Extortion in the skies?

We got all the testing done today, so I was back in the hotel by 5:00. I took a quick look online to see if there was an Air Canada flight tonight -- there's one at 8:00, and as long as I packed quickly, I should be able to get there on time. I called Air Canada to see how much it would cost to switch the ticket - there's a $10 fee for this, a $32 fee for that, which I would have been happy to pay if it got me home tonight instead of tomorrow. Then he said that the ticket price was higher, so I'd have to pay the difference -- $350. The original return ticket cost $491, or just under $250 each way. I didn't ask the guy, but I should have -- why would the price of a ticket on this flight be more than double that of the one tomorrow morning? Is it on a nicer plane? Better food? Free lap dances by the flight attendants? There's gotta be some major difference, right? Nope -- it's a time-honoured airline tactic called "fucking the customer over whenever possible". I just checked aircanada.ca for flights from Toronto to Vancouver tomorrow (Jan 19) -- there are 13 direct flights. Tango ranges from $168 to $426. "Latitude" costs $626 for every flight, and the only advantages over Tango are things like more Aeroplan miles, no charge for same-day ticket changes, and the ability to select your seat without paying for it. For "Latitude Plus", $1260 allows you to sit in the Maple Leaf lounge before the flight, and you get an upgrade to first class if a seat is available. This means that if first class is full, flight 103 from Toronto to Vancouver tomorrow morning will have some people sitting in coach who paid $168, while others also sitting in coach who paid $1260. Does this make sense to anyone other than Air Canada?

BTW, the flying time on the flight down here (from wheels-up to touchdown) was exactly 59 minutes and 30 seconds. I'll write again after I get back and post the flying time for the return flight.

In-flight entertainment

I'm writing this on my laptop while flying over the blackness that is Lake Ontario at night. Through the clouds, I can occasionally see some lights off to our left, which must be the east end of Toronto, or possibly even further east, like Pickering or Whitby. I'm on Air Canada flight 310, flying down to Reagan airport in Washington DC. Tomorrow and Wednesday, I'll be meeting with some contractors who are doing a security evaluation of the database product that I work on, Adaptive Server Anywhere (ASA). This evaluation is required before a software product can be used by the US government and its agencies, so getting the evaluation done opens a bunch of doors for our sales people. I'm the technical lead on the project, so over the past three years, I've put together lots of documents describing the product and how it works, and written lots of tests and documentation about these tests. It's been a long and ardous project, but for the most part, it's been part time - a few hours here and there, rather than 8 hours a day every day. I will be glad when it's all over though.

Starting this morning when I got up, I've been very nervous about this trip. Not because of what will be happening when I get there, but the flights themselves. I can't explain why - I've flown many times, and I've never been the least bit nervous about it. In my previous job, I flew down to Boston all the time - probably averaging every other month over three years, as well as a couple of trips to San Francisco, one to Naples, Florida, once to DC, and once to New York City. And that's just work trips with Comnetix - I've flown to Baltimore three times with Sybase (though not for over 5 years), and many times on various vacations. I've never been nervous flying, but I had butterflies in my stomach all day, and they got worse as the day went on.

My only guess as to the reason is that it's the first trip I've taken away from my family since Ryan was a baby. The most obvious fear is that the plane will go down and Gail will be left to raise the boys on her own, and they will grow up without a father, and that idea scares the hell out of me. I have every confidence in Gail's parental abilities, and I'm sure she'd do fine, I just don't want her to have to. The weird thing is that Gail and I flew down to Las Vegas back in October without the kids, and I had no qualms about that. If there was, um, an incident during that flight, the kids would grow up without either parent, and would be raised by my sister. With all due respect to her, that would be far, far worse, and yet, I felt no nervousness about that flight. I don't get it.

Looking out the window, I can still see lights off to the left. We must be far beyond the lake now, over New York state somewhere. For some bizarre reason, I felt this urge to time the flight, so I started my stopwatch as soon as the wheels left the ground - 29 minutes and 30 seconds ago. Actually, flying time is supposed to be about an hour, so we're probably at our cruising altitude of 25,000 feet, and roughly halfway there.

