Category: Uncategorized

I thought of something good I could put up here the other day, but I forget what it was.

New feature on tweek.is-a-geek.com! If I’m listening to music on my computer, you can see what I’m listening to, thanks to the Now Playing plugin for Windows Media Player. It works by uploading a file with information about the song that’s playing to my web server. Then when someone visits the page, it goes and gets the album artwork from Amazon.com and displays it with the song title on my page. Clicking on the album artwork will bring you to the Amazon page where you can buy it.

The plugin was written by a guy named Brandon Fuller. It’s shareware, registration is US$10. And talk about service: after using the plugin for a bit, I found a bug in it, so I emailed him about it. Half an hour later, he’s emailed me back to let me know he’s fixed the bug and posted the updated plugin on his site.

Edited 2004-11-11 11:44pm: Apparently having a picture of what the sidebar looks like with the now playing feature has confused someone (a graduate student of computer science, no less.) I have altered the graphic to help prevent such a misunderstanding from occurring again.

Yeeeeehaw, it’s a party at Erik’s house! It’s party blogging, man. Beer and chicks, man. Um… beer and chick. There’s one chick. Charis says hi.
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Here’s the front of the bag of peas.

Here’s the back.

The text along the seam of the bag is the best before date. Let’s look a little closer.

The peas are good until 10:59 on January 14, 2006, but SWEET JESUS DON’T EAT THE PEAS AT 11:00 BECAUSE THEY WILL EXPIRE AT THAT VERY MOMENT.

If you’re in the Victoria area, pick up a copy of the September 30-October 6 edition of Monday Magazine (look for a yellow newspaper box; they’re all over the city.) The CD I recorded with Jay and Matt is reviewed on page 20. Robert Wiersema writes:

Season of the Deadened, the new album from Dunphy’s Victoria-based trio The Religion, is a full 12-pack of hurtin’ songs played with a ramshackle charm and a reckless, though clearly skilled, verve.

Come check out the CD Release on Saturday, October 2 (that’s tomorrow!) at The Spiral Café, 418 Craigflower St. (map) Admission is by donation, show starts at 8 pm.

Aimée won a trip for four to see Norah Jones perform in Vancouver on Monday night. She graciously invited me, my sister Angela, and Denise to come with her. (You can open up the pictures in another window and follow along if you’re into that sort of thing.)

The trip began with a ride on the Helijet to downtown Vancouver. Heavy fog in Coal Harbour delayed our departure, but at around 3:45 pm we were finally in the air. I would have taken pictures of us losing our collective helicopter virginity, but the co-pilot’s pre-flight speech brought the permissibility of the use of cameras on board the aircraft into question. (On the return trip I threw caution to the wind and snapped a few pictures.)

Our rooms on the 27th floor of the Century Plaza Hotel offered an impressive view of Downtown Vancouver, especially the formidable Sheraton Wall Centre across the street. Nobody got the memo saying our hotel had a pool, so none of us had brought our bathing suits. We contented ourselves instead by nearly charging video games to our rooms and pondering the contents of the locked cabinet in each kitchenette. (A safe, we were informed.)

When dinnertime rolled around, we put on our fancy duds and took a stroll down Robson Street in search of a suitable eatery. Our sense of adventure exhausted, we settled for the familiar in The Keg. Denise had the filet mignon, Aimée had the peppercorn New York, and Angela and I went for the teriyaki sirloin. Our appetites sated, we proceeded by taxi to GM Place.

The show was opened by a folk singer named Amos Lee. He performed solo, just him and his guitar. His set included an entertaining love song filled with sugary metaphors (“I wanna smear you in cocoa butter, I wanna caramelize you, baby…”)

Norah’s set was preceded by a clip of Hank Hill (from King of the Hill) riding in on a lawn mower and advising the crowd to turn off their cell phones, lest Norah attack us with a microphone stand. Then they hit the stage, launching right into “What Am I to You”. The rest of her set hit on most (if not all) of the songs on her two albums, as well as a few cover tunes. Improbably, a fight broke out in the floor seats at one point, prompting Norah to ask if everyone was OK. “I didn’t think my music incited violence!” We didn’t think so either, Norah.

After the concert, we returned to The Keg for some dessert, which none of us could finish. Exhausted, we returned to the hotel and retired for the evening.

The next day was a lazy one, with a little shopping and wandering around downtown. They had some nice shirts at the Tommy Hilfiger store but they were a little out of my price range. While relaxing in the courtyard of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Angela ran into a girl she knew, and I got crapped on by a bird (not seriously, mind you).

After drinks in the lobby of our hotel we returned to the heliport, and 45 minutes later we were back, safe and sound, in Victoria.

There is some seriously cool stuff happening on the internet right now. You need to check some of this stuff out.

First of all, if you’re still using Internet Explorer, you need to knock that off right now. Firefox is less susceptible to spyware, has a built-in popup window blocker and other neat features like tabbed browsing. Go get it here.

Now that you’ve got a better browser, you’ll want to go visit all your favorite websites, right? Of course, some of them probably won’t have been updated recently. If you visit a lot of sites, especially blogs like this one, you might find yourself making a lot of wasted trips. Why not let the websites come to you?

Well now, with the magic of syndication, you can do exactly that. You may have noticed websites advertising something called an RSS feed (or an Atom feed). These feeds provide you with a list of articles on the site that is updated whenever the site is. tweek.is-a-geek.com has one, the link is in the sidebar.

The first thing you need is a program called an aggregator. I use a free web-based service called Bloglines. Go sign up, then check out my list of subscriptions here. My list consists of a bunch of geeky technology blogs like Slashdot, a few personal blogs, and a few newspapers like the Globe and Mail. Click on any one that interests you, then click on the “Subscribe” link in the right-hand pane. To subscribe to sites that aren’t on my list, find the link to the site’s RSS feed, copy it, click “Add” in Bloglines and paste the address of the feed into the Blog or Feed URL box.

Now when you visit Bloglines and click on the “My Feeds” tab, you’ll see a list of the feeds you’ve subscribed to. Any time a new article gets posted on one of these sites, the name of the site will appear in bold in the list and a number will appear next to the name of the site indicating the number of new articles. Just click the name of the site to read the new entries. It’s that simple.

Just one more neat thing for now. Google Local has just been expanded to include Canadian addresses. If you’re in Canada, go to http://local.google.ca, enter “pizza” in the “what” box, and enter your postal code in the “where” box.

Neat, huh?

Arrrrr, maties! Ye lubbers best not be forgetting that today, September 19, is Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Apologies to anyone who tried to visit my site over the past couple days. The web server has been in small pieces all over my floor. In fact, it’s still in small pieces all over my floor, but now there are some new, faster pieces, and they are all connected together. The hard disks, video card and network adapter are all that remain from the old system. (And the floppy drive, which I’m booting from. Yes, LILO is still b0rked fixed! Thanks Mike!.) Replacing the old server is

• An AMD Duron 850, generously donated by Aimée
• My old Soltek motherboard with the leaky capacitors (it still seems to work, kinda)
• 256 MB of RAM from my other computer (which I replaced with a 512 MB DIMM)
• A brand spankin’ new ATX power supply

You are here:

Update: As Donn mentioned in the comments, that’s donn.dyndns.org living next door. Such lovely neighbours.

Well, I just got back from the Great Canadian Beer Festival.

Well, when I say “got back”, I mean, I’m at Mark’s house.

Is this sounding familiar yet?

Here I am again, writing a blog entry from somebody else’s house after attending the beer festival. I swear, I never planned it this way.

I think I’ll end it here, before I write something stupid. You know, like last year.