demonstration with the head chef, a woodworking class with the head carpenter, mixology, scrapbooking, and blackjack lessons, an internet cafe (and apparently the pool area is a wireless hotspot now, though we don't plan on bringing our laptops anyway) and other stuff like that. Oh yeah, and all your food is included, and is excellent. Another advantage is that dinner time for the kids starts at 5:30, and for everyone else at 6:00, at which time Playvillage opens, so you can feed the kids at 5:30, then take them over to Playvillage, then come back and have a nice leisurely grown-ups-only dinner.

In previous years, we've rented jet-skis, but Fern doesn't rent those anymore. Luckily, my friend Jeff recently bought one (as I mentioned in in the camping entry), so we'll have that to play with next week as well. It's not terribly cheap, but it's not ridiculous either, and we have a great time every year. I can't wait.

The week after Fern will also be fun. We leave Fern on the Friday morning, and head north to Gail's dad's place in Sundridge. We stay Friday night there, and leave Saturday morning sans Nicholas, who's staying with John and Jackie for a week. On the way home, we stop in at my parents' place, where we drop Ryan off. So from Saturday afternoon until the next Friday, no kids. Now don't get me wrong, I love my kids, but the idea of going out to a movie without paying more for a babysitter than for the movie itself certainly has appeal, not to mention not making kids lunches every day, not fighting with bedtime every night, not worrying about making a dinner that the kids will actually eat, and so on. Gail and I will get lots done around the house, see a couple of movies, sleep in on Sunday and maybe play a round of golf. It'll be nice.

Technorati tags:
Vacation

Lunch at Harvey's with Nicholas

Me: There are four types of kids meals, Nicky. Do you want a hamburger, cheeseburger, chicken fingers, or a hot dog?
Nicholas: A hamburger.
Me: A hamburger? Not a cheeseburger?
Nicholas: No, a hamburger.
Me: OK. Are you sure you don't want a cheeseburger? Just a hamburger?
Nicholas: Yes, I want a hamburger.
Me: OK.

A few minutes later...
Me: OK Nicky, here's your hamburger. What do you want on it? Ketchup? Mustard?
Nicholas: No, just cheese.

Queensryche Live

I borrowed a fairly new Queensrÿche album from the library the other day, called "The Art of Live". Kind of a self-aggrandizing title, I thought ("We're so good live, we've turned it into an art"), but they used to be one of my favourite bands (as I've blogged before), so I thought I'd give it a try. What a disappointment. Part of my disappointment comes from the fact that most of the songs are from the last few Queensrÿche studio albums, which I didn't really like, and not so much from the first 4 or 5, which I did like. Even ignoring that, there are other problems: the crowd noise is almost non-existent (a live album without crowd noise is just weird to listen to), and there are no backing vocals. This doesn't matter much for some songs, but for a song like Anybody Listening, it really loses something without the backing vocals. I guess Chris DeGarmo was the primary backing vocalist, since he's no longer with the band. Hey, maybe that's the reason I don't like as much of the new stuff — he wrote all the songs I liked too. Another weird thing is that on the song My Global Mind, it sounds like they've shut off the amplifiers, or at least turned the distortion way down — it's not quite an acoustic version, but it certainly isn't as heavy as the original version. I think if it was a pure acoustic version, it would be OK, but it just seems mixed up here. Operation: LIVECrime was a pretty good live Queensrÿche album, but this one just seems to continue the downward spiral of a formerly great band.

I also got a greatest hits album by Silverchair from the library, but I haven't listened to it yet. I will be sure to keep you, Constant Reader, informed. (Kind of a Stephen King thing there)

Leave that thing alone

I read an article on a blog yesterday, where the guy talked about circumcision — how he needed to get it done to his son when he was about 5, and he wished he had gotten it done when he was born. He says "I listened to all that nonsense about butchering and psychological damage and curcumcision being unnatural. What a mistake." I couldn't disagree more. I don't believe that circumcision causes psychological damage, but in general, there is no anaesthesia used, so (I'm guessing - I don't actually remember) it really freakin' hurts. Do you want to cause your son that much pain, even if there won't be lasting psychological damage? Not without a damn good reason — and thus far, I have not been able to find one.

