Fa la la la la

I'm a fan of rock music — everything from Sarah McLachlan to Metallica, Elton John to Tool. There are other kinds of music I sometimes listen to: I don't mind some country now and again, some blues, and I even have a couple of musical theatre soundtracks - yes, I admit it, I listen to show tunes. I'm not a fan of hip-hop / rap, and adult contemporary (Celine Dion, Michael Bolton) puts me to sleep. I don't listen to jazz either, but I can appreciate their talent — jazz guitarists and drummers are among the best musicians around. I just can't get into the electronic stuff either; generally, if there isn't a real guitarist or real drummer in your band, I'm not interested. If your "band" consists of three keyboardists, a DJ, and a drum machine, I'm not even going to listen.

One form of music I've never been a fan of is Christmas music. I think it's because after 30-some years, Christmas songs all start to sound the same. It's like there are a bunch of Christmas songs available (some religious and some not), and if you want to record a Christmas song, you must pick one of them. God forbid you write a new one. That's not always true; every couple of years I hear a Christmas song I've never heard before, but usually when someone releases a Christmas song, it's just their version of existing song that has already been done to death. Just yesterday, I heard a "new" version of the Beach Boys' "Little Saint Nick" (I don't know if they wrote it, but the only version I know is by them), but the "new" version was an almost note-for-note copy. Why bother?

Two of my least favourites are "Rockin' Around the Christmas Tree" and "Jingle Bell Rock". Both have "rock" in the title, and that's part of what makes me not like them — neither has anything to do with "rock". What does Brenda Lee know about "Rockin'", anyway? And what the hell is the "new old-fashioned way"? "Jingle Bell Rock" isn't as bad, and I have nothing against Randy Travis (I just can't say his name without dropping into a southern drawl - Rrrrrandy Travis), but if he can cover a song without (a) changing his style or (b) changing the song's style, it ain't rock.

I suppose I have been mellowing in the last few years. I like the Barenaked Ladies' version of Jingle Bells (it starts off very slow and lounge-y, then suddenly blasts into this high-energy fun song). Tom Petty has a pretty good one ("Christmas All Over Again"), and Paul McCartney's "Wonderful Christmastime" is OK. Now that I think about it, John Lennon's "Happy Christmas (War Is Over)" is a really good Christmas song. I'm even learning Silent Night on the guitar. I'm not going out to actually buy any of these (for myself, anyway, I've bought some Christmas music for Gail), but I don't cringe whenever I hear them.

Strangely, it doesn't seem that there have been many attempts to write a hard rock Christmas song. AC/DC did a song called "Mistress for Christmas", which was just dumb. And there are NO death metal Christmas songs. I guess I won't hold my breath waiting for Cannibal Corpse's version of "What Child is This?" or "A Very Slayer Christmas".

Musings on McGwire

Mark McGwire is on the ballot for the baseball Hall of Fame. A lot of people are saying he should not get in because of steroid use. Now, I'm a strong believer that steroid use in pro sports is cheating. I think it goes against the principles of sport in general; athletes are supposed to compete against each other physically, and in many cases mentally, but not chemically. Also, it teaches our young athletes that becoming the best you can be is not good enough on your own, you need drugs as well. Not only does this damage their self-esteem, but it puts them at risk because steroids can be dangerous, even deadly. So on that basis, I think McGwire should not be in the Hall.

On the other hand, it has never been proven that McGwire took steroids, nor has he ever admitted to it. Also, steroids were perfectly legal in baseball until after McGwire retired, so even if he did take them, technically, he never did anything wrong. His stats are unquestionably worthy, and his home-run race with Sammy Sosa in the late 90's gave baseball a much-needed boost in interest (only a few years after the interest-killing strike), so maybe he should be in the Hall.

On the other hand, the criteria for being in the Hall includes your conduct off the field, and McGwire has repeatedly refused to answer any questions regarding steroids, including questions in front of a Congressional inquiry. This refusal could be seen as an admission of guilt, or at least qualifies as detrimental behaviour, so maybe he shouldn't be in the Hall.

On the other hand, baseball has far worse people in the Hall of Fame. Ty Cobb was a racist who once fought with an umpire (after a game), and stabbed a man to death during another fight. Kirby Puckett was arrested for groping a woman and was accused of other "lewd acts" (according to Wikipedia). Those are just two examples, but given that, does taking legal (at the time) "supplements" qualify as detrimental enough? Maybe he should be in the Hall.

Should McGwire be in the Hall of Fame? I dunno. I'll let the baseball writers decide. I'm happy sitting here on the fence.