We started boarding the flight around 5:45, and just before then, I realized that Gail had already picked up the boys, and was probably at home fixing dinner. The boys would be in the family room, glued to today's episode of What's New, Scooby Doo? which we tape every morning. I thought of calling just to tell them that I love them, but this would be weird for me (telling them that I love them wouldn't be weird, I do that all the time, just calling from the airport specifically to tell them). I know that Gail would immediately ask me what was wrong, and I don't want her to worry about me, so I didn't call. I hope I get to the hotel in time to call before bed - I'd really like to talk to Ryan and ask how his day went - he had a test on owls, which they've been studying for a few weeks now. Did you know that an owl will eat pretty much anything smaller than itself, including bats, rabbits, and even other owls? I did not.

Sometimes talking to Nicholas on the phone is fun too - he's too young to have any real concept of how far away I am or when I'll be back. Ryan, simply because of his age, has a much better understanding of the concepts of time and distance. I keep forgetting how much younger Nicky is - almost three years. Nicky sometimes talks about Figgy and the fact that he died -- and then asks when he's coming back. When we tell him that Figgy's not coming back, he never gets sad, he just sort of says "oh, right", as if he simply forgot. Ryan, on the other hand, started to sniff and almost cry when we drove by the vet's a few weeks ago, because he remembered that that's where we took Figgy when he died.

The captain is talking now - we're at about 15,000 feet, and we'll be touching down in about 10 minutes, so I'll have to shut the machine down now. I'll probably write more on the return flight.

b2 and 0-3

I tried the b2 thing on Saturday night to watch the Toronto Rock game in Rochester. More on the actual game later. b2 basically takes whatever video feed is available (local TV or whatever) and streams it out onto the 'net for $6 a game. For some games, the only video available is the video shown on the scoreboard, complete with crowd shots, "kiss-cam", and whatnot. In this case, the game was being shown on a local Rochester channel, so we got the feed for that, including commercials. I streamed it to my laptop and plugged the laptop into the TV, so I didn't have to watch it on the laptop screen. It was OK, in the sense that I could watch a game that I couldn't otherwise watch, but the video quality kind of sucked. It was sometimes possible to read the names on the back of players' jerseys, but not always. Following the ball was next to impossible, though.

There's another thing out there now called lacrossetv -- for $10 US/month, you get a box that you have to plug into your broadband connection, and then you get lots of games - live games as well as older ones available on-demand. Sounds pretty cool, but (a) I don't know where we'd put the box, and (b) I don't know when I'd have time to watch older games anyway.

Anyway, onto the game itself, which the Rock lost 14-9. I only saw about half of it, since it started at 7:30, and by the time the boys went to bed and I read them their stories and such, it was into the 3rd quarter. The Rock gave up 12 goals in the first half, and were losing 12-4 at one point. The 12 goals were the most the Rock have ever given up in a half, and after 10, Watson was pulled for backup goalie Phil Wetherup. He only let in 4 goals the rest of the way, so he did a great job in a backup role, but the Toronto offense couldn't get anything going. Manning had another frustrating game, only getting 2 assists, where Josh Sanderson had 2-and-3.

Shawn Williams had a great game for the KHawks - 4 goals and 3 assists. Shawn is my buddy Mike's nephew, so we all like to see him do well. I'm sure he especially enjoys playing well against the Rock, since he was once a member of the Rock (won a championship with them in 1999), but was then traded to Buffalo for nothing but a draft pick -- and the guy they chose with that pick never played a game. Don't know why that trade was made, but Shawn spent one productive year in Buffalo before being traded to Rochester in a blockbuster deal the next season, where he's played really well ever since. On any team not featuring John Grant or John Tavares, Shawn would probably be the number one forward.

So the Rock are now 0-3, and are off to the worst start in franchise history. However, 4 of the 5 teams in the east make the playoffs, and the playoffs are all one-game things, not the best-of-5 or best-of-7 you see in the NHL or MLB, so as long as we get into the playoffs, it's still quite possible for the Rock to repeat as Champs. Either way though, I just want to see the Rock playing the way we know they can.