The main argument that people use when arguing for circumcision is that it allows the child to avoid painful infections that could require circumcision later in life. When Gail was pregnant with Ryan, we asked our family doctor about this, and she said that most of the time, proper washing of the penis eliminates this problem. When Ryan was 3, he could wash his penis by himself, so it's not a difficult thing. She (our doctor) also said that people get ingrown toenails all the time, but nobody advocates removing them at birth.

Another argument I've heard (this, to me, is unbelievable) is that if the father is circumcised, it's important for the child's penis to look like that of his father. Hogwash. If that's true, then you'd better hope that your kids all have the same eye and hair colour as their father as well. Quite simply, people look different — my kids know this. Neither of my sons have ever asked why I look different than them.

It's true that in some cases, infections or inflammations or whatever may cause circumcision to be required in older children, or even adults. But that doesn't mean that we should just do the surgery in advance just in case it's necessary later. Hey, the tonsils and appendix serve no purpose in the human body, and they may also get infected (and if an infected appendix ruptures, it could be life-threatening), so we should remove them at birth too, right? Gail had her gall bladder removed 12 years ago because of gallstones, and she's just fine now, so should we remove all gall bladders from babies so that they avoid the pain of gallstones? The logic is the same.

Bottom line: it's painful for the child, expensive (health insurance doesn't cover it), and generally unnecessary. So why would you want to do this to your child? I don't believe that circumcision is butchery or psychologically scarring, I just don't understand why you'd elect to have it done to your child.

Note: Some people have the procedure done for religious reasons. That is not an issue for me, which is why when Ryan was born, I simply looked into the medical reasons to get it done (and found none). As an atheist, I can't say I understand it, but if your faith dictates (probably using the wrong word there) that your male children must be circumcised, then it doesn't really matter whether or not it is medically necessary. If you honestly believe that God wants your infant son to feel that much pain for no medical reason, then nothing I say in this article will mean anything to you.

Aside: I wonder how many more google searches will hit my blog now that I've used the word "penis". Maybe I should rewrite this article using various other words for penis, and watch my readership numbers skyrocket!

Update (Dec 2006): As Yappa pointed out in the comments, there have been studies that show that circumcised heterosexual men are less likely (some studies say half as likely) to get HIV than uncircumcised men. John mentioned in his blog (also in the comments) that Wikipedia lists other advantages, including lower incidence of penile cancer.

Here's a link (thanks John) to an article saying that the results were so striking that they actually ended the study a year early, saying that it would be unethical not to offer circumcisions to all the men in the study. These results are certainly interesting, and if I lived in sub-Saharan Africa, I would have to seriously reconsider having it done to my kids. However, incidence of HIV among heterosexual non-drug-using men is far lower here than it is there. I don't regret my decision not to have it done (and if I had another son I probably still would not get it done), but I must take back my (implicit) assertion that it's pointless and has no benefits.

I still don't generally agree with removing something just because it might cause problems later. Doctors believe the appendix serves no purpose, and later in life it can become infected, causing pain and if it ruptures, possibly even death, but doctors don't remove them at birth "just in case".

Camping trip

Starting in the late 80's, a few friends of mine went camping every Canada Day weekend, and I joined them starting in about 1990. Gail started in 1992 when we started dating, and we've gone every year since (though Gail took a year off in 1999 when she was 8 months pregnant). The numbers of people that went on these trips kept growing, until we had over 30 people and 8-10 camp sites. A few years ago, we decided to move the weekend from July 1st to the August long weekend, which was less busy, and easier to get camp sites. It's not like interior camping or anything; one family had a tent trailer, while the rest of us were in big tents (our tent is big enough for me to stand up in the middle). Just about everyone had air mattresses to sleep on, and Coleman stoves and barbecues, and some sites even had electricity, so we're not exactly "roughing it".