"Post" of the "day"

Here is a Flickr photoset containing images of signs containing unnecessary quotation marks. This is something that's always bugged me. In a previous job, I walked to work every day, and I passed a gardening business. On the side of their trucks, they had the phrase A "cut" above the "rest". I never figured out why "cut" and "rest" were in quotes. I just chalked it up to bad grammar — people who had never figured out when to use punctuation properly. I, on the other hand, have always been anal pedantic about such things.

If I see Breakfast "burrito" on a menu, I read that as "It's not really a burrito, but it's kind of the same, so we're calling it one anyway". Generally, I just ignore the quotes, but you never know — it could be that they really do know what they're talking about, and it's really not a burrito. Just make sure that you use the little "finger quotes" signals when you order it.

Gives new meaning to "Bad customer service"

I just read a story on boingboing.net about a guy who got seriously screwed over by the Bank of America. To sum it up, this guys sold a couple of bikes online for $600, and the guy who bought them sent a cheque for $2000, telling him that the extra $1400 was to cover shipping costs and his "trouble". He was suspicious, so when he went to the bank to cash the cheque, he told the teller that he wasn't sure if the cheque was real. She checked it out, the cheque was not real, and the guy was arrested and thrown in jail. Note that he did not write the cheque, he received it from someone else and tried to warn the bank about it. He's since been forced to spend over $14,000, in bail and, presumably, legal costs. The Bank of America refuses to apologize or reimburse him.

Since then, many people have closed BofA accounts in protest of this, totalling over $50 million. I don't have a BofA account, and I suspect the majority of people reading this are Canadian, but if you happen to have a BofA account, please consider closing it, and make absolutely sure to tell the branch manager why you're doing this.

Free-as-in-beer music redux

About a year ago, a Seattle-based band named Harvey Danger released their latest album, "Little By Little", and made headlines by making the entire album available in MP3 format on their website for free. I'd never heard of the band, but I figured the price was right, and I could just delete the files if I decided it sucked. (I even blogged about it.) Well, it didn't suck, and I grew to quite like the album. A month ago, I decided that I liked it enough to actually purchase it, since I felt kind of guilty that I was enjoying listening to this album, while the band was getting no benefit from my enjoyment. So I went to the web site, entered my address and credit card number, and got an error, saying that my zip code was in the wrong format. Well, Canadian addresses don't have a zip code, they have a postal code, in a different format than US zip codes. Yet another US-based web site that doesn't know that people exist outside of the US. Sigh.

Anyway, I emailed the "webstore" address asking if they could confirm that either (a) my credit card was not charged, or (b) it was, but the CD will be sent to me. I never heard back, and promptly forgot all about it.

Yesterday, I received my credit card bill, and lo and behold, there is a charge for US$19, and I have no CD. I emailed them again, stating that I was charged, so could they please send the CD? This morning I got a reply, saying that the CD was sent last weekend, and if I don't receive it soon to let them know. The funny part was that the email was sent by Jeff J. Lin (Note: inactive blog), who happens to be the guitar player for Harvey Danger. You know you're not dealing with a big-name band when the guitar player is also responsible for shipping. You wouldn't send email to u2.com and expect to get a reply from theedge@u2.com. After reading some of the stuff on his rather sparsely-populated blog, it looks like he's a geek like me (he specifically mentioned "my CS profs" in one entry), so he's probably "the website guy" as well as the guitar player.

Anyway, I thought that was cool. I encourage you to go and check out this album, if you like their style of music. I'm not sure how to describe "their style of music" though, other than to say that they have been described as "college/alternative". You can hear short clips of a couple of their songs from their Wikipedia page.

Star Wars - comparing the trilogies

Wil Wheaton (who I'm beginning to think of less as an actor and more of a writer and blogger) wrote a blog entry as well as an article (SFW) at suicidegirls.com (NSFW - I only read it for the articles) about Star Wars, what it means to "my generation" (I'm only a year or two older than Wil) and why the fact that the new trilogy "sucked so hard" made him not just disappointed, but downright angry.

I didn't hate the second trilogy (I'm going to refer to the trilogies in the order in which they were released, i.e. the first trilogy is episodes 4, 5, and 6, and the second trilogy is episodes 1, 2, and 3), but it certainly didn't mean the same thing to me as the first one did. I'm sure that part of it was the fact that I was 8 when Star Wars came out, and my friends and I were all into playing with the action figures and such. I think part of it is also that there had never really been a movie like Star Wars - the effects were state of the art, and unlike Star Trek, the aliens were truly alien, not just humans with different coloured skin or bumps on their foreheads. It created a whole new generation of science fiction fans, and paved the way for innumerable other space movies. It was also one of the first movies to really cash in on the toys and merchandising - I wonder if Lucas made more money fom that then from the movies themselves. Basically, the first three movies were not just great movies, they were groundbreaking in the world of cinema.