Another close one

The Rock lost their second game of the season to the Buffalo Bandits last night, 13-11. Other than the outcome, it was a great game - kind of chippy in the 1st half though. It seemed for a while that we wouldn't have 5-on-5 lacrosse at all - there would always be someone (or two or three) in the box. Josh Sanderson, who didn't show up in game 1, came out guns-a-blazing last night, and ended up with 4 goals and 3 assists. Blaine Manning, who had a great game 1, got no goals and a single assist. If this trend continues, both Manning and Shooter will have a great game tonight, and Doyle will do nothing.

The defense played pretty well, though stopping Mark Steenhuis on transition is next to impossible. Man, that guy's good. He's one of those annoying little pricks that you hate to play against, but you'd give your left nut to have on your team. He ended up with 5 goals and 4 assists. Chugger put on a clinic, although a lot of shots seemed to hit him square in the chest. Watson made some really nice saves, but also let in 12 goals on only 44 shots.

The most interesting part of the game was a fight (well, sort of) that I actually agreed with. Normally, I don't much like fighting in lacrosse or hockey; most of the time, it's seems pointless. But when Chris White gave Toronto MVP Colin Doyle a cross-check to the head after the whistle was blown, Toronto enforcer Tim "The Surgeon" O'Brien went after White and started pounding him. White immediately turtled, dropping to the floor and covering his face. Since White never threw a punch, he didn't get a fighting penalty, and O'Brien got 5 for roughing. (White did get 5 minutes for cross-checking.) Like I said, I don't generally like fighting, but when someone hits your star player with such a cheap shot, I have no problem with sending someone after him.

Toronto plays in Rochester tonight, trying to avoid starting the season 0-3. Winning in Rochester, however, has never been easy for the Rock - I think they've only done it once ever. (Of course, that once was the 2004 NLL Championship.) The game is on b2, which is some live video streaming thing that I've never tried, but I've heard good things about it, so I think I'll give it a shot tonight.

I'm Rich!

I got an email today saying that Sir Dennis Thatcher, late husband of former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, passed away and left me $750,000! That's right, a famous rich guy that I've never met left me a fortune! All I have to do is send an email to this guy in England (he's a reverend, so you know you can trust him).

Strange that an English guy left me a nice round number of American dollars, but like I said, if you can't trust an English reverend, who can you trust?

Drinks are on me, boys...

When hot ain't so hot

I got one of those HotWash things for Christmas - you know, the thing from Canadian Tire that you hook into your windshield washer system and it heats up the fluid before it gets squirted onto your windshield. Supposed to clean it better, and melt ice and snow faster, and get rid of bugs better in the summer, all that good stuff.

Well, it's supposed to be easy to install, but I'm no mechanic (anything requiring more skill than changing the air filter is beyond my capabilities), so I brought it into the Canadian Tire in Burlington to get installed. The installation cost me $45, so big whoop. So then we have the warmest January ever, and I never get to try it on ice and snow. Just to make sure it works, I wash the windshield and feel the fluid temperature. Cold.

So I take it into Canadian Tire in Waterloo (near work), and tell them it doesn't work. They fix it, then I come home and try it again. Cold. (Stupidly, I decided to wait until I'm home before trying it again, instead of trying it in the CT parking lot.)

I took it back in again this morning, and they told me that the fluid is only heated to about 70°F, so it's not going to be super-hot, and that the unit is indeed working. So I check the manual and it says "...allowing the windshield washer fluid to be heated to 60°C (90°F)." Well, first off, 60°C is not 90°F, it's actually 140°F. Secondly, if the thing only heats the fluid up to 70°F, then both numbers in the manual are wrong anyway. Good to see Canadian Tire's quality control department is working overtime.

The Great Debate

Read an interesting article on the Dilbert blog today, regarding the whole Intelligent Design vs. Evolution debate. The article itself was mildly interesting, but the comments are the cool part. Everything from atheists like myself who believe in evolution to religious extremists who believe that people and dinosaurs existed at the same time, and everything in between, including God-fearing scientists who believe a bit of both.

I find these kind of debates interesting. I get a kick out of some (not all) of the creationist points of view that end up reducing to "God must exist because it says so in the Bible. The Bible must be true because it was written by God." This is the quintessential example of circular logic. Maybe God exists and maybe not, but you can't assume the existence of God in order to prove the existence of God. You just can't.