However, in 2004, we found camping very challenging — Nicholas was only 2 so he had to be supervised every minute, and it also rained a fair bit. We've had a number of rainy camping weekends, and those are just no fun at all:

• At one point in 2004 we had DVD players going in at least three different mini-vans to keep the kids occupied
• In 1996, Gail and I left a day early because our tent leaked, so everything we had brought (particularly clothes and sleeping bags) got wet. That was also the weekend my old 1988 Cavalier died, so we had to borrow someone else's car just to get there.
• Another year, everyone drove into the nearest town and we all went to a restaurant for dinner. A completely non-camping-like move, but it had rained most of the weekend, and we all just wanted to be dry for an hour or so.

2004 seemed far more work than fun, and so we really had no desire to go the next year. Some other families felt the same way, and so last year, the camping weekend was officially cancelled; a few of us rented a chalet up in Collingwood for a weekend instead.

This year, we decided to try it again, but for a non-long weekend, and so last weekend, the tradition was resurrected, up at Balsam Lake Provincial Park. I'm very glad it was, because everyone had a great time. The weather co-operated (no rain, not too hot, not too cold), the beach was nice, the lake was warm, the kids behaved themselves as much as we could have expected them to, everything went off without a hitch. We had 9 campsites and 33 people — the kids ranged in ages from a little over a year to 10.

My buddy Jeff bought a Jet-Ski a couple of weeks ago, so we all had a ride either on it or being pulled behind it on a tube, so that was a lot of fun. One of the tubes was shaped like a hot dog, and you're not supposed to sit on it, you kneel (especially when you're in the back). I was behind Ryan, and so kneeling the whole time (it was all of about 10 minutes) just killed my legs — three days later, my legs are still stiff and sore. Playing baseball last night didn't help much; they loosened up during the game, and felt pretty good afterwards, but today they're as bad as yesterday. I just hope they're better before my next ball game on Thursday night. In the words of one Mick Jagger, what a drag it is getting old.

Article on IPv6

I found an article from the Times Online (a British paper) talking about IPv6 and how it will revolutionize the internet. Not a very good article (even ignoring the fact that I already knew most of it), but because the author obviously skimped on his research:

• When the internet was developed in the 1980s,... — actually, it was the early '70s
• They gave each address a "16-bit" number... — No they didn't. Each IPv4 address is a 32-bit number.
• ...a new one was written based on "32-bit numbers" — In IPv6, each address is a 128-bit number.
• The number given for 2³² was 340,282,366,920,938, and then a bunch of zeroes, but that's not accurate. The actual number is greater than the one given by 463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456, or over 4.6 sextillion.

Obviously, with IPv6, we're going to need bigger tubes.

Vacation Week

Busy busy week. Gail and I are both on vacation this week, but we didn't actually go anywhere; by that I mean that we didn't go somewhere for the whole week, just a couple of day trips and stuff. Last Sunday, we decided to work outside, moving about 1/3 of a cubic yard of triple mix from a big bag on the driveway to the gardens in the backyard. Of course, Sunday was the hottest day of the year so far, and one of the hottest in the last few years — according to the thermometer in the back yard, it was 38°C (102°F) in the shade. We took a break in the hottest part of the afternoon and watched some of The Lord of the Rings - The Special Extended Director's Cut (or whatever) while the boys napped. I really enjoyed the LOTR trilogy, and the extended ones are even better. Seems that Mr. Editor Guy wasn't a big fan of Faramir, since he had a lot more scenes in the extended version than in the "regular" ones.

Monday, we went to Canada's Wonderland again, and spent most of the day in the water park. Being Monday (i.e. not a weekend), we figured it wouldn't be crazy busy, but being hot (mid-high 30's again) increased the numbers, but it still wasn't too bad. Gail's mom came with us; driving her home was kind of funny. She lives right in Toronto, and seems to think that since we live a fair ways outside the city, we're completely unfamiliar with it. I've told her a number of times that I know the city, particularly Scarborough, where she lives, pretty well, but it doesn't seem to sink in. She lives near Victoria Park and the 401, and coming home from Wonderland, the 401 got busy, so I got off on Allen Rd. and went north to Sheppard, which I planned on taking across to Victoria Park. She gave us a tour on the way back, and kept giving me directions. Even after I pointed out that I used to work on Don Mills just south of Sheppard and drove Sheppard Ave. home every day, and was born in North York, and lived in Scarborough for 11 years, and so on, she still pointed out where Victoria Park was and told me that I wanted to turn right at the lights right after Consumer's Road. Sigh.