Then, 16 years later, along comes "The Phantom Menace". The special effects were, once again, state of the art, and zillions of people (myself included) were excited to be entering the world of Star Wars once again. They even had big name actors like Liam Neeson and Ewan McGregor involved - how could it fail? Well, it didn't, financially, it made zillions. But the movie itself wasn't up to what I expected:

• First and foremost was Jar Jar Binks, the most annoying movie character since ... well, since the beginning of time.
• There were the obvious comparisons between Darth Vader and Darth Maul, and while Maul looked menacing and was really slick with the very cool double-ended light saber, he had maybe two lines in the whole movie, and ended up being nothing more than a hitman. Vader, on the other hand, was the very personification of evil in the first trilogy.
• The dialogue was bad. Really bad. Anakin asking if Padme was an angel made me cringe, especially once we realized that the two of them would, (ahem), "get together" in the second or third movie - that was kind of creepy. Another classic bad line: "Let's try spinning, that's a good trick".
• Qui-Gon insisting that Jar Jar (ugh) accompany them because of his life debt seemed like a desperation ploy to keep Jar Jar in the movie. Qui-Gon telling Obi-Wan "we may need a guide" was just laughable. Also, Jar Jar had no idea who these Jedi were, and yet immediately led them to the "hidden" Gungan city. Later, he led them to a special (also hidden) place that Gungans go when in trouble. If they have a hidden city, why would they need another hidden "special place"? And after telling them that Gungans don't like outsiders, why would he lead outsiders to these hidden places twice?
• The midichlorians were these microscopic life forms that live within our cells and give us knowledge of the force. Why, George, why? The midichlorians served exactly one purpose: Lucas wanted a way to quantify how strong Anakin was in the Force. It wasn't enough to just say "this kid is really strong", he needed to prove that the kid had potential beyond that of any known Jedi. But without an actual number to quantify that, there was no way to make that point, so he came up with the midichlorians. Now he could give an actual number and specifically say that Anakin's number was higher than that of Yoda. I didn't like this idea, but I can't say why. The best I can do is to say that making the midichlorians some kind of intermediary between people and the Force seemed to reduce the coolness factor somewhat.

It did have some good points too - the lightsaber fight between Obi-Wan/Qui-Gon and Darth Maul and the pod race were both good, though I suppose that's mainly because of the visual effects (and sound during the pod race).

I really wanted to love the movie - like I said, I was (am!) a huge Star Wars fan, and was really excited about it. I remember leaving the movie feeling like I was "betraying" Lucas by not loving it. It never occurred to me at the time that Lucas was actually betraying us, the fans, by making it. I'm still not sure that I feel that way about it, but I know some, like Wil, do.

I'll post my thoughts on Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith later on.

Squeak squeak swish

I went to my first Raptors game in about 10 years last night - Raptors vs. the Atlanta Hawks. Last time I went to a Raptor game was around '96 or '97 with my old company - we went to a Raptors-Celtics game (fitting, considering the amount of time we spent in Boston) at the SkyDome. They, of course, play at the ACC now, and I know a little more about the game than I did then, which was precisely nothing.

I'm still no basketball expert by any stretch, but I can recognize bad defence when I see it, and the Raps were brutal in the first half. Chris Bosh couldn't hit anything, and I think he might have had 4 points at halftime. He did have a bunch of rebounds though, but that doesn't matter much if you miss the follow-up. The Raps quickly took a 2-0 lead in the first, then Atlanta tied it, went ahead, and never lost the lead for the rest of the game. The Raptors played better in the second half, and got to within 2 points of the Hawks a couple of times, but no closer.

I'm going to two more Raptors games next month - one with Ryan, and one with my friend Jeff. Jeff co-owns season tickets to the Leafs, and he's taken me to a number of Leaf games, and never lets me pay for the ticket, so I think a Raptors game is the least I can do!

Breaking News

Attention all single men! The news you have all been waiting for has arrived: Britney Spears is filing for divorce! This means that Britney is available! For those of you who are on the prowl for a rich and famous woman who is stunningly beautiful (when she's not skanky-looking), marginally talented, and has the IQ of molasses, this is your lucky day. I'm happily married, so this news has no effect on me.

On the other hand, Halle Berry is also single...

Update: So is the über-cute Reese Witherspoon.