I once saw a bumper sticker that I found intriguing - "Spiritual people enlighten me. Religious people frighten me." I'm not anti-religion, despite my atheism. I have friends of many different religions, and I don't think any of them are delusional or stupid. If you feel that religion gives your life purpose or meaning, or you just find it fun, then as Bob McCown might say, giddy-up. Go to town. Have a ball. Just don't try to push your beliefs on me, and we're good.

Rock lose in OT and Wireless G

Cool - a rhyming title. Gotta like that.

Lacrosse season is back! The Rock played their first game of the season on Saturday night, and lost to the Arizona Sting 14-13 in OT. It was a rematch of last year's final, where the Rock won something like 19-13, but this time, the Sting were the dominant team. They had a 9-3 lead at one point (after an absolutely awful 2nd quarter), but the Rock battled back and tied it at 11, then 12, and then again at 13 with 36 seconds left in regulation. But 2 minutes into overtime, Andrew Guindon put a shot past Whipper to end it. The Rock were rather rusty - lots of dropped balls, passes that went nowhere, and even shots that missed the net by miles. Josh Sanderson looked like a rookie - taking a stupid penalty less than a minute in, and only ending up with 3 assists. Other than the 2nd, Whipper played pretty well, and Brad MacDonald, who came over in a trade with Calgary, made an amazing play to save a goal late in the game.

Arizona started Mike Miron in net, which kind of surprised me, considering they acquired Rob Blasdell in the off-season. I assumed Blazer would be the starting goalie, with Miron as a solid backup, but perhaps it's the other way around, or maybe they'll platoon, as Whipper and Cosmo did a couple of years ago in Toronto. Miron played a pretty good game though, so it's possible that the Arizona GM and coaches know more about lacrosse than I do.

On an unrelated note, I finally managed to get my new wireless G router set up the way I want it - all of my machines can connect to the 'net and each other, and no other machines can use it (using MAC filtering). I had to download a firmware upgrade and reset the router to factory defaults at least four times before I got this done, but it eventually worked. It's kind of a waste though - the old wireless B router gave us 11 Mbs, while the new one gives 54 Mbs. Sounds great, except that the 2 machines upstairs only have 11 Mbs cards in them, so they don't notice any difference, only our laptops (both from work) do. However, the cable modem coming into the house only gives about 3 1/2 Mbs, so the laptops don't notice any difference either, unless they're copying files between each other, which has never happened. Long story short - the new router gives exactly the same performance as the old router. I'll have to look for cheap wireless G cards on eBay or Factory Direct.

Luckily, the router was on sale - after the $20 mail-in rebate, it only cost me $10. The mail-in rebate should come in 8-10 weeks - if it doesn't, I'll probably have long forgotten about it by then, and even if I haven't, it's not like there's anything I can do. I was promised a mail-in rebate (something like $60) when I bought 3 seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation on DVD, which I did (I eventually bought all 7), but 8-10 weeks later, I received a letter saying that I hadn't included proof of purchase from each DVD package, which I had. But of course, I had no proof of that, so I was SOL.

Words of wisdom

Yesterday Nicholas said something rather profound, for a three-year-old, anyway. He was trying to do something (don't know what), and was not having much luck, and started to get frustrated. Ryan told him that he needed to be patient (Ryan being the poster-boy for patience), to which Nicky gave a big sigh and said "It takes too long to be patient". Truer words were never spoken.

So spam ain't that useless after all

Here is a story from boingboing about a guy who received the ubiquitous spam email supposedly from the FBI saying "we have logged your IP address on some illegal websites and now you're in big trouble", yadda yadda yadda. He figured the email was real, and turned himself in to the police, who found lots of child porn on his computer.

One more kiddie porn scumbag off the streets, and it's all thanks to SPAM! I have long hoped for a day where spam would simply cease to exist, but if the existence of spam helps to get these people off the streets, then sign me up for your mailing list! I want to buy a cheap Rolex knockoff! I want to increase the size of my manhood! I want cheap xanax and alprazolam and propecia and other drugs I've never heard of! I'm excited that hot teen sluts are just waiting for me to call them!

Actually, thinking about it some more, keep me off the mailing lists, and just send all my spam to the stupid kiddie porn people. Thanks.

Jasper secrets revealed!

My boss discovered my blog today, thanks to the link on my family web site, so I thought I'd scare him a bit. Jasper is the code name for the next release (version 10.0) of SQL Anywhere, the RDBMS that I work on. It's not scheduled for release until sometime in 2006, so revealing the new features and stuff here would be a very Bad Thing™ and could get me fired. So, no, Mark, I have no intention of posting any secrets here, except to say that Jasper contains more new features and big changes since ASA 6.0 back in about 1998.

BTW, all of the major releases since version 7.0 have had code names, and they've all been ski resorts: 7.0 was Aspen, 8.0 was Vail, 9.0 was Banff, and 10.0 is Jasper. We haven't picked a code name for 11.0 yet, but apparently Chicopee, the staggering 200-foot-vertical ski hill in nearby Kitchener, is not in the running. By way of comparison, the hills in Jasper, Alberta have a vertical rise of about 3,000 feet.

Music stuff

Here are a few lists of music-related things:

Good Band Names

• Blue Rodeo
• The The
• Barenaked Ladies
• The Thompson Twins (there are 3 of them, and they're not related)
• Rage Against The Machine - not a big fan of their music, but good name
• Strawberry Alarm Clock
• Bands named after people who don't exist (Max Webster, Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull)
• Death Cab For Cutie
• Rainbow Butt Monkeys (now known as Finger Eleven, another good name)
• Bourbon Tabernacle Choir
• Buddy Whasisname and the Other Fellas
• Bruno Gerussi's Medallion
• Me First and the Gimme Gimme's

More good ones here.

Bad Band Names

• The (anything) - post-1980. The Cars? The Smithereens? The Salads?
• Bands that name themselves after a place (Toronto, Boston, Kansas, Chilliwack, Asia, Chicago) - The Bay City Rollers are exempt from this because they picked their name by throwing a dart at a US map
• Audioslave - great band, boring name, especially considering the members came from Rage Against The Machine and Soundgarden, both good names

Just Weird Band Names

• Chumbawumba
• Bowling for Soup
• Hoobastank
• The Meat Puppets
• Toad The Wet Sprocket
• Mott The Hoople
• Ned's Atomic Dustbin

Great Album Names

• Not of this Earth - Joe Satriani -- After listening to his guitar playing, you might believe he really is not of this Earth.
• Break Like The Wind - Spinal Tap
• Tragic Kingdom - No Doubt
• Yes I Am - Melissa Etheridge -- Doesn't refer to her sexuality, but since it's the first album since she came out, it sounds like it does
• Rockihnroll - Greg Kihn -- He also had albums named Kihnspiracy, Kihnspicuous, and Kihnsolidation

Generally bad album names:

• Anything non-debut album that's self-titled (see Peter Gabriel, Weezer)
• Any numbered album (Led Zeppelin, Chicago)
• "Untitled" albums (Led Zeppelin "IV")
• "Greatest Hits" if you're a band that didn't have any actual hits, i.e. on the Top 40 chart or whatever. Pearl Jam is immensely popular, but has had very few big hit singles. If Pearl Jam were to release such a compilation, "The Best Of Pearl Jam" would be a better option than "Pearl Jam's Greatest Hits".

Best Guitar Solos

• Comfortably Numb - Pink Floyd
• One of these Nights - The Eagles
• Alive - Pearl Jam
• Free Bird - Lynyrd Skynyrd
• Shine - Collective Soul
• Layla - Derek and the Dominoes
• Sultans of Swing - Dire Straits
• One - Metallica

Dork Tower

Hilarious picture from Dork Tower.

CD Baby, baby!

I ordered Heather Hill's CD from cdbaby.com, and got this email once it shipped:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of Portland waved 'Bon Voyage!' to your package, on its way to you, in our private CD Baby jet on this day, Saturday, December 10th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as 'Customer of the Year'. We're all exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

The subject of the email was "CD Baby loves Graeme". It's nice to be appreciated.

Guess who hit the big time

We received a Christmas card the other day from a couple with whom we exchange cards every year, but we haven't actually seen them in a number of years. We knew he had started his own company, but we had no idea how it was doing, so just for fun, I googled him. After finding some stuff about him, I asked Gail if there was anyone else she wanted to look up, and she said she was wondering about her first-year university roommate, Heather Pirie, who we lost touch with a number of years ago. We knew she had gotten divorced, but nothing else. The first search turned up an entry that started "Heather Pirie became a full-time singer/songwriter...". Gail was immediately skeptical that I'd found the right one, until I read the rest of the entry: "...after leaving an executive business development position in the corporate world of Internet software publishing", which describes what Heather was doing the last we heard. Then Gail thought for a second, and remembered that Heather was a very good piano player and did like to sing, so maybe... After some more searching, we found that this was indeed the Heather Pirie that Gail had roomed with, and she had changed her name (presumably she is now re-married) to Heather Hill. We found her web site, listened to a couple of tracks from her debut CD, and then ordered it. I hope this doesn't sound condescending, but good for you, Heather, for following your dreams!

Note about the title of this article - it's from "Lucky Ones" by Loverboy, and the complete line is "Don't ask me how, but guess who hit the big time". Just wanted to say that the "Don't ask me how" part doesn't apply here. I've only heard a couple of the songs, but she sounds like quite the talented singer.

Which OS are you?

Which OS are You?

A Clandestine Meeting

Gail and I started a Christmas tradition a couple of years ago -- on Christmas eve, we have fondue for dinner (bread and cheese fondue first, then beef fondue, and chocolate fondue for dessert), and then everyone puts on brand new pajamas, and we all do a big jigsaw puzzle. I bought some puzzles on eBay the other day just for this reason, and noticed that the seller lives in Hamilton. I asked him if he wouldn't mind me picking the puzzles up to save myself shipping costs, and he said no problem. Once I won the auction, we arranged to meet at a Tim Horton's (how Canadian, eh?) across from Limeridge Mall. I told him I'd wear a red baseball cap so he'd recognize me (Gail thought that the whole "red baseball cap" thing was very funny), and he said to look for an old man with gray hair and a cane.

I was going Christmas shopping anyway, so I showed up a little early and had dinner. Vegetable soup and chicken salad sandwich combo. On whole wheat. With a Coke. I finished that and then went back up for a donut and hazelnut smoothee (mmmmmmmm... hazelnut) and while I was enjoying that, a woman who was the quintessential "little old lady" came up to me and said "Excuse me, but are you the puzzle man?" I told her I was, and she motioned me over to where she and her husband were sitting. Her husband was the man with the cane - there was a large tree in between where they were sitting and where I was sitting, so I hadn't seen them (good thing I wore my red baseball cap!). We chatted for a minute or two, I thanked them for meeting me so I could save the shipping costs, and went our separate ways.

My car still smells like hazelnut smoothee.

Harry the Fourth

Gail and I played hookey flexed some work time this afternoon and went to see Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. The movie raised a few questions: How many times can you say that the fourth movie in a series was just as good as the first, if not better? How many movies would Gary Oldman agree to be in if he was offered maybe 3 minutes of screen time, and you could barely even recognize him? How do you make a 2 1/2 hour movie out of a 700 page book without skipping any important stuff?

It had its flaws (Harry, Ron, and Hermione all look older than the 14 they're supposed to be), and some stuff was missing (the Dursley's and Mrs. Weasley weren't there at all, Fleur and Krum said almost nothing, and I missed Krum's trouble with Hermione's name - "Herm-o-ninny") but we really enjoyed it. As usual, the views of the school and surrounding grounds were amazing, Snape was sufficiently slimy (though less negative towards Harry than in the previous movies), Draco was somehow a bully and a chickenshit at the same time, and Ron was scared silly (though this time, it wasn't spiders or other monsters that scared him, it was (gasp) girls). The only person who seemed out of character was Dumbledore - he seemed more angry than usual, and also seemed to have more energy than a man his age should have.

It'll be a two-year wait, but we're already looking forward to the next movie - Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix!

In other news, I ordered a new home gym yesterday, and it's being delivered tomorrow. Click here, then click on Strength, and look under "Northern Lights Multi Gyms" for a model called Granite. I didn't get the 50 lb extra weight - 150 lbs should do me for the time being (and the forseeable future). I'm not planning on entering any weightlifting or bodybuilding competitions or anything, I'm just hoping to tone a little and hopefully lose the "love handles" around my waist. I started working out shortly after Ryan was born - we bought a treadmill, and I lost 25 pounds in about 4 months. I bought a cheap little weight bench and a few free weights a year or so later, and I've been using them ever since, though the fact that I work out alone and don't have a lot of time to be switching plates and stuff around meant that the number of exercises that I could do was very limited. With this thing, there are tons of things I can do, I can change weights in seconds, and there's no danger of dropping the weights on my chest or neck or anything, so it's safer. I'm really looking forward to this...

Things are more like they are now than they ever used to be

I remember a time, not too long ago, when a 540 MB hard drive cost just over $500 - the rule of thumb for disk storage at the time was roughly a buck a meg. Right now at Factory Direct, you can get a 250 GB hard drive for $119, which is less than 50 cents a gig. Which means that in less than ten years, the price of hard disk storage has come down by a factor of two thousand.

Our first computer (in 1982) was a Commodore VIC-20, with 3.5 kB of usable RAM, and the only storage was tape casettes. It cost something like $400. After a while, we got a 16 kB expansion cartridge, and I didn't know what to do with all the extra memory. Eventually (maybe 1985) we moved up to an XT with an 8 kHz processor, some terribly small amount of RAM (definitely measured in kB, not MB), and two floppy drives (no hard disk) - this machine cost over 2 grand. My dad bought a 10 MB hard disk a little while later, and we were on the leading edge of computing. Now, twenty years later, there's a far more powerful computer embedded in your average vending machine, and I have a little two-inch-long thing that hangs on my key chain that can store 128 MB.

It's almost scary to think what computing will be like 10 or 20 years from now. This post kind of reminds me of the book The Age of Spiritual Machines by Ray Kurzweil, which I read a year or two ago (and inspired the album Spiritual Machines by Our Lady Peace). Kurzweil talks about how much more powerful (and cheaper) computers are getting, and eventually, they will be as powerful and fast as the human brain -- and what happens then? Will people start getting microprocessor implants to enhance memory, intelligence, or even things like strength or muscular endurance? How many such implants can one have before the line between human and machine gets blurry? A really interesting read.

Ovechkin and Ponikarovsky

I've heard quite a bit about Alexander Ovechkin recently. He was the first pick just before the "season that wasn't", but then seemed to have been forgotten about, what with the lockout and then the end of the lockout and then the whole Sidney Crosby mania. He won't be forgotten about for long though - he's rivalling Crosby for most points by a rookie this year. The way they talk about him on the radio is impressive - he's a scoring machine, who has as good a chance as anybody of scoring 70 goals in the next couple of years. Considering 50-goal scorers have been rather rare in the last couple of years, this would be quite an accomplishment. Anyway, I heard an interview with him the other day, and he said that he wants to play as much as possible - forward, defence, on the PP and PK, anywhere. He just loves to play. His coach said that he's adapting to life in North America quite well - he's working hard on his English, and even turned down an offer to be roommates with one of his Russian teammates, figuring that if he's bunking with a native-English speaker, his English will improve that much faster. Nice to hear about a hard-working athlete who is playing because he loves to play, and doesn't consider himself God's gift to his sport (are you reading this, Terrell Owens?).

Also heard another nice story about the Leaf game yesterday - Carlo Colaiacovo took a shot towards the net that Alexei Ponikarovsky seemed to deflect into the net. Ponikarovsky was given credit for the goal, but immediately went to the ref and told him that he didn't touch it, and that Colaiacovo should be given credit. He also knew that it would have been Colaiacovo's first NHL goal, so he went and grabbed the puck. After talking to the ref the second time, he gave the puck to Colaiacovo, and credit for the goal was changed. He could easily have just taken credit, but went out of his way to make sure the right person got the goal. Attaboy.