Tuesday we finished the bag of dirt from the driveway, took the boys to the library, and had a rather nice uneventful day. My parents came by after dinner, and stayed until this morning. Wednesday morning, my dad and I went to play golf — my first game of the year. I shot something like 117, which it a touch higher than I have shot before, but I only get out two or three times a year. My driver was working really well though, so I was very happy with that. I did hit it left quite a bit, but at least it was consistent, not all over the place like I used to hit. I used to hate my driver, but after the lessons I took a couple of years ago, I can hit it pretty well now. The rest of the day was more gardening and playing outside with the boys, and then we had a wonderful dinner outside on the deck - the heat had subsided, and there were no bugs, so it was very nice.

Today, we took the boys to Ontario Place. I had been there a number of times as a kid, but probably not in 20 years or so. It rained for a while in the afternoon, but we spent part of that time in the Cinesphere, part of it in the water park, and the rest on the wilderness adventure ride (i.e. log flume), so we got a little wet, but we had a lot of fun anyway. Best part — Ontario Place has a policy where if it rains for more than an hour continuously, you can get a coupon for free admission any other day, so we get to go back another time for free. Since it cost us about $105 for admission, this is a good thing.

Tomorrow, we're going camping for the first time in two years. There are going to be something like 25-30 of our friends there, so it should be a lot of fun. Gail will likely take a ton of pictures, so I'm sure I will scan a bunch and make a Camping 2006 page on our web site.

On an unrelated note, I created a LiveJournal account today, so now I have three blogs (I also have one for my NLL Pool, but I only update that one with pool-related information, and only during the NLL season (Dec-May)). I only created it so that I can comment non-anonymously on other LJ users' blogs; I have no plans to actually use it as another blog.

Exodus from Edmonton

OK, I don't get this. The Edmonton Oilers were a game away from winning the Stanley Cup, and suddenly everyone's jumping ship. OK, maybe Chris Pronger had "personal reasons" for wanting out, but there seem to be a lot of players who are leaving Edmonton. Obviously Pronger was traded to Anaheim, but a bunch of free agents have also left: Ty Conklin, Georges Laraque, Sergei Samsonov, and Jaroslav Spacek have all signed with other teams. Mike Peca is supposedly in talks with the Leafs (though that seems to have stalled), and Radek Dvorak has stated that he has no interest in returning. I'd have figured that after having been that close to winning it all, you'd want to stay with the same team, and try to get just that little bit better next year. Maybe after Pronger asked to be traded, a bunch of the free agents figured there was no chance of that, and so they all jumped ship.

Kind of sucks for Edmonton fans, though they probably still have a better chance of winning it all next year than the Leafs. The Leafs should sign Peca and Anson Carter quickly, then sign Eric Lindros to a cheap contract (if he'll take one; if he wants more money than last year, let him go), and dump Jason Allison. They already did the right things in buying out Ed Belfour and Tie Domi (I like the guy and all, but he's getting too old, and is too expensive for what he brings to the table), and they resigned Nik Antropov to a fairly cheap contract, which is good (well, the cheap part is good). Not a big fan of Antropov's — we've been waiting years for that guy to turn into the star player he was touted as, but so far in his career, as Bob McCown would say, he's just a guy.

Technorati tags:
Hockey
Edmonton Oilers
Toronto Maple Leafs

The Big E

I was browsing around on Wikipedia this evening before my baseball game, when I came across the entry on Eric Lindros. I've never been a big fan of the Big E, mainly because of the way he started his career. He was drafted by the lowly Quebec Nordiques in 1991, and had indicated, even before the draft, that he wouldn't play for them. It was that arrogance that pissed me off — he'd never played a single NHL game, and already he's decided that he's too good to play for Quebec. He demanded to be traded, and he was — to the Philadelphia Flyers. The trade was unbelievable though: Lindros went to Philly, and here's what went back to Quebec: Peter Forsberg, Ron Hextall, Chris Simon, Mike Ricci, Kerry Huffman, Steve Duchesne, a 1st round draft pick in '93 (Jocelyn Thibault), a 1st round draft pick in '94 (traded to Toronto in the Mats Sundin deal), and $15 million in cash. Three years later, the Nordiques moved to Colorado, traded Thibault to Montreal for a goalie by the name of Patrick Roy, and won the Stanley Cup (they won it all again in 2001, and have also won 8 division titles). Lindros went on to lead the Flyers to the Cup finals once in 1997, but they didn't win it.

I found it quite ironic that Lindros refused to play for Quebec because they sucked so bad, and yet trading him away allowed Quebec to become a very strong team for many years. Lindros plays for the Leafs now (or at least he did last year, but hasn't yet been resigned for next season), so I'm supposed to like him now, but first impressions stick with me for a long time. Having said that, I wouldn't mind if the Leafs did resign him, as long as it isn't for much money - $1.5 million tops.

Technorati tags:
Eric Lindros
Quebec Nordiques
Philadelphia Flyers
Colorado Avalanche

The Circus

We went to a circus on Saturday. The Shriner's circus was in Burlington, and some friends of ours had tickets but couldn't go, so they gave them to us. There were your standard trapeze artists, clowns, jugglers, and stuff (though not a single pair of stilts to be seen anywhere), and they were all good. The things I wasn't so impressed with were the animal acts. Oh, the animals were all trained very well, and the performances went off without a hitch, but something about applauding because six horses were running single file in a circle, then switched directions because some woman with a whip twirled her arms just didn't sit well with me. At least once (I think twice) the MC said that elephants are an endangered species and that they hoped that the opportunity to see the elephant at the circus would cause us (the audience) to become interested in helping do something about it. He also said that elephants in the wild generally live around 45 years, but elephants living in captivity can live up to 80 years. I read over the web site for the circus company, and they do say that they are they take "great pride in the care that [their] animals receive", and I'm sure that the animals are generally not mistreated. The elephant act didn't bother me — one elephant standing on a little stool while some gymnast climbed around on him — and the trained poodles were very cute, but the only time I saw a whip (which was not used on the animals — in fact, she never cracked it once) was during the horse act, and that bothered me.

I'm no tree-hugger, and I do eat meat, but cruelty to animals really bothers me. I cannot envision a scenario involving these horses and a whip that does not involved some cruelty to the horses. They were also tied up in such a way that the horses could not lift their heads beyond a certain point. This was probably for the safety of the performers, but the horse is a very majestic animal, and seeing them with their heads constantly pulled down made them look subservient and humiliated, and I really felt sorry for them.

Weirdness: the MC looked a lot like Wil Wheaton, who writes one of the best blogs on the 'net. His latest entry (ironically about writer's block) is a great example of why blogging was invented.

Technorati tags:
Circus
Animal cruelty
Wil Wheaton

Changed comments again

I changed the comment stuff on my blog back to the standard blogger comments. The Haloscan stuff was working OK, but I just didn't like the look of it — to read the comments, you had to pop up a separate window, and that window had advertising links in it, and I'm too lazy to reformat the window to look nicer. I've moved the comments made during the Haloscan days back over, though I haven't found a way to reset the times to the original times, so it looks like I got a bunch of comments on various different entries all within a few minutes of each other on the same day. One of the main advantages of Haloscan is trackback, which is not offered by blogger, but my blog is low-traffic enough that not having it is no big deal.

Update: I figured out how to edit comments, so all the comment dates/times are now correct.

Technorati tags:
Haloscan
blog comments

More Separated at Birth

In a comment on my last posting, Yappa said: "I agree with those! In addition, I've always thought that Johnny Depp and Helena Bonham Carter look like twins." Well, let's see:

Helena Bonham Carter	Johnny Depp

Yup, no question. Must be the facial hair.

Separated at Birth?

Is is just me?

Steve Yzerman	Michael Keaton

While I'm at it...

Corey Hart	David Duchovny

I've always thought the same thing about k.d. lang and Colin James early in their respective careers, but I couldn't find any pictures that illustrated the similarities.

Technorati tags:
Steve Yzerman
Michael Keaton
Corey Hart
David Duchovny