Movie Review: Nacho Libre

Gail is away for the weekend, so it's just me and the boys. We rented a couple of movies: The Wild (which the boys liked, I thought the other-movie-with-the-same-plot Madagascar was better. I did like Don Cherry's cameo though) and Scooby-Doo for the boys, and I decided to get something for myself that Gail would have little interest in seeing. I decided on Nacho Libre, since I like Jack Black. Well, let me say this: Nacho Libre is easily — easily — the best Mexican wrestling movie I've ever seen.

Comparing it to non-Mexican-wresting movies, however, is not so favourable. There were some funny moments, but in general, it was kind of boring. The cinematography was weird (like a Mexican movie? I dunno), as was the soundtrack. It seemed to me that both would have been less grating if I were more familiar with Mexican culture, but watching a parody of something that you're not familiar with is just not funny.

What is it with studios that they release movies with very similar plots around the same time? The Wild and Madagascar were released about a year apart, and both dealt with New York zoo animals escaping and making it to their natural habitat, with which they are unfamiliar. Antz and A Bug's Life were released around the same time, both dealt with computer-generated ants. Armageddon and Deep Impact, both about meteor strikes. Volcano and Dante's Peak, both about (you guessed it) volcanoes. Especially weird were The Truman Show and EdTV, both of which had what I would normally have considered a very unique plot. It would seem to me that one studio gets wind of an idea that the other studio is working on, and rushes to get their own "version" out first. Come on, writers, this is why you get paid the big bucks — write your own damn movie.

Top Ten Signs That You Edit On Wikipedia Too Much

1. Whenever you find a spelling or factual mistake on any web page, you immediately look for the "edit this page" button
2. When you see a spelling mistake on your own web site, you immediately look for the "history" button to find out what moron added it
3. Putting hyperlinks in HTML documents is such a pain because typing [[whatever|link]] is so much easier than <a href="http://whatever">link</a>
4. When writing plain-text email, you try to emphasize a word using '''word'''
5. You wish your email client supported categories: being able to add multiple categories to an email would be so cool (All joking aside, this would be quite a cool feature^*)
6. You see a short web page lacking in content and want to add {{stub}}
7. You see something on a web site that doesn't seem right, and you want to leave a message on the talk page asking about it
8. You eye your kids' toys, wondering if they really play with them anymore, whether they'd notice if they vanished, and how much you could get for them. Oops, wrong list — that should be on the Top Ten Signs You Use eBay Too Much
9. You wish the web had a "watchlist" so you could find out which web pages have changed recently without having to actually visit those pages (though I suppose that's what RSS is for)
10. You click on a hyperlink that takes you to a 404 error page, and you wonder why the original link wasn't red

^* I have frequently been looking for a particular email and cannot remember what folder I saved it in. Wouldn't it be great to be able to "save" it to multiple folders without replicating the message numerous times? If I'm looking for a message from my boss regarding IPv6 in SuSE Linux, did I save it in a folder called "Mark"? OK, so that would probably have been dumb, but was it "IPv6" or "Linux" or "SuSE"? If I could mark the message with a bunch of different tags (eg. "Mark IPv6 SuSE Linux"), then I could look in any one of those folders and find it. Blogger.com just added this feature for blog articles, and I love it; it's also similar to the way you can save bookmarks at del.icio.us. Are you listening Thunderbird or Outlook people?

I went to a fight and a hockey game broke out

Don Cherry was on the radio this morning, talking about how fighting is required in hockey, and he was going to convince me, the listener, why this is true. I'm not a fan of fighting in hockey (or lacrosse), so I waited to be astonished by his insight. He proceeded to tell stories about how so-and-so star player (Gretzky et al) were "untouchable" and if anyone "looked sideways" at them, someone would take them out. He called this "protection". As I've stated before, I don't have a problem with sending your resident goon out after someone if he hits your star player with a cheap shot. But what Cherry and Kypreos and others who advocate fighting don't seem to "get" is that Wayne Gretzky and other star players are not just stars, they're hockey players, and part of hockey is getting checked. If you're a star player like Crosby or Malkin or Nash and you're heading towards the offensive zone with the puck, you better expect to get hit. If that's too much for you and you need this much "protection" (not from cheap shots but from legal checks), then you have no business being in the NHL. This notion of having "untouchable" players is just silly.

Cherry even told one story he told about someone who bumped his star player accidentally (and Cherry agreed it was accidental), and got beaten up anyway. He actually laughed when he said that his goon grabbed the other player by the hair (no helmets in those days) and slammed his head into the boards. Yo Don, does the name "Steve Moore" mean anything to you? Cherry's entertaining and all, but what an idiot.

